Elbow Room
When the gates swing wide on the other side
Just beyond the sunset sea
There’ll be room to spare as we enter there
Room for you and room for me
For the gates are wide on the other side
Where the flowers ever bloom
On the right hand on the left hand
Fifty miles of elbow room
—50 Miles of Elbow Room, Herbert Buffum
I have always longed for elbow room.
Huge arching domes of clear air above.
Wide open spaces for the eye to search.
Soundless vistas with not a soul to be seen.
The elbow room I long for is not that described in the lyrics of the 1930 gospel song, 50 Miles of Elbow Room, from songwriter Herbert Buffum. His version of elbow room is a placid paradise in the hereafter
Ideally, I don’t have to die to find my sought after elbow room. Of course, finding such a place might entail a little imagination along with a willingness to accept that this elbow room most likely will be located inside oneself.
Maybe that’s what I am trying to uncover with my work.
Elbow room. At least, my own little bits of elbow room.
This painting is titled Elbow Room, of course. It’s a return of sorts to my earlier work of the early and mid 2000’s, painted on heavy watercolor paper in the transparent inks I favor. In a way, painting it felt like it was something inherent. Built in. Natural, like coming home, like a circle being completed.
For me, work done in this earlier style this is sometimes the hardest work to judge. It’s like looking at old family photos. You don’t look at the faces in those old pictures and apprise them for attractiveness or ugliness. You just see them for what you know them to be, for what they mean to you. How the outside world sees them is not important.
And this certainly feels like a family photo for me.
Speaking of elbow room, let’s hear a bit of that song, 50 Miles of Elbow Room. I couldn’t find the original from Vaughan Happy Two. The two most significant versions are a gospel version from the Rev. F.W. McGee in 1933 and a traditional folk version from the Carter Family in 1942. The song I am playing today owes its influence to the Carter Family. It’s performed by a favorite of mine, Gillian Welch.
Still feeling the effects of the covid. Not terrible, not good. Just blah. Dead tired. That being the case, I decided to rerun the post above about a painting that currently lives here in the studio with me. Ironically, it was painted during the opening days of the pandemic back in 2020. I chose it because of the paragraph above where I talk about how judging this work in my early style is often difficult for me. For some reason, this idea that seeing them as family photos, as I often, sometimes prevents me from seeing them as something other than family. Like family, the affection and attraction I possess for them doesn’t come from their surface beauty, though they might possess that. It comes from a deeper common bond, a familial one born in an acceptance and understanding of who we are.
That really spoke to me this morning. It somehow got my rusty-feeling gears turning which felt pretty good.
I also ran this post because of another post featuring this painting and Daniel Boone that contained a 1930 poem from Arthur Guiterman called On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness:
The tusks which clashed in mighty brawls
Of mastodons, are billiard balls.The sword of Charlemagne the Just
Is Ferric Oxide, known as rust.The grizzly bear, whose potent hug,
Was feared by all, is now a rug.Great Caesar’s bust is on the shelf,
And I don’t feel so well myself.
As someone not feeling so well myself, this made me chuckle. It kind of cemented the deal for this post and painting.
Now, get out of here. You’re crowding me. I need room to breathe. Give me elbow room, I say!
Redtree Times 