Proof of God (1994)
A great flame follows a little spark.
—Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (1321)
Whenever I come across this tiny piece while going through my old work, I have to stop and consider it. Just something in it, some intangible quality, that holds me for a moment or so.
As I said, it is tiny, only about the size of two postage stamps side by side, so its size doesn’t provide its visual impact for me.
And the color is not as bright as I imagine I had wanted at the time. It is painted on some lovely soft Fabriano watercolor paper that sometimes tended to absorb pigment, depending on how it was applied. Other times, it would hold the pigment up high on its surface so the color would shine. I don’t know why but for this little piece it soaked up the color a bit more than I would have liked back then. As I look at it now, I think it’s just fine and fitting.
I can see what I was going for when I did this little guy. The negative white space was intended to be two trees and their shadows. When I got to the point in the painting, this white, negative space where the trees and their shadows should be was so much more powerful than anything I could add if I continued. It felt like it was no longer representative of two trees on a hillside.
It had become a tiny abstract enigma that said so much without saying much at all.
A mute prophet.
I am not positive that is how I saw it then but something close to that caused me to instantly jot down Proof of God at the bottom of that small piece of soft Fabriano paper that felt so lovely in my hands. I never felt the need to try to explain that title, even to myself. It seemed self-evident to me.
I never showed this piece anywhere. I never had the self-confidence that my more abstract work would translate to others in the way they did to me. I was afraid it would seem like a trifle to others, something I couldn’t tolerate then or now for any of my work. Plus, it felt outside of my work. An enigma, as I said before.
It has become precious to me over the years, this tiny anomaly that consists of 21 little stacked blocks of colors with those two bands of white space somehow binding them together. Looking it now reminds me of looking closely at a small bee, considering its totality, how its wings connect to it and how it moves in flight among the flowers, and seeing in that totality a microcosm of all that is.
Maybe that is all the proof of god that is needed.
I don’t know. Certainly don’t know much about the god that they preach and sermonize over in churches and other edifices of religion. I am going to end today– my sermon?– with another passage, this one from the 1985 book (and later film starring Jodie Foster) Contact from the late Carl Sagan:
She had studied the universe all her life but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
For me, this little seemingly insignificant bit of paint on soft paper makes the vastness bearable.
Blaze– You Could Win This Painting!
A reminder: This coming Saturday, September 26, I will be giving a Gallery Talk at the Principle Gallery on King Street in beautiful Old Town Alexandria, VA. It begins at 1 PM and concludes with a drawing for one of my paintings, Blaze.
It is generally an entertaining hour with some laughs, some serious art talk, a bunch of Q&A, some gifts, and a bunch of other stuff.
Here’s just the song for that. It’s the Jule Styne/Stepehen Sondheim classic, Let Me Entertain You, from the musical Gypsy. This is from the movie version with Natalie Wood.
So, on Saturday, let me entertain you. Well, at least try. And just so you know, there will be no stripping on my part on Saturday.