You Cannot Rage At Something You Never Completely Understood…

Dune Study, 2016  ~  Kris Passey (1948-2016/17) Watercolor on 140 lb coldpress,  9 1/2 x 4 7/8 in.

I have been given a confirmed diagnosis of stage IV adenocarcinoma pancreatic cancer. My prognosis is on the short side of 3 – 6 months to live. It is not curable. There is no viable surgical, chemical or radiological treatment at this point. Any choices about it I have are limited to a range in pain management.

I was encouraged by some and discouraged by others about posting it on Facebook. But you’re reading it so you know what my decision is.

My wife, children and close family all know, I believe. We are far-flung both geographically and otherwise. Telling my friends has been complicated, laborious and enervating. Not everyone I would have liked to tell personally before making this general announcement on Facebook has been told. I do not mean to give offense nor to presume any relationship that was more on my side than yours. I love a lot of people. I do not expect mawkish statements of grief, contributions or questions.

Please do your own research if you have questions about stage IV adenocarcinoma pancreatic cancer. It is a very personal kind of cancer and what happens to me will almost certainly not be what happens to others who contract it. For that reason I will not be writing about it. A tough guy might say, “We are all in this alone. Stand up and die your own death.” I don’t think of myself as a tough guy. And while I don’t expect this to be a party that does not mean I expect there will not be some partying along the way.

I have completely accepted this. There is no false hope to have. If you have a little, please, keep it to yourself. Your hope for a cure, proclamations of faith or spiritual pleas for more time will not buoy me up. I am strangely happy. There are no miracle cures anywhere in the world despite what anyone has told you, or will tell you. So please, be a human about what you say here. I will not be getting better.

Retired Barn, 2016 ~ Kris Passey (1948-2016/17) Watercolor on 140 lb. coldpress, 4 1/8 x 2 5/8 in.

As a nontheist, I have no religious ground to make up. I do not listen to spirits, my own or others’. I have no one to prepare to meet and nothing to expect. I do admit to a small amount of joy at knowing that if I am wrong, I will probably know that before you do. If I am right, none of us will know. You will find I do some mild teasing about this from time to time. Please, don’t ever take it personally. I am not singling you out for admonition.

There are many on this “social” network I love and respect. I wish I would have gotten to know you better, faster. I wish I would have gotten to hear your personal stories as well as read more of those you will write. That is not a lament, however, but a joyful song for all those you did share. Thank you.

I understand now that the first two lines in each tercet and the concluding quatrain  of Dylan Thomas’s  villanelle, “Do Not Go Gentle…” are much more important than the last line’s repeated rhyming mechanism, which I now see as an ironic statement of futility. … But please, do your own research.

Torn Sky, 2016  ~  Kris Passey (1948 – 2016/17)  Watercolor on 140 lb. coldpress, 6 1/4 x 4 5/8 in.

I will try to keep posting the light captured by so many as paintings that bring me joy. It may become more irregular before it disappears. I assure you there are many sources when mine sputters to a stop. I hope you indulge yourselves before you catch and sing the sun in flight. Or perhaps you will rage with impunity?

In the country of reading

Reading time: How well do you read?  (Word Count: 1,541)

 

Part of the joy of reading, I think, is the memory surrounding the act itself. This short passage from Curtis Evan’s excellent, “The Passing Tramp” blog, recently reminded me of that.

 I started reading Agatha Christie when I was eight years old. We were living in Mexico City and while shopping at Sanborns Department Store (I loved two things most of all about Sanborns, the bookstalls and the milkshakes) my mother had bought, for eight pesos apiece I believe, four Pocket Christies: Easy to Kill (Murder Is Easy), Funerals Are Fatal (After the Funeral), And Then There Were None and The ABC Murders.

I read all these on a love seat in our third-floor apartment under a big window from which streamed in a wash of afternoon, rays from the sun.

 Reading for me has always been a pleasure second only−but occasionally equal to−sex. Although loving, warm, relaxed, giving sex is still the penultimate true joy of this existence (the last being death, where answers are either revealed, or not) there is a dispiriting quest to divide ‘becoming one’ into compartments of ugliness. But that is another conversation.

Reading came to me early with an aroma of wonder. The nose is a wonderful memory trigger; if you don’t savor the smell of a new volume soon after being introduced you are no bibliophile in my book. When you detect its scent in a later time, the doors of the mind unlock and you are awash in an earlier experience.

