Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
–Václav Havel, The Politics of Hope – Disturbing the Peace (1986)
The words above from the late Czech President Václav Havel make an important distinction. People often mistake hope for optimism, but they are two separate entities, as Havel indicates.
You can have hope without optimism, but I don’t believe that optimism exists without hope. You hope that whatever happens makes some sort of sense, that you come away with an understanding, even it is not the outcome you desired.
Optimism is a firmer belief, well beyond the vague belief for the future held in hope, that things will turn out as you desire. It is a riskier bet than hope, one that sometimes doesn’t pay off.
The best, of course, is to have hope find its way into becoming optimism.
Maybe hope is that tadpole that becomes the frog that is optimism?
There’s a lot going on in the world right now that tests our ability to have either hope or optimism. I have no conviction that anything in the near future will make sense or give me better understanding.
As the always interesting Havelock Ellis wrote in the 1920’s: The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.
I hope for the hope that my tiny tadpole of hope somehow makes its way to becoming that frog.
You know something? Call me crazy, but I am kind of optimistic that it will.
Does that make sense of any kind?
I hope it does, but I am not optimistic about that.
This doesn’t sound pessimistic, does it? It’s not meant to be. Besides pessimism is a whole other creature than hope or optimism. Altogether different species and genus.
It deserves discussion but don’t get me started on it, okay?
Oh, well. It’s way too early on a Sunday morning and I haven’t been getting much sleep lately so who knows what sort of illogical gibberish will emerge from my keyboard. It surprises even me sometimes.
Let’s have a song for this week’s Sunday Morning Music. It’s a new song from Lucinda Williams called The World’s Gone Wrong. I know that sounds neither hopeful nor optimistic. But I think you have to take a clear-eyed view of things before you can have either hope or optimism. Neither have much power for those folks who wear blinders.
Once you are diagnosed with cancer, time changes. It both speeds up insanely and stops altogether.
–Eve Ensler, In the Body of the World: A Memoir (2013)
I promised myself yesterday that I wouldn’t mention my recent diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer in today’s post. I figured yesterday’s post said enough. But I came across the passage above from Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, and felt that I needed to comment on the effect of the disease on time for me at this point.
Her words instantly struck a sharp chord in me when I first read them. The past several months, especially the last month or so, have found my mind racing at breakneck speed. I feel as though the big hourglass containing all the time of my life had been suddenly pierced. The grains of time are spilling out freely now and my mind is desperately trying to find a way to repair the leak so that as little time as possible is lost.
I have always known that time is limited for us all. But until I saw it spilling from my own hourglass, that seemed like a philosophical concept that you study from afar. A cold object to be held up and examined.
It now seemed real and my mind panicked in trying to find a solution or at least a competent repairperson to step in and take charge in making my hourglass somewhat whole once more.
It is here that time suddenly felt like it stopped completely even as it sped away in my mind. It was obvious that I would be dependent on the healthcare system, the repair shop of our physical lives. But it moves in a slow and often opaque manner that seems far removed from the rhythm and time the mind is expecting.
Every day, every minute, felt interminable, filled with the nervous anticipation of the wait. Every minute seemed to have 90 seconds and every hour 90 minutes. I often found myself sitting motionless, almost paralyzed as I waited for some movement to take place in the space outside of my control. Part of my brain was telling me that I had to try to ignore it and get to work while the other half was flashing red DANGER lights and blaring sirens.
It was like being caught exactly in the space between the fight-or-flight response. My creative mind felt shut down. My brushes and paints sat unmoved on my painting tables. The same canvas has been on my easel for weeks now, prepared to go but untouched.
It feels like this logjam of time will be with me for a while longer, until the appointments of the coming weeks establish the course of treatment showing me a path forward.
I suspect many of you who have been in similar situations with your own health issues will understand what I am saying. You know there is a problem and want to repair it.
I have said before that artists often come to be because that is the only way they understand how to solve the problems they perceive. In a gallery talk several years ago, I spoke about a passage from a Virginia Woolf book where she recounted three episodes from her youth that led her to becoming a writer. Two filled her with despair, pain, and hopelessness, an ugly physical confrontation with her brother and the suicide of a neighbor. The third was in the recognition that came in observing that a flower outside their door was whole in itself as well as connected to the whole of the earth. It was in itself the union of all things.
