Everpresent (2003)- Coming to the Principle Gallery
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
–John Updike, Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
This painting, Everpresent, has lived with me for a long time now. It was painted in 2003, and I believe it was shown in a gallery setting only once before returning to me. It is a piece I have looked at thousands of times over the years. So often that after a while I was looking and not really even seeing it, if that makes any sense to you. I think it was a matter of me thinking that I had absorbed everything it had to offer, that it was completely within me.
I took for granted that it had nothing new to offer. And as it happens so often in those cases where we take something for granted, we are wrong. I realized my mistake one day a year or two ago with this painting. It was hanging in a bedroom here in the studio that serves as a library, with filled bookshelves lining two of the walls. It had hung in that spot for probably a decade or more. I stopped and looked at it. Really looked at it, trying to see if it had something that I had missed in the thousands of sometime cursory views I had given it over the years. I tried to see it with new and fresh eyes, not my old, tired ones.
Could it offer anything new?
For many years, as the title suggests, I viewed this as though the everpresent I referenced was a spiritual force. That perception made sense in my mind. Seemed natural.
But with new eyes looking at it, I perceived something quite different. I saw the Red Tree as being symbolic of those dreams we hold for ourselves and place before us as goals and destinations. The Red Roofed houses were assembled in this piece as being a sort of roadblock, a barrier that stood between the viewer and that distant dream as personified by the Red Tree. The same held true for the body of water standing between the viewer and the Red Tree– another barrier to be overcome.
The Everpresent I saw now was not some omniscient spiritual force. No, it was the dream, the aspiration, that one holds forever in their mind. Some of us stay forever separated from them by the roadblocks and barriers between us and our dreams. Some don’t even attempt to get past them. But the dream remains always though sometimes it fades into the distance for those that have given up hope of ever reaching their dream.
And the lucky few do reach that distant land where the dream in the form of the Red Tree dwells.
It was a much different reading of the painting than I was expecting. And this delighted me, even though I was happy with what the painting was expressing to me before this new view. It made me think that maybe the dreams we hold are a spiritual force of some sort.
They certainly might constitute a belief system– self-belief. It seems to me that the stronger one’s belief in their ability to reach their dream, the more likely it is achieved. But like any belief system, how we go about practicing it is our affair, something we must deal with on our own terms. There is no one way to go about it.
Everpresent is 11″ by 14″ on canvas and is included in Flow, the exhibit of my work that opens June 12 at the Principle Gallery.
Here’s the late Roy Orbison doing his Dream Baby backed by an all-star band from back in 1988.
Okay, got to get going. Much to do still and little time to waste on the likes of you. You do know I’m kidding, don’t you?