The “just the facts, ma’am” answer to why that happens is likely brain anatomy. The olfactory bulb processes incoming smells first. It has ‘direct connections to two brain areas that are strongly implicated in emotion and memory:  the amygdala and hippocampus. Interestingly, visual, auditory (sound), and tactile (touch) information do not pass through these brain areas. This may be why olfaction, more than any other sense, is so successful at triggering emotions and memories.’ Or so says current science.

Some of this causerie undoubtedly appeared now because I have been happily observing the newest woman in my life, Sophie, our HoundX, snuffling out her new world in our yard and home and I am unconsciously considering what it is she is learning: A new world through her moist black nose-her second or third world-all of them imprinted during her first seven dog years. We are similar in that I had three distinct reading worlds, each with its own olfactory atmosphere, during my early years at Canyon Rim, which sits high on the east bench overlooking the Valley of the Great Salt Lake.

The first of these reading worlds was centered on a tattered set of 1927 encyclopedias called “The Book of Knowledge.” They shared an aroma  of boiled horse glue from the binding with an effervescence of chalk that wafted up from the ancient coating on the paper. The ink was the heady essence of initiation, secrets revealed, mysteries explained. The editors were wise enough, and perhaps prescient in their understanding of the power of serendipitous education on young minds. Rather than being organized alphabetically by topic, each volume in the 20-volume set was a delicious chunked stew of knowledge to taste. I have included a contents page so you can construct your own metaphor, and a few individual pages for your review. Imagine you and I nestled together or alone in the reading corner while at the same time traveling to the far plains of the universe and bringing home treasure to store in our minds!

My second reading world was the Bookmobile that stopped every week during summers at the top of the long steep hill on Louise Avenue, just one street over from our house on 29^th south. The blocks in our neighborhood were two houses backyard-to-backyard wide and about 25-30 long; this was the short two-house walk. This is important because it meant I could handily tote the full limit of books home after checking them out from the Bookmobile. But I dillydallied as long as I could, vacillating, adding to and subtracting from my pile, discovering something else I had to read first. I have written elsewhere about the rites and procedures of my childhood, wherein I managed a full essay with five paragraphs worth of words on how I constructed the final pile of, I think, the 15 or so books that were the limit for each child. But I admit that the major reason I took as long as possible was to surreptitiously sniff and savor each of the books in which I was even remotely interested. I might want to replace some in my pile or check them out later, but sensed I did not want to be caught, literally, with my nose [sniffing] in a book. Many things in childhood are taboos; I wasn’t sure this book sniffing wasn’t one of those. Adding subterfuge very likely imprinted the joy of it more deeply.

Along with the thousands of book smells, the Bookmobile carried the added bouquet of its

Our book mobile looked like this one from LA, but it snowed in Utah so it only came in summer as I remember.

diesel motor and the sachet of mechanical contrivances that titillate many young boys. I was positive I could detect the sweet diesel smell before I could hear the labored motor shift into low gear for the climb up Louise. My mother made us wait for the Bookmobile’s arrival before turning us loose from our front porch steps to meet it, but I quickly whittled her resolve down to hearing its basso profundo on the ascent. I was usually waiting when the doors opened. And, it was the blended odor of vulcanite and petroleum grease lubricating those doors that started my mind salivating.

Everyone should discover a snug, comfortable cave like my third reading world. Mine was just west, across 29^th east, on the precipice lip of the Lake Bonneville bench, an ancient shoreline of an almost vanished pluvial lake that existed until perhaps 500 years after the artist priests of Lascaux were painting their cave walls in 15,000 B.C.E. I discovered it while looking after a little boy (please, I was never a babysitter!), the son of Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs, who lived there. The French use the word cave, pronounced kav, to mean what we might call ‘the basement,’ and more specifically to refer to a wine cellar. The Jacobs had a wine cellar in their cave, but a more important treasure for me, they had box after box of books: all of Frank Baum’s many OZ books in early hardback editions with original full color art on the covers and B&Ws mixed inside; also some of Baum’s fantasy novels and smaller books with his poetry. I thought all of these would smell the same, but remember registering slight bewilderment and disappointment that they didn’t. The Jacobs also had what I remember as a full box of smaller, say 5 x 8 inch hardbound books with blue covers. The Baum Oz books seemed huge by comparison. These blue-cover books were illustrated only with black ink silhouettes. All smelled exactly, exactly, the same. Many of them were biographies, I think, stories about people’s lives. My memory of the exact stories themselves is vague but I do remember that I found them intriguing and read every one.