The first two awful experiences showed her that the world and people were sometimes broken. The wholeness of the flower showed her that there was a purpose and reason in our being and that she must try, as a writer, to use that reason and purpose to somehow repair the broken world.
I understand her thought completely. I think a lot of artists– and non-artists– feel that way, that their purpose is in healing the world somehow, even in a tiny way. Because even the tiniest flower has meaning as part of the whole.
In her book, Moments of Being, Woolf ends the section containing this episode with the following concluding passage. I think it speaks volumes:
From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock.
I don’t know if this post explains anything. Maybe it is just a release for me, one that might allow me to break out of the creative paralysis this episode has brought on. I sure hope so.
I need to get my hourglass fixed so I can get back to trying to repair the small part of this world within my reach. To make things whole once more.
PS: Many thanks to everyone who reached out to me yesterday. I was most touched and will be working on getting back to everyone today. Hey, at least. that’s doing something. And I promise, no cancer talk tomorrow!
There’s an inherent limit to the stress that any material can bear. Water has its boiling point, metals their melting points. The elements of the spirit behave the same way. Happiness can reach a pitch so great that any further happiness can’t be felt. Pain, despair, humiliation, disgust, and fear are no different. Once the vessel is full, the world can’t add to it.
–-Stefan Zweig, The Post Office Girl
This has been a stressful year.
I could probably leave that sentence hanging in the air alone and hardly anyone would disagree. It’s been stressful for most folks, with political upheaval and economic uncertainty across the board.
Those have been stress-inducing for me as well. The thought of our movement toward some form of authoritarian police state and the anxiety of trying to make a living as an artist in an economic downturn would provide more than enough stress for me in any year.
This year also had other stressors.
Some were emotional as I saw a number of friends pass away, some well before their time from disease, while at the same time, some family members were experiencing severe, life-threatening health crises. Again, that would be enough for most years, especially when you add in the current political and economic atmosphere.
But that just didn’t seem like enough stress for this banner year. I had some physical blips to throw into the pot.
I limped into the year with a fully ruptured tendon on in my ankle then suffered a mild concussion on a fall on the ice a couple of months later. I then had a bout with a tick-borne illness, anaplasmosis, that went undiagnosed for over 5 weeks in the summer. Throughout that time, I suffered severe symptoms– fever and chills, night sweats, body aches, headaches, extreme fatigue, dizziness when moving at more than crawl, disconcerting brain fog, etc– that left me feeling like a zombie. It was only diagnosed and treated at my insistence that I be tested for tick-borne illnesses.
In late May, a month before the anaplasmosis, routine blood work revealed that I had an elevated level of PSA, which is the protein produced by the prostate. A higher level may indicate cancer. At this point, I kind of shrugged it off, figuring that it couldn’t possibly be serious.
Rookie mistake.
I am not going to go into the complete timeline and the battles I had to wage to get things moving. It was slow going and was frustrating, often infuriating, and sometimes demoralizing. I may go into at some other time here if only to serve as an object lesson that people must be prepared to serve as their own outspoken advocate, something I learned from my run in with a case of anaplasmosis.
The short version is that my high PSA levels led to a long-delayed appointment with a urologist who found that my PSA had once more elevated.
That sent to another long-delayed MRI of the prostate which showed tumors indicating a high probability for prostate cancer.
A biopsy was ordered and took place 5 weeks later, in early October. It was originally scheduled for December, three months after the MRI, which I refused to accept. The biopsy results, which I received just days before my West End Gallery opening, revealed that I had an aggressive form of prostate cancer, indicated by a high Gleason score.
The next step would be a PET scan to determine if the cancer had moved beyond the prostate. This took place last Friday (which also took a major protest to get this scan moved back from December) showed that the cancer had spread to two spots in my bones, one in my rib and the other in my pelvis.
Though this technically makes it a Stage IV cancer, because the spread is showing in only two locations it is considered oligometastatic disease— kind of like Stage IV Lite. As I understand it, this may indicate that the spread was in an early developmental phase. Treatment for Stage IV cancer would normally consist of chemotherapy for a systemic attack on the cancer, whereas oligometastatic disease is treated with an aggressive mixture of hormone therapies and radiation treatments, often concurrently, on the affected areas.
