In the Light of Stillness— At West End Gallery
I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.
–Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, And Other Essays
There are times when I feel a bit lost with my work. I find myself not sure what I am looking for in it, not sure if I am on the right path with my work or if it has any meaning at all. This always leads me to question what I was originally seeing in the work, what in it gave me the idea that it had purpose or meaning in the first place.
What was I finding in it then? And why?
Thinking about this recently, as I was struggling a bit, I began to settle in on the idea of somehow finding clarity. It was the idea that while I might not be able to completely stave off the chaos and darkness I perceived in the world, I could create a small island of respite from it in my work.
A sliver of reason in an often unreasonable world.
Clarity meant, for me, that the work would be easily entered by the viewer. They wouldn’t need an interpreter to tell them what it meant to them, wouldn’t need prior knowledge of art history or anything else for that matter. They could just hold onto whatever edge they might find in it and find a smoother ride through the chaos.
That didn’t mean that it had to be superficial or shallow in its meaning. The chaos of the world was never ignored or hidden. It was always present, looming. Chaos, in fact, became the background on which this world of clarity was built. The gesso of one of my painting’s surface is applied haphazardly in a chaotic manner. The hope is that the viewer will not notice it at first, that they will focus on whatever it was in it that attracted them originally.
My belief is that having this chaotic underlayment creates depth in the clarity of the feeling of the painting, whatever that might be. If one takes hope from it, that hope is a rational form of it. Not irrational in a cockeyed optimist sort of way. It is a hope that understands that, while there are forces that turn the world that appear chaotic and beyond our understanding, we have an ability to find some sort of clarity.
Breathing room, I guess you might call it.
I don’t know. Just thinking out loud this morning.
Here’s another song from the new album, The Southwind, from guitarist Bill Mize. I had a post about him last week, mentioning that he had chosen a painting from my Archaeology series for the cover of his new album. I thought this song fits well for today’s subject. It is his arrangement/interpretation of a wonderful Dolly Parton tune, Light of the Clear Blue Morning.
Clarity…
Redtree Times 