Totality– Coming to West End Gallery
Everything matters. The Universe is approximately fifteen billion years old, and I swear that in all that time, nothing has ever happened that has not mattered, has not contributed in some way to the totality.
–Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels (1981)
I’ve been contemplating this new painting for weeks now. It raises all sorts of thoughts and questions in my mind. It felt like it has real meaning for me and maybe for others. Maybe that’s pretentious to say something like that. I don’t know. Don’t care, actually.
I had a hard time coming up with a title that expressed what I see in it. I wanted something that pointed towards the depth and richness of it without trivializing it. Maybe I should have simply called it Landscape #17 or something like that.
Nah. That’s not my style.
What I was seeing was a wholeness in it, something that made evident the old maxim from Aristotle that say that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In the growth seen in the converging field rows in the foreground along with the setting sun, it has a feeling of beginning and ending. And in the path leading up to the Red Tree there is evidence of movement and activity while in the Red Tree itself there is a sense of stillness and restful appreciation.
Each element plays its part, contributing in a small but necessary way to this sense of wholeness.
Overall, it feels complete in time and space.
A totality.
Yeah, that sounds just right. Totality. That shall be the title.
It’s one of those paintings that I would be proud to say represented my own totality.
Does it? I have no idea.
It made me wonder about the totality of any one of us and whether we can ever know exactly what that looks like. To ourselves, it most likely looks marvelous. Like me looking at this painting.
Maybe our totality has little to do with our own perception of self or ego. Maybe it comes in realizing that you are somehow part– perhaps small but necessary–of something greater than yourself?
I have no idea. I am probably not supposed to know. I am okay with that.
Maybe our experience of art is the one avenue that allows us a fleeting glimpse our own totality?
Maybe.
I tend to think so. And for me, I am grateful to sense it in this painting.
If that is totality, I am satisfied as I sit here on this Sunday morning in the dark.
Here’s this Sunday’s song. I am not sure it has much to do with today’s subject but then again, maybe it does. It does deal with the totality of one’s life– the joy and pain in our living and dying. This The Great Gig in the Sky from Pink Floyd‘s 1973 classic Dark Side of the Moon. This video is the winning entry in a competition that was held on the album’s 50th anniversary. It was created by Brazilian animator Bruno Mazzilli. I felt myself being pulled into it. Good stuff.
Now, I haven’t said this in a while, but I am tired and sore and have too much to do today to mess around.
That means, in a word, git.
Totality is included in The Jubilee Dance, my 25th solo exhibit at the West End Gallery that opens Friday, October 16. There is an opening reception at the gallery on October 16 that runs from 5-7 PM. Hope to see you there.
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