It has been a rollercoaster of emotion since last Thursday when I learned that my protests after they tried to delay my scan two more week resulted in moving my PET scan up several weeks to the next day, last Friday. Lots of ups and even more downs. Lots of frustration with the lack of communication and guidance. I often feel like I have been dropped into a wilderness with which I am unfamiliar without a guide or assistance of any sort.
But at the moment I feel like we are close to being on a path through the wilderness. I have two appointments this coming week, one with my Radiologic Oncologist here and another in NYC with an Oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering who will review all my tests, scans, and pathologies as well as any plan of attack recommended by my Rad Oncologist here. I then see a Medical Oncologist the following week, the day before Thanksgiving.
At that point, hopefully, we will, have plan in place and treatment will get rolling.
I have some optimism. While it is serious, my prognosis is fairly good. I am in relatively good shape and have been steadily increasing my workouts to build up strength (which was still lacking from the earlier bout with anaplasmosis) to better withstand the coming treatments. Plus, recent studies provide evidence that intense workouts are truly effective in combatting certain cancers. I actually feel pretty good at the moment with practically no pain.
To be honest, I feel fortunate, almost embarrassed, since there are so many others out there experiencing much worse health episodes. I really feel for those folks, especially those trusting souls who passively go through the system, accepting that the delays and long waits for testing and treatment are just the way it has to be. I know there are people on the same timeline as me who, because of this trust in the system, are still waiting for biopsies and scans, putting them at risk of much worse outcomes for their health.
It shouldn’t be this way.
I am also fortunate to have a wonderful support system of family and friends that have become much apparent to me in recent months. Working alone and seeking solitude often hides the fact that there are people there for you.
One is my niece-in-law who is a highly respected Oncologist who has been advising Cheri and I as we stumble through the wilderness in which we find ourselves. It was at her recommendation that we seek a consultation with Memorial Sloan Kettering. As we near Thanksgiving, I couldn’t be more grateful for her keen guidance and her caring nature.
I hemmed and hawed about writing this, with revealing my diagnosis here. But sharing this came down to the fact that I have written this blog for over 17 years now and it has served in some ways as a diary for me. I have shared a lot of personal details, feelings, and opinions.
Probably too much.
However, there is a freedom that comes with this transparency. I have said before that my life is divided into two distinct halves, in which the first half consisted in trying to hide things whereas the second half has been devoted to revealing those same things and more. With this transparent attitude, I am infinitely happier now than I was in the first half of my life.
If you have been a regular reader for much of that time you most likely feel like you know me and, for the most part, you do. This diagnosis is now part of my life, much like my work, and most likely will be with me for at least a few years.
Maybe more.
The point is that it will affect my work in ways I do not yet know. On one hand, I am scared for what might transpire between this cancer and my work. On the other hand, I am kind of excited. It might be revelatory in ways I can’t imagine.
Or not. We won’t know for a while.
But we will know.
I used one of my most personal paintings at the top. It is A Prayer For Light from my early Exilesseries. This piece was painted in 1995 as my mom was dying from metastatic cancer in Florida, far from her family. This past Monday marked thirty years since her death. Looking at it yesterday morning, this painting resonated in ways that it had not for me before. I couldn’t help but cry, imagining with a better understanding now of the loneliness and loss she must have been experiencing at the time as she struggled through the last months of her life.
I feel her experience as the Exile in the wilderness much more profoundly now. And though I sometimes have felt the same over these past several months, I know now that it is not the case for me.
I have guides and companions to help me find my way out of the wilderness and home once more.
What more could I ask?
In parting, let me just add this: Don’t worry about me– I got this covered.
I probably don’t need to throw in a song on a post like this. But this came on yesterday while I was thinking about how to address my situation on the blog and I found myself once again tearing up, especially at the first section of the medley. This is the medley Golden Slumbers/ Carry That Weight/The End from the Beatles off their Abbey Road album.
The feeling is less like an ending than just another starting point.
–-Chuck Palahniuk, Choke: A Novel
Well, the show comes down at the end of the day. I am talking about my solo show Guiding Light which hangs at the West End Gallery. Many, many thanks to all who made their way in to see the show or who attended the opening or Gallery Talk. And many thanks to Jesse and Linda Gardner for allowing me to show my work at this wonderful gallery as well as for the tremendous amount of work they put in and the warmth which they have extended to me over the past 30 years.
