Between the Sea and the Sun– Now at West End Gallery
Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.
–Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
I’ve been thinking about contradictions lately, mainly in those contradictions that exist between our perceptions and reality. Most of us can easily see these sorts of contradictions in ourselves. Well, at least I think most of us can. Actually, for all I know, maybe most folks don’t see any difference in how they see themselves and how they really are. That would explain a lot.
But manly I have been thinking about contradiction as it occurs in art. I think the passage above from The Brothers Karamazov articulates this pretty well. Often art creates forms of beauty that challenge us with contradictions between what we know in our mind and what we perceive with our senses.
For my work, it comes in forms, colors, sizes, perspectives, omissions, and other aspects that one knows, when one really considers them, are unreal. They do not or cannot exist in reality in the way they are shown. The contradiction comes in the fact that this unreality is often perceived as a reality by the mind.
I realized this for myself a long time ago. The work always translated as reality to me, whether there were blue treeless hills, brightly colored patchwork fields, giant suns, or trees whose proportions sometimes defied perspective.
It basically straddled the boundary between reality and the totally fantastic, that area where those two contradictory terms meet and coexist. Unreality becomes reality. That area where what the mind knows (or believes) is nonsense begins to make sense.
As I have said in the past at Gallery Talks while groping to explain this, I never questioned the reality of what I painted. It always translated immediately in my mind as being reality.
It just was, despite all evidence to the contrary. The coming together of reality and unreality, which might well be used to define all art.
You know, I wasn’t planning on writing anything this morning and this thing just popped out. I hope it makes sense. Maybe it’s art because in my head it does…
Okay, I have to go get stuff around for tomorrow’s painting demo at the West End Gallery. It begins at 10 AM and goes to around 12 and maybe a little later, depending on how it is going. If it’s going well, I might keep working. If not, I might set the damn thing on fire right then and there. Just kidding– I would take it out of the gallery before setting it ablaze. Hope to see you there!
Here’s a song that caught my eye this morning. I didn’t think I had ever heard of it before, but the chorus made me think I had heard it at least once or twice. It sounded familiar. It’s a 1966 song called Painter Man from a group called The Creation. This group claimed that their music was as much visual as it was musical and sometimes had a member of the group painting while they played on stage.
Redtree Times 