There were boxes of picture travel books that smelled tart and zesty, yet also toasty. Several boxes of science books smelled like chemicals, like a laboratory-a questionably easy connection-but still vivid in my memory. Many random books had the smell of my dad’s office workspace inside the small building at the oil pipeline terminal in Woods Cross where he worked. Also suspicious, but locked nevertheless in my memory, is the chalky, but oaked smell of each of the math books in two smaller boxes. The books were filled with more equations than words, and although the words that were printed appeared to be English, I didn’t understand how they were connected for meaning anything I could understand. This was very clearly a different language, and I perused them infrequently only to marvel at the elegant diagrams and lists of tables and to check, just in case, whether I had been granted the gift of interpretation of tongues.

It may sound like it but I didn’t have my nose in a book all the time, just more, perhaps, than other boys my age. We always played outside in good weather, roaming the neighborhood, playing pick-up baseball games or over-the-line, or hit-the-bat; catch tadpoles, frogs, spiders and garter snakes in the ‘little gully’ with the pond and willows; explore the scrub-oak trails looking for Bloody Mary in the big gully that was off-limits, partly because our mothers feared polio was somehow living in the water there and partly because it was the out-wash of Parley’s Canyon. When it grew too hot I would disappear and secretly find my way to the Jacobs’ house where Mrs. Jacobs would sometimes give me a slice of Wonder Bread with peanut butter and grape jelly, and a glass of milk; then nod me downstairs after making sure I had washed my hands. We had rigged up an old chaise mattress and an orange crate along a cool basement wall lit by summer light, surrounded by the heady wine of words and odors. Reading, I sometimes looked through a glass, darkly, at fantasy worlds; sometimes I put away childish things.

Those three distinct, memorable reading worlds have increased in number. But as it is in so many things human, the first times etch deeply. So my toast today to you is, “May you ever continue to have first times!”

 

 

Bars, Key West and Hemingway

First, get this straight. The original Sloppy Joes’s was not in Havana. It’s not there now. In Cuba. Got it? Hemingway drank and ate at many bars and restaurants in Havana: the Bodeguita del Medio Bar/Restaurant, the El Floridita Bar/Restaurant and in bars in and around the Ambos Mundo Hotel. Get it?

Second, the Key West Sloppy Joe’s was first run out of what was once a mortuary. It was owned and run by a guy named “Sloppy Joe” Russell. It was called Captain Tony’s. Some, and only some, think Captain Tony’s was the inspiration for “Freddy’s,” in Hemingway’s “To Have and To Have Not.” I never knew Hemingway so I’m not going to call him Papa or Hem or any other pet name like that. He wouldn’t do that to me, I won’t do that to him.

Third, the reason to drink in a bar is not because someone you never knew, did. People who do that are broken in a way they probably can’t help. They may be good in other ways but when it comes down to it, they can’t be trusted.

There is a story, and it is a good story, that says Russell was tight with a dollar. So when his landlord raised his rent by $6 a month in 1937, Russell was not happy. At midnight on the day his landlord announced the rent increase he told his patrons he was moving. Anyone who wanted to move with him should bring their bar stool and walk up the street with him to his new place. And they did.

There is another story, not as good, but good in its own way, that Hemingway took the marble urinal from the old bar home with him. The reason it is not as good a story as the first one is that no one who truly knew Hemingway believes he would stop drinking at midnight because he wanted to move a urinal, marble or otherwise.

The next things I’m going to tell you have some risk, some pain attached. It is the same kind of risk and pain I had when I attached a map to the painting of Owyhee Springs done by Mary Maxam. I’ve regretted that and now believe I will remove it. If you want to go there you should at least go through the pain of locating the route. To paraphrase Hemingway, who was talking about catching black marlin with bills as big around as baseball bats and sails like a full-rigged ship, “People who know how [to fish catch them] to find the good places find them. But don’t think they don’t take punishment.”

If you find things about Hemingway you like, you probably don’t go to bars to pay that homage because they have his skis or fishing pole or a lot of old b&w photos with him in them on the walls. And if you go because you think some spirit of him would remain in such a place you are one of those broken people spoken of above. There isn’t. He wouldn’t be there. None of him would be there.