There’s always a bit of sadness in seeing a show come down. What was once assembled as a unified entity dissolves into individual components that will attempt to stand on their own, to establish their own identity.
As I pointed out in an earlier post, it’s like the band or chorus is breaking up. What were once band or chorus members whose playing and singing supported and harmonized with the others around them are now soloists.
That’s sad in a way. It’s an ending, after all, and as much as we love a happy ending, endings are often sad. But there is also the exhilaration of being out apart from the other to consider.
A new start. A new chance to stand apart and let your own light shine.
And that might well be how much of my work might be construed. The Red Tree in my work often stands apart. It is not overshadowed or lost among the many other trees in the forest. It clearly exhibits both its strength and its vulnerability.
It is free to be all it wishes to be. All it should be.
The ultimate freedom.
So, while I am sad to see the show end, I am eager to see how the remaining work makes its way into the world.
And to clearly see their strength and hear their singular voices.
As noted above, Guiding Lightends at the end of the day. There’s still a chance to get in to hear the chorus.
Here’s a classic from Joe Cocker, his cover of the Beatles’ With a Little Help From My Friends. It just seems right this morning. This his iconic Woodstock performance. The backup singers were trapped in the traffic jam heading to the festival so his band members had to take up the slack. With a little help from his friends, Cocker’s performance carries the day.
I hope my soloists carry this kind of passion with them…
Happy are they who live in the dream of their own existence, and see all things in the light of their own minds; who walk by faith and hope; to whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar, and into whom the spirit of the world has not entered! They have not been “hurt by the archers”, nor has the iron entered their souls. The world has no hand on them.
–William Hazlitt, Winterslow: Essays and Characters (1850)
I have used a quote once before here, back in 2012, from the British art and literary critic of the 19th century William Hazlitt. The quote made me chuckle when I came across it this morning while researching the quote from him above:
Landscape painting is the obvious resource of misanthropy.
As a painter of primarily landscapes, I am not saying that Hazlitt’s claim isn’t sometimes true. Believe me, there are days when the last thing I want to do is see or talk to another human being. Most days, actually.
But the fact is that I see the landscapes that I paint, internally created though they may be, as connecting tissue to our humanity and all that is good and decent in it. And that goodness and decency is something I will always revere and love in humans.
Part of the attraction of painting my landscapes is that I can create a world that reflects an acceptable form of humanity for me, one that creates space for our better angels. Nne that I can feel comfortable in. One that brings me happiness of some sort.
A landscape that gives me a path to follow and a light to guide me.
You can see why I was attracted to Hazlitt’s less cynical words at the top of the page. I can see them reflected in much of the work from my Guiding Lightexhibit at the West End Gallery that ends tomorrow. The first line–Happy are they who live in the dream of their own existence, and see all things in the light of their own minds– resonates deeply for me in the work of this show.
The only part of Hazlitt’s passage to which I might mildly object is the one stating that this created inner world is one into whomthe spirit of the world has not entered. As I said, I see these internal landscapes as connecting tissue to my humanity. The spirit of the world, at least the better angels of that spirit, are infused in the work.
As noted, it is a mild objection only as I understand that he is inferring that if the darker angels of our spirit were to enter such a world, happiness in this inner world might never be achieved.
For my part, the work for this show brought me such happiness as Hazlitt describes. I hope others sensed that and felt it in themselves.
All I can ask of it.
Guiding Light now hanging at the West End Gallery comes to its conclusion at the end of the day tomorrow, Thursday, November 13.
One never finishes learning about art. There are always new things to discover. Great works of art seem to look different every time one stands before them. They seem to be as inexhaustible and unpredictable as real human beings.
–Ernst Gombrich, The Story of Art (1978)
I think the passage above from art historian Ernst Gombrich (1909-2001) is an apt flourish to this reminder that my solo exhibit, Guiding Light, at the West End Gallery comes to its conclusion at the end of the day this Thursday, November 13. There are three days to arrange to see the show.
I believe Gombrich’s statement applies here because as he says, art looks different every time one stands before it. And I think when a show is hung it creates a unique atmosphere created by the dynamics of the individual pieces in relation to one another, the space, and the viewer. It makes viewing any painting in an exhibit, as well as the exhibit as a whole, a unique experience for the viewer.
Maybe I am out of place in saying this, but I felt that this show at the West End Gallery was one of those unique experiences with its own atmosphere. Each piece stands out in their individuality but is reinforced by the work surrounding it.
