Redtree Times

These words from Adolph Gottlieb, the late Abstract Expressionist painter, ring true for me. I believe that art should acknowledge the presence of powerful forces that guide our lives, good or bad. As he points out, it is this awareness that fueled the myths and symbology that have lived with us since time immemorial.

For me, it is displayed in the underlying darkness of much of my work which is evident in even my most optimistic works. This darkness gives the work, at least to my way of seeing it, a sense of tension, a counterbalance that keeps the work centered. The most optimistic work still has a wariness in this darkness that acknowledges the dangers ahead and the hardships endured in the past.

Triumph of any sort is seen as a transient emotion, one that is to be savored in the moment and recalled in the future but short-lived in the present. The darkness is always hovering nearby, presenting a potential threat or a challenge or even a dramatic change that comes with both the possibility of utter defeat or a new triumph. It is this mystery that makes the darkness so appealing and necessary.

The paragraphs above were written and posted here in 2018.

I was going to take a break today from writing but came across this post which, in turn, reminded me of a passage that I had recently encountered from author John Steinbeck. In a letter to his friend and publisher Pascal Covici on New Year’s Day in 1941. The war in Europe was widening and threatening to become a World War as the US vacillated on entering the fray. It was time fraught with peril and darkness.

Steinbeck writes:

“And speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty.

(…)

So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that proceeded. Maybe you can find some vague theology that will give you hope. Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that two forces are necessary in man before he is man. I asked Paul de Kruif [microbiologist and writer] once if he would like to cure all disease and he said yes. Then I suggested that the man he loved and wanted to cure was a product of all his filth and disease and meanness, his hunger and cruelty. Cure those and you would have not man but an entirely new species you wouldn’t recognize and probably wouldn’t like.”

Steinbeck was basically saying that that our humanity consists of two opposing sides– good and evil– and that both are intertwined with the other in the character. One cannot look in a mirror and not see the other. Two sides of a mirror, as he put it.

As a result, neither good nor evil can ever fully triumph forever. Neither a utopian nor a dystopian society has an indefinite shelf life.

There is a balance which exists where the two side of the mirror meet.

And as much as I would love to see good triumph and for evil to be forever eradicated, I find hope, like Steinbeck, in simply knowing that evil can only be temporarily victorious. It has always been that way and always will.

Shadows need the light in order to exist.

I mention this because we talked a bit about this at the Gallery Talk the other day, how art depends on that balance of light and darkness. I feel my best work emerges when I am fully aware of the darker side of our character still hovering nearby even in those better times when I am expressing feelings of optimism and hope in my work.

In good times, the presence of darkness serves as reminder of the temporary nature of all feelings as well as our existence.

And in darker times, it acts as call to arms for those who live by the light. A call to rise up and drive back darkness to the isolated and underlying shadows where it belongs.

Back to its own side of the mirror…