Idyllica-At West End Gallery
Art alleviates the ills of life by showing us the eternal and universal behind the transitory and the individual. Spinoza was right: “in so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect it participates in eternity.”
— Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (1926)
Tired, tired, tired this morning. The fatigue has been bearing down hard this past week or so, more so than I had been expecting it would. We’re trying to get my blood pressure, which has spiked from the hormones, under control since high BP serves as a multiplier for the fatigue.
This increased fatigue has turned everyday chores into monumental tasks done at a trudging pace.
The only time I feel normal or good right now is when I am painting. For several hours each day, I enter a different state of mind, one that takes me out of time and place. It is a world of art, that state of being that, as Will Durant wrote, alleviates the ills of life. The fatigue recedes. The clouds that have gathered in my mind clear so that there is light and focus. The cruelty, hatred, and greed of this world move out of sight.
Even my own desires and worries seem to fade away.
It’s a different world I find myself in for those precious few hours each day.
I can’t say that it’s the eternal and universal world that exists beyond our transitory world.
Can anyone ever know such a thing?
I have always felt that my best work came when it had a universal quality, one that moved across limits of language and culture and expressed a universal feeling. When it wasn’t of any one place or time. It’s not something you can shoot for consciously. When I attempt with such a grand goal in mind, it always falls far short of its mark and loses all the power of real art.
The worldly mind is not up to such a task.
But in recent weeks here in the studio, my worldly mind seems to take a short vacation when I am in front of the easel.
I am just there and then. Nowhere else. No other time.
Like I said, the fatigue of this world doesn’t follow me into that timeless and placeless world. I am free of all worldly things.
However, there is a caveat to that statement. After about four or five hours, this world starts to press its way in. I might push against it for a bit, but it always overwhelms my defenses. Then all the fatigue that had been so far away rushes back into place with its full force and is once again my constant companion.
But, man, that short respite from its overwhelming presence is little slice of heaven. Maybe that is evidence of something eternal. I don’t know but am eager right now to get back to the easel this morning.
I am very excited by the work that is coming from these recent sessions but want to remain cautious in extolling their virtues. I don’t know that I am the best judge of my own work right now. I worry that the satisfaction and relief brought in creating it may compromise my ability to objectively evaluate it.
Much of this work will make up my October exhibit at the West End Gallery. I haven’t yet revealed any of this work but will soon begin. Then others can judge it. That doesn’t matter much to me, not nearly so much as it might have in the past.
I can only view this work as I see it now, knowing where it came from and what it has already given me in transporting me from the worldly to the otherworldly.
Is that eternity? Is that art?
That’s not for me to say.