I’ll give you a hint but I’m not providing a map this time. None of the places in Key West where Hemingway might go now are on Duval Street. They are also not pictured in this blogpost. One of them will tell you in absolute terms what NOT to let your dog do.

Perceptive, literate people will understand that while dogs are welcome in this establishment, people posing as dogs are not.

The Art of Reading and Remembering…

Harper’s had a brief article this week, a memoir-type piece about the Encyclopedia Britannica. When I was very young we didn’t have the Britannica, we finally got the World Book Encyclopedia, I think largely because a neighbor on the next street from ours was selling them. I have many good memories of those volumes, particularly the page-by-page clear acetate pages revealing how a woman really is.

 

But the set of encyclopedias I really remember dearly was a set of the Book of Knowledge. It wasn’t alphabetically set up, the articles had a random order and you never knew what you might discover when you took out a volume in its old-blood red color: you might get an Aesop’s Fable with wonderfully inked line drawings or an article about elephants or how steam engines worked.

 

Arthur Waley, Portrait by Roger Fry

I think this had an effect on how my mind organized itself. I don’t have a photographic memory but I remember things in books by their place on an open spread of two pages, about where it was in that volume. I remember where the volume is mostly by where it is on my library shelves if it is one I own, and then by the outline shape and organization of the type on the spine – not so much the color but to a lesser degree.

 

I understand that hoarders, who appear to just have an impossible mess more accurately have an inscrutable mess. Many, or perhaps most – I don’t remember which – can find what they are after pretty quickly. Their method of organization is a large part of why they are so pained or find it nearly impossible to throw things away. Getting rid of things fiddles with their spatial perceptions of reality. Take a foot or two off one of their stacks, or an inch or two of a dusty pile and you obliterate a needed compass point in what to you might just be clutter.

My organizational preference as an editor/publisher for my work desk is the the pile. It had the needed benefit of preventing others from finding things there that might be sensitive, private, or journalistically “top secret” within two hours – more or less a normal lunch hour. Piles of documents act like settling ponds. The good stuff tends to be either at the top or bottom, depending on the nature of good. The middle is “neither cold nor hot” and may be spued out entirely, eventually, or spat upon another pile for further settling. I found three to be the absolute minimum number of piles to make this work.

I am familiar with Matteo Ricci’s memory palace but did not discover it until too late to pour a proper foundation, and fear that advancing age, and a diminishing staff of memory servants, would diminish the number of usable rooms for something that may have resembled more of a country chateau than a palace anyway. So, piles and my shelved library ’til death do us part or I toddle off to the dreaded waking forgetfulness.

Picasso and “The Old Guitarist”

“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”  PABLO PICASSO, Quote, Sept. 21, 1958

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso is his full name .  And his internal workings are thought to have been as complex as the variety of reactions people have to many of his paintings.

This one, from his blue period is a case in point (painted in late 1903-early 1904). At first glance it seems simple enough – an old, white-haired man, possibly blind, possibly even crippled but although Picasso often distorted his figures when he was developing ‘Analytic Cubism,’ this paint was done prior to that period of his painting. The players’ clothes suggest poverty, and in fact when Picasso painted this he was just barely emerging from some years of penury.

Picasso was so influential an artist that is is easy to get bogged down discussing his work. Here I just wanted to through out some of the things circling his work from a further orbit. You might listen to the Cowboy Junkies sing Blue Guitar while looking at the painting. There is also a famous Wallace Steven’s poem written in 1937 called the Man with the Blue Guitar. When asked about it by an interviewer, Stevens denied it was about the painting but reading it would give a very different impression. It’s a long poem, 33 cantos, so I’ll put a link here to more commentary about how it relates to Picasso’s The Old Guitarist.

The final orbit in this discussion will be what’ under the painting. This is from the Cleveland Museum of Art’s website:

Recent x-rays and examinations by curators found three figures peering behind the old guitarist’s body. The three figures are an old woman with her head bent forward, a young mother with a small child kneeling by her side, and an animal on the right side of the canvas. Despite unclear imagery in crucial areas of the canvas, experts determined that at least two different paintings are found beneath The Old Guitarist.^[4]

In 1998, researchers used an infrared camera to penetrate the uppermost layer of paint (the composition of The Old Guitarist) and clearly saw the second-most composition. By using this camera, researchers were able to discover a young mother seated in the center of the composition, reaching out with her left arm to her kneeling child at her right, and a calf or sheep on the mother’s left side. Clearly defined, the young woman has long, flowing dark hair and a thoughtful expression.^[5]

The Art Institute of Chicago shared its infrared images with the Cleveland Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where curator William Robinson identified a sketch by Picasso sent to his friend Max Jacob in a letter. It revealed the same composition of mother and child, but it had a cow licking the head of a small calf. In a letter to Jacob, Picasso reveals he was painting this composition a few months before he began The Old Guitarist. Despite these discoveries, the reason Picasso did not complete the composition with a mother and child, and how the older woman fitted into the history of the canvas, remain unknown.

