Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
– Thomas Edison
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I was going through old blog posts recently and I noticed that I had used the painting above a number of times in my earliest posts. It’s part of my Exiles series from back in 1995 and is titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, borrowed from the title of a group of Depression-era photos of sharecroppers in the American dust bowl shot by photographer Walker Evans.
I never really wrote about this painting except in what I saw as it’s similarity to what I saw in those photos of Depression era workers. I always felt a connection to this piece but thought it was an outer connection, one that simply had to do with my reaction to form and color and not with anything I might see of it in myself.
Maybe that was my hope.
But it is a painting that I find has more meaning for me than I might want to let on. It’s a piece to which I always return, again and again, to study closely. While I sometimes see it as apart from me, more and more as I live with it, part of me feels like I am that man, standing alone in his landscape.
A sometimes self portrait.
It’s not a flattering self portrait. I used to see this figure as sad or regretful, world weary. But that has changed over time. There is some sadness, some regret but more than anything, I now see him as resigned, neither happy or sad. He is in his place with work behind him and much more work to do. It still has a weariness in it, but not from a physical standpoint. It is more a sense of tiredness from working to stay ahead of the world’s constant encroachment, the world’s constant erosion. But while it appears tired there is also a sense of implied strength and determination to stay on task.
The hand here is important to me, a symbol of the bond of a working mind and working hands. Ideas set in motion and realized.
It’s a painting that means more and more to me as times passes and the world works its erosive qualities on my self and my world, my landscape. Maybe I am that dirt farmer, looking back with pride in his work along with an apprehension that it will someday be carried away like dry soil in the wind.
I am not going to be around Sunday so here’s a little music for the morning, a day early. It fits pretty well in tone and substance to the painting above. It’s the immortal Otis Redding with I’ve Got Dreams to Remember.
Have a good weekend.
Maybe it’s a morning for daydreaming. There’s a sharp crispness in the air this morning that reminds me of autumn mornings, gloriously cool and bright. But we’re lingering in July with the gauzy summer days of August still before us, so there is still a bit of time before those fall mornings arrive. So I’ll daydream of those days ahead.
I first read the poem The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats over forty years back and it left a mark. Cut and scarred me. Its first verse still resonates in my mind, especially that last line– the best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity. It just reeks of the current political bog in which we are mired.
I wrote about late artist Dale Nichols (1910-1995) a few years back after being completely charmed by his paintings of snowy scenes from his home state of Nebraska. In that blog entry I mentioned that there wasn’t a huge amount of info on the artist. The only book was a book that accompanied a show of his work from back in 2011 at a small but not unimportant museum, the
I don’t really want to write anything today, just want to decompress a little bit. Or decompose. Or deconstruct.
Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.
We’re in the Fourth of July weekend here but I am pretty busy, with still much to do to finish up work on my show, Self Determination, for the West End Gallery that opens in less than two weeks, on July 14.
Redtree Times 