Redtree Times

Far Above It All– The Prize to be awarded at the West End Gallery Talk on Saturday.

In case you’re just stopping in here for the first time, I am giving a Gallery Talk this Saturday, August 10, at the West End Gallery in Corning, NY. The Talk starts at 11 AM. One of the traditional highlights of these talks is the awarding of a piece of my work to one lucky attendee. I give a lot of thought in choosing the painting to given away. I want it to be one that has meaning for me, not a failed experiment or one that just never fully came to life.

The painting I have chosen for Saturday’s Gallery Talk meets that standard pretty easily. Shown above, it is 24″ by 20″ on canvas and titled Far Above It All. It checks off a lot of the boxes for my work with its Red Trees with intertwined trunks, the Red Roofs, inward path, rolling hillocks, and orange sun/moon.

Yesterday, I said that this choice was a dilly. This morning, I am changing that to it being a real pip. I might even go so far as to call it a doozy. Whatever the case, I think it is a great choice for someone in attendance to take home with them on Saturday.

Below is what I wrote about this painting years ago:

I felt from the time this painting was complete that with its intertwining tree set apart from the village below that it was about some form of love. But what sort of love and how to describe it in words?

It seemed like a form of eternal love, one bound together through time, much like that in the myth of Baucis and Philemon that I have described here on several occasions. But I thought I would look to the words of someone else to perhaps give a new perspective on what I was seeing in this.

That brought me to the poems of Rupert Brooke, the British poet who was just in his ascension as a major poetic voice when he died at the age of 27 in 1915. He was in the British naval forces of WW I on the way to Gallipoli when he developed sepsis from an infected mosquito bite. He died soon after and was buried in an olive grove on the Greek island of Skyros.

An odd casualty of the war but still a casualty that deprived the world of what might have come from his hand.

The poem of Brooke’s that hit me the most fitting for this piece was one titled The Call, written when he was only about 20 years old. It has the intensity of youthful love, like a flaming torch held high. And that’s what I see in this painting. So, if you can tolerate poetry–and I know some can’t– give a read to the verses below from Rupert Brooke. It’s powerful and straightforward. And fitting, or so I think.

[2024] I have added a spoken word version below. The video’s creator used WW I imagery but this poem was written well before the war.

                      The Call

Out of the nothingness of sleep,
The slow dreams of Eternity,
There was a thunder on the deep:
I came, because you called to me.

I broke the Night’s primeval bars,
I dared the old abysmal curse,
And flashed through ranks of frightened stars
Suddenly on the universe!

The eternal silences were broken;
Hell became Heaven as I passed. —
What shall I give you as a token,
A sign that we have met, at last?

I’ll break and forge the stars anew,
Shatter the heavens with a song;
Immortal in my love for you,
Because I love you, very strong.

Your mouth shall mock the old and wise,
Your laugh shall fill the world with flame,
I’ll write upon the shrinking skies
The scarlet splendour of your name,

Till Heaven cracks, and Hell thereunder
Dies in her ultimate mad fire,
And darkness falls, with scornful thunder,
On dreams of men and men’s desire.

Then only in the empty spaces,
Death, walking very silently,
Shall fear the glory of our faces
Through all the dark infinity.

So, clothed about with perfect love,
   The eternal end shall find us one,
Alone above the Night, above
   The dust of the dead gods, alone.

            -Rupert Brooke