So, Kristy Puchco, from Mental Floss*, wraps it up this way: don’t be deceived by this seemingly simple painting of a man and his instrument. Pablo Picasso’s The Old Guitarist has secrets in its past and in its paint. 

1. Picasso related to his penniless guitar player.

At 22, Picasso was overcome with a sadness that he projected on this piece, and many others from his Blue Period. He showed this through the monochromatic, flat representation. Picasso knew what it was like to be broke, spending most of 1902 in poverty.

2. It’s bigger than you’d expect.

Contorted and cramped within the frame, you might think this Old Guitarist is presented on a small canvas, but it actually measures in at 48 3/8 x 32 1/2 inches, roughly four by 2 2/3 feet.

3. It appears that the man pictured is blind.

Observe his closed eyes, averted from the world and the instrument he plays. It’s suggested that a key influence of The Old Guitarist was Symbolist literature, which often employed blind characters to suggest a vision beyond this world.

4. The disenfranchised was a theme of the Blue Period.

Marginalized and deprived people were often the subject pieces in the Blue Period. Picasso was especially intrigued by blindness and seemingly blind figures can be found in several of his works. The etching The Frugal Repast (1904) offers a blind man and a sighted woman sharing a sparse meal. A similar subject was tackled—minus the mate—with The Blind Man’s Meal in 1903. Lastly, the 1903 portrait Celestina displayed a woman with one milky unseeing eye. 

5. It could also be viewed as a self-portrait of sorts.

The only element of The Old Guitarist that is not devotedly blue is the man’s guitar. Through his art, this isolated misfit finds solace. The brightness of the guitar could be seen to speak to how Picasso viewed his own art as a bright spot even in his darkest times. 

6. The Old Guitarist’s composition is a nod to El Greco.

As with all of the pieces from the Blue Period, this piece is directly related to the artist El Greco. Picasso was fond of the artist because he was overlooked by scholars in favor of other Renaissance and Mannerist painters of the time. The guitarist’s head crooked at a jarring angle and legs curled in make him appear cramped within the frame. Art historians suggest Picasso chose this angular pose accented by elongated limbs as a nod to the celebrated 16th-century artist.

7. This piece may have inspired poetry.

Three years after The Old Guitarist was exhibited in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, American Modernist Wallace Stevens published the lengthy poem “The Man With The Blue Guitar.” Despite a seemingly obvious link between the painting and the poem, Stevens denied any connection to Picasso’s work, claiming, “I had no particular painting of Picasso’s in mind and even though it might help to sell the book to have one of his paintings on the cover, I don’t think we ought to reproduce anything of Picasso’s.”

8. There’s a woman hiding on the canvas.

If you look closely at the space above the guitar player’s ear, through the blue-gray paint you might make out a forehead and eyes. This ghostly woman invited further study, so the museum that owns the painting, The Art Institute of Chicago, studied it in a conservation lab using infrared scans and X-rays to see what Picasso had painted over. What was discovered was an abandoned portrait of a nude young woman, seated and nursing a child from her right breast, as well as a calf and cow.

9. The Old Guitarist is the most iconic work of Picasso’s Blue Period.

This chapter in the seminal painter’s career began with Casagemas in His Coffin, which depicted his dearly departed friend in his final repose. From there came many more, solemn portraits of despair, desperation and desolation that have scattered to museum walls all over the world. But none has come close to surpassing the popularity of The Old Guitarist.

10. The Art Institute of Chicago made history with the painting.

The Art Institute of Chicago acquired the piece in 1926 in what turned out to be a pivotal moment for Picasso. The Old Guitarist became Picasso’s first painting to be acquired by an American museum, and according to the Art Institute of Chicago, by all accounts it was also the first Picasso painting that any museum in the world acquired for its permanent collection.

 

*from http://mentalfloss.com/article/66934/10-things-you-might-not-know-about-picassos-old-guitarist.