Like strong individual voices gathered in a choir.
Hope you get a chance to catch the show before the choir disbands and the singers go solo.
Here’s a favorite song from the Talking Heads and David Byrne performed during his American Utopia tour of 2018. This is This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody).
The less we say about it the better Make it up as we go along Feet on the ground, head in the sky It’s okay, I know nothing’s wrong, nothing
If only we try to live sincerely, it will go well with us, even though we are certain to experience real sorrow, and great disappointments, and also will probably commit great faults and do wrong things, but it certainly is true, that it is better to be high-spirited, even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent. It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love, is well done.
-Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh to his Brother, 1872-1886
Jean-Francois Millet- The Sower 1850
There are a lot of other things I could write about, things that of concern to me in many areas, but I am going to leave them off the table this morning. Instead, I just wanted to share a few words from Vincent van Gogh and what I imagine is one of his lesser-known paintings, The Sower.
Painted in 1888, van Gogh appropriated the figure here from the famous 1850 painting of the same name from Jean-Francois Millet, which was a very influential on van Gogh. He painted several takes on the Millet painting, of which Millet painted several subsequent versions himself.
I share this image from van Gogh today because whenever I come across it, it reminds me of how influential it was on me when I first saw it years ago as a nascent painter. The simplicity and strength of the composition’s elements and the way the paint evoked feelings well beyond the subject spoke to me then and now. It felt uncontrived and sincere, a deep expression of the artist.
I can’t tell you how many times I have been reminded of this painting in my own work over the decades. Sometimes it is in the composition, the way the tree trunk slices the picture plane or the prominence of the sun above the horizon line. Sometimes it comes in recognizing the same emotional response to what I am working on that I felt in seeing his painting.
The words here reflect van Gogh’s feelings on living and painting with sincerity. This has had much the same effect on me that this painting and others of his have had on me. I am not qualified to judge the quality of my work or whether it will have a lasting legacy. That is well out of my hands. But I can attest to its sincerity and the fact that the emotions it expresses are genuine and meaningful to me.
That sense of sincerity has been my guiding star for the past thirty years. It has sustained me in my work and in my life. Like every living human, I have had my fair share of high points and an equally fair share of, as I call them, beatdowns, breakdowns and meltdowns. Clear-eyed sincerity has pulled through these thus far in my life. And I believe that applies to my work. In fact, enduring the down times with sincerity may have strengthened the work. As van Gogh wrote in another letter:
Whoever lives sincerely and encounters much trouble and disappointment without being bowed down is worth more than one who has always sailed before the wind and has only known prosperity.
I would like to think that has been the case, that adversity has been turned to strength through sincerity and resolve.
I think that must be the seed that every artist sows.
Got to go. The fields are waiting to for me. Maybe I can sow some seeds while I listen to Satchmo. Here’s Louis Armstrong and La Vie en Rose.
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
—Jorge Luis Borges, Two English Poems, Verse II, 1934
This has been a long and arduous week. There have been a few high points and more than enough low points. Let just say for this morning that there are a lot of moving parts right now that I will explain in greater depth in the near future.
I am resharing a post this morning from two years back that has easily been my most popular post since it first appeared. I thought it was an appropriate piece to share as my show at the West End Gallerycomes to an end this coming Thursday, November 13. I think the whole of the show now hanging very much reflects the thought behind this post, that art is indeed a love offering from the artist to the viewer.
A gift of the self.
And since it is Sunday, there’s a song at the bottom for the weekly Sunday Morning Music segment of our little show. It’s Bob Dylan and It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry from his landmark 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited.
[From 2023]
What can I hold you with? I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the jagged suburbs. I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely moon. I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living men have honoured in bronze. I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, whatever manliness or humour my life. I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal. I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow-the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams, and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities. I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born. I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself. I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
—Jorge Luis Borges, Two English Poems, Verse II, 1934
Wasn’t going to write anything this morning, again. So, I didn’t write this morning. Haven’t felt much like writing lately. Just a little worn down, I guess.
But later in the morning, I came across a draft of a blog entry that I had never shared containing the second verse of a Jorge Luis Borges poem, Two English Poems. It sent me thinking and writing. It is basically about finding and losing love in the first verse, followed in the second verse with the narrator weighing out what he has to offer in order to regain or hold on to his beloved.
