Redtree Times

The Blue Moon Calls– At West End Gallery

How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.

–Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)

At the Gallery Talk for my show at the West End Gallery, I mentioned that I wanted to be a writer as a young person. Painting wasn’t even on the table at that time. I said that I was never really a great storyteller, that my writing seemed to always find its way to describing wide open spaces and the silences contained in them.

Not the most fertile ground for great narratives.

I realized at some point that writing would never be the vehicle for carrying whatever it was that I had a need to get across to others. It might have been that my skills were lacking to describe things that were beyond words. Things in the atmosphere, things that we only sense on a subconscious level.

Years later, I found that painting best filled my needs. I found that it was easier to create a meaning for space and silence visually rather than with words that sometimes felt inelegant and insufficient.  Painting certainly got my point across more specifically and succinctly than the plodding paragraphs I was producing.

It created a means of access for people other than me to those inaudible feelings and purposes, as Dreiser called them above, in a way that I could never achieve with my writing.

Painting has definitely been more satisfying for me.

It gets me there.

And that’s all I can ask of it.

The painting at the top is a good example of what I am talking about. It would be hard for me to put together a readable and interesting narrative that would fully describe what I sense in this piece with a glance.

Its vague shadows and light say more than many thousands of my words.

The painting is a 30″ by 48″ canvas titled The Blue Moon Calls. It was a late addition to my Persistent Rhythm solo show at the West End Gallery. The show ends at the end of the day tomorrow, Thursday, August 29.