Mooning, sheep and Granville Redmond

“The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.”

Ellen Glasgow, The Sheltered Life (1932)

The artistic endeavor, like so many pursuits in life, is one of putting one’s inclinations, imaginings and impulses into the corral of discipline for the purpose of exacting a result of excellence.

No one that I know of said that. It just occurs to me a good representation of the effort. I always liked the phrase usually attributed to Hemingway, who is quoting either Nathaniel

Hawthorne or Alexander Pope, or perhaps he is quoting Gertrude Stein quoting either Hawthorne or Pope : “Easy reading is damn hard writing.”

Thus by extension, “Beautiful paintings are damned hard painting,” the s being a significant addition.

Since this little essay so far seems composed only of homilies so far, another chestnut shouldn’t be too painful: Practice makes perfect. That practice is made up, usually, of deconstructing the sum into its parts, symphony into phrase or measure, novel into sentences and words, paintings into colors and strokes. Elements into atoms.

With the last example we are reminded that the end result of such deconstruction is not

A Shepherd and His Flock in the Early Morning Mist

simplicity but yet another sum of complexity, or as one wise man either said or quoted, “All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself…,” or as the Kabbalah would express it, qav ha-middah, the line of measure that maps out the path and stages of emanation, the spectrum of divine colors concealed within the concealed, hidden within the mystery of Ein Sof.

Nothing short of repetition seeking perfection. And that, nothing short of elusive to painters, poets and artists of all ilks. But tingling in its proximity.

Unpacking boxes after Christmas

I don’t mean the boxes in which the presents came. And Christmas is only a marker of current time. After all, this is being written after Christmas and might appear anytime before Valentine’s Day.

The boxes to which I refer are those into which we are put by others. Right now I am struggling to be kept out of the box into which those are put who end sentences with a preposition. But in the interests of brevity and voice I will have to leap in.

Is this Katie Murphy painting an evocative modern image for orthodoxy?

The strongest drive in humans, after sex, is labeling things in groups of like characteristics, then discriminating differences within the group to form sub-boxes to contain them.

Linnaeus is considered by many as the father of taxonomy, the MythicAdam by others. Every art and science participates with salivating earnestness. Sorting and resorting keeps six sevenths of the current human population employed according to a statistic I just created as an impressionistic device.

 

With the boxes and sub-boxes comes steadily more nuanced discrimination of difference, and, sooner or later, rules and the assignation of power about who gets to make them.

Does Kasimir Malevich’s “Black Square”evoke heresy?

Inevitably following or concurrent with that process are ideas of normalcy and psychosis, orthodoxy or heresy. And without noticing, we have arrived at today.

Moving between boxes or from one to another is frowned upon by rule makers as an attack on the surrounding (enclosing?) culture. Heresy produces heretics,  Anathema Maranatha, Jihads, stonings, shunning. Or different forms of the same thing in politics, science and the arts.

Orthodoxy produces stability, bishops, archbishops, conformity, safety of a sort, and occasional zealots, cleansings, crusades, inquisitions and new technologies for confession. And again, different forms of the same thing in politics, science and the arts.

Journalism, the modern jester/chronicler/”fact-based” storyteller and mulatto offspring of tradecraft and professionalism, constantly reassuring itself inside its own set of boxes with songs of relevance and mission persistantly devours its own lifespan.

But it does have the grace of god (both lowercase) to position itself slightly above and to the left of all the other boxes, looking always hopefully toward the next holiday.

Perhaps the view from your box is different?

“Road” is a temporary accomodation…

Yes, it is the Christmas season. No this is not a Christmas song. Not in the traditional sense. No, it is not, technically, a painting. But bear with me.

There are many reasons Beth Hart is near the top of my Favorite Singing Artists list. Her almost gravelly, full voice goes right to my guts. The songs she sings fall into one of the genres I really like. And she is unpretentious and open with her feelings, only rarely revealing what a titanic fight that is for her. But she refuses to sink.

Give a listen:

The word she used is agoraphobia, a fear of being in open or public places, by extension, a fear of sharing herself with others, a self that paints her images with sound and lyrics – sometimes of her own making, sometimes the making of others.

Hart uses the metaphor of the road as the place she comes to fight her fear, to touch and be touched, to see and be seen, to look, which has a sort of exponential relation to seeing.

I need to share a rather long quote now. Consider it another painting, something to look at, to see.