I focused on the second verse of the poem. Its first line– What can I hold you with? —is a thought that often goes through my mind when I stand before a blank canvas. In my conversation with some unidentifiable and indistinct viewer that I imagine being present in the studio, it is often phrased in a slightly different way–What part of myself can I give to you?
The meaning is much the same though. When I paint, I am making an offer of myself to the viewer.
But what has the greatest impact for me was the final part of the second verse, highlighted in red above. It reminds me of the thoughts I sometimes have when trying to describe what I hope others see in my work, those things I have to offer with the hope that it will entrance and hold the viewer.
The artist hopes that what they have to offer, while being their own memories and feelings, opens up new avenues of perception for the viewer of themselves. As Borges put it:
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself.
I have struggled to say just that for a long time. It is just what I want from my work.
And that final line just crushed me:
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
I felt like it was describing much of what I have to offer in my work. You hope that your work represents the totality of you, all the many facets that make up your humanity, with the hope that others see their own similar feelings in it. That includes the deepest of feelings, those rising from loss and disappointment. These are sometimes a bit darker and more somber than feelings of joy and happiness, but they are as much a part of who we are as the brightest of our feelings.
As I said, Borges’ poem is very much a poem about what one has to offer in order to gain one’s love. In a way, sharing one’s art is often very much the same thing– a love offering of the deepest and most intimate parts of yourself. It may not be real or romantic love. But when you connect with art in a deep way, you often feel as though you are connected with the artist and know and understand them.
I don’t know that I can fully explain what I mean here. It may even sound a bit off the wall to you. That’s okay. I am used to that. Just felt like I wanted to share this poem today.
Here’s a reading from Tom O’Bedlam of the whole poem from Borges.
Nothing is old, nothing is new, save the light of grace underneath which beats a human heart. The way of feeling, of understanding, of loving; the way of seeing the country, the faces that your father saw, that your mother knew. The rest is chimerical…
–Georges Rouault, Soliloques (1944)
I try not to employ quotes from other artists unless I am also sharing their work, especially when the words are from artists whose work I greatly admire, such as Georges Rouault. I have featured his work here a number of times over the years and readily cite him as an influence on my early work.
But this morning, I felt that Rouault’s words fit perfectly with what I was seeing and feeling in this painting, A Prayer For Understanding.
My feeling from this piece is that we often get so consumed with small and ephemeral things that we lose sight of those things that truly have meaning for us. These are those things that bind us to our family, our land, and the universe beyond. Things that create our understanding of our existence, both in our time here in the ephemeral world and in our unknowable life that comes both before and after our time here.
It is an understanding that comes not from words or action. It is formed in stillness and observation.
It doesn’t live in the regrets or glories of the past nor in the hope or fears of the future.
Its existence is only in that silent, watchful moment when the rhythms of all things converge and time dissolves in light like sugar in water. As Rouault put it: Nothing is old, nothing is new, save the light of grace underneath which beats a human heart.
That is where understanding dwells, always nearby yet always so far away in the grace of the human heart.
The painting shown here is A Prayer For Understanding. It is 30″ by 15″ on canvas and is included in my current solo show at the West End Gallery, Guiding Light. The exhibit closes next Thursday, November 13. Hope you can get in to see it.
Here’s one of my favorite compositions from composer Philip Glass. It’s a piece originally from a soundtrack of the 1985 film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. The full title of this particular selection is String Quartet #3 Movement VI (also called Mishima Closing) and is performed by the Catalyst Quartet. I have shared this piece a couple of times over the years from other artists. This performance seems to fit well with the painting as I see it.
By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.
–Confucius
I’ve tried all three methods, and I am not certain I’ve yet gained any wisdom.
Does one ever know?
I guess the point is to keep trying and, maybe after a while, it will show up unannounced and without any fuss.
That seems about right. But then again, what do I know?
Actually, I just wanted to point out that my current solo exhibit at the West End Gallery, Guiding Light, ends a week from today, on Thursday November 13. The gallery is closed today but reopens tomorrow so if you have a chance, I hope you can get in to see the show.
Here’s a song from John Prine that might well apply to the words above from Confucius. It certainly is about reflection and experience. It’s I Remember Everything which was the last song he recorded before his death in 2020.
Redtree Times 