My sister Terri doesn’t really like my work. Not the portraits, at least. I say this with absolutely no emotional attachment … lots of people are simply not “portrait people” … as a terrific art dealer in Atlanta told me recently, “no one in this town wants to buy a painting with a face”. To me they are like those people out there who don’t like cilantro or mayonnaise or liver pate … they just don’t like those things … it has nothing to do with me personally.
But every time I go over to Terri and Jeff’s I see lots of other things I’ve made … other than portraits … most came from a time of artistic gestation … when I dabbled in everything. Bear in mind, this dabbling is exactly what a student artist should do. In the classical tradition this is a time of training the hand, and finding the voice, and it is perfectly acceptable to do copies — either of an actual painting or of a signature style. So I did plenty. Mercifully, most of my early wanderings haven’t survived, except for a few paintings and sculptures, including Three Hearts from the Jim Dine phase … my take on his beautiful pop art hearts. This large painting hangs in a bedroom of my sister’s house.
As I begin to work on a couple of new narrative portraits, I’m thinking a lot about using abstracted as well as representational elements unified in the same picture … not a new idea in painting, but one I’m trying to work out in my own voice. In that spirit, it was good to see the hearts from the Jim Dine phase. It was … for me at least … so easy to relive that time … dive back into the shimmering water of artistic abandon … and the compulsion to PAINT EVERYTHING! For several years there was really nothing in my heart but painting. For better or worse, those days seem to be returning.
I was just reading a great article in Kosmos Journal about Liminal Leadership, an iconoclastic look at the kind of thinking necessary to address planetary problems. https://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/liminal-leadership/ . As the author says, “Needs—like to breathe, eat, love, and make community—are arguably impossible to change, whereas rethinking the structure of society is merely extremely difficult. Keep in mind that the ‘reality’ of these socioeconomic systems is a human construct; the deer and the sea algae do not buy food. As our systems begin to fray in this unraveling time, reorganization is necessary.”
Taking on expansive, boundary stretching ideas like this sends me into the world of thinking in pictures. The process is so automatic now, that I rarely notice the auto-translation. Read the words, feel the pictures. Seeing the Three Hearts painting, I remember the time of three hearts in my life, and the difficult relationship I was compelled to reconcile in the language of my soul — pictures. And I remember that I didn’t chose to risk everything in that nascent time because I wanted something from painting … I did it because I would die if I didn’t. I love this passage from the Liminal Leadership article:
Being a parent is sometimes dangerously close to playing God with someone else’s life. I was afraid to send my son to a professional acting school when he was 15. He was a good student on a path to a good university. I asked his acting teacher if he thought it would curse my son’s life to send him to study a skill that would likely land him a lifetime of waiting tables, and his reply was this: “If your son wants to go to acting school, don’t send him. If he will die if he doesn’t act, send him.”
Anyone who wants to help usher in a new way of living that honors the wellbeing of all people and the other organisms had better be willing to risk everything to get there. It will take nothing less.