The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe…

Yet this seeing which comes before words, and can never be quite covered by them, is not a question of mechanically reacting to stimuli. … We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. As a result of this act, what we see is brought within our reach — though not necessarily within arm’s reach. To touch something is to situate oneself in relation to it. … We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.

Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen. The eye of the other combines with our own eyes to make it fully credible that we are part of the visible world.

If we accept that we can see that hill over there, we propose that from that hill we can be seen. The reciprocal nature of vision is more fundamental than that of spoken dialogue. And often dialogue is an attempt to verbalize this — an attempt to explain how, either metaphorically or literally, ‘you see things,’ and an attempt to discover how ‘s/he sees things.’

This illuminating verbal painting  is the thinking of John Berger in his arguably most influential book on art “in any language,” Ways of Seeing. I need to re-read it much more often than I do.

Facebook might be a metaphor for the road (useful, but not nearly as useful as the real thing).

Also, it may be long and winding, but inevitable the road is a temporary accommodation. Eventually we all return to our room or our”home.”

What do you think?

Ten Sleep it’s not, or maybe…

Art history is full of examples of themes repeated and reworked, right? But Philip Geiger (right) has found something I haven’t run across before. He paints a lot of sleeping women. Not in a creepy, Dr. Huxtable kind of way, but rather in a warm, safe, very restful way. I’m going to scatter a bunch through this post, so you’ll see what I mean yourself.

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After looking at these for a bit I looked at some other artists’ take on sleeping women. There are many that feature a nude or suggestively draped figure, like “Sleeping Woman,” (below, left) by Taeef Najib. Or apparently exhausted figures, like the colorful “Woman Sleeping,” by Keith Burgess (below, center). But that is not where Geiger appears to be headed, at least overtly. Lilian Westcott Hale’s 1925 “Woman Resting,” (below, right) seems more the mood Geiger evokes in me.

The obvious connotations: SLEEP>dream, escape, reboot, oblivion, dormant, stasis, night, death, purge, empty. One interesting connection that is known to botanists but not many of the rest of us is a reference to a night position for petals or leaves different from their position during the day. It is also a short leap from sleep to prophecy.

Geiger interpreters point out the scenes are all indoors and that there are always one or more openings depicted. The only exception to the openings observation that I could find is the painting below (top right).

These last three are much tighter in composition and closer in the much-reduced color palette used. They also have a younger model, which brings me to my last observation. Sleep evokes a repetitive stage of life, the bookends of a day of life, a boundary, a border, the part of a journey that evinces a progression or, paradoxically, movement. We fall into it, drift off to it, and wake from it.

The sleeping women have much to tell us.

Local history says, “Ten Sleep [Wyoming, near Buffalo in the Big Horn mountains] got its name by being ten sleeps (nights) between the Great Sioux Camps and the Platte River to the south, and the northern camp located near Bridger, Mont.”

Mommy can’t make it better dear

Rites of passage are, by definition, things that move a person into a different place. They are both collective and individual. Collective in that they are usually a culturally organized, condensed form of education that include a prerequisite course, as it were. Perhaps a guide or mentor. Sometimes not. Sometimes one is thrown into the experience with little or no warning. But that very suddenness is part of the tribal plan.

The individual side of rites of passage is a paradox. The “passenger” is fated to have a unique experience by the imprisoned nature of human consciousness. Yet that individual’s unique experience will be shaped by his or her (or they) close tribal cultural filters. A spiritual religious conversion, for instance, is ultimately personal and unique. But its interpretation must be blended into respect and adherence to tribal mores else the tribe is undefined and eventually disappears.

I had a wonderful undergraduate professor whose pet phrase was “drill down.” He used it to move us from one level of understanding to another. There was an implied meaning to the phrase of a bottom, some base level of understanding, of truth. We never arrived.

What resonates as I look at Pyankov’s work in these examples  is an expression of the emotion of knowing that only a very short view provides a bottom. Of that emotion caused from the rite of passage when you hear for the very first time, “Mommy can’t make it better dear.”

But what are your thoughts?

Above: Left – “Big Toe”  Photograph, author unknown. Top right – “Meditation,” Ilya Pyankov. Bottom right – Photograph of the artist in front of “Hotel 4 seasons in Saint-Petersburg,” September – October 2011

Below: Left – “Miracle Night,” Ilya Pyankov. Right top – “Snow in the Yard,” Right bottom – “Snow,” Vija Celmins 

Miracle Night

Snow