24 April 2024
Goofy
A study like this from a few nights ago feels like I’ve lifted the veil away from the classically ‘pretty’ sunset genre. I confess that after painting so many of these rosy things I kind of miss my gloomy side. But in this one I can almost breathe a sigh of sad relief for it appears that I’ve touched a dark corner where I’m equally comfortable. But don’t get me wrong, and I like all the ‘pretty ones’ too. It’s just that my life has been filled with so much melancholy that I’m still distrustful of so much ‘happy, joyous and free,,,, or pretty for that matter’. But hey, I’m still getting used to it. Being joyful still takes time getting get used to because I’m an Irishman at heart.
In this picture though, I like certain technical things about it even after just looking at it for a day or two. I’m amazed by those pale lime-colored splotches made from broken Prussian Blue that live up in the rafters of the sky. Like the sound of faint church bells, they’re distant reminders of heaven. But I love how their colours answer the golden expanse that invites nighfallt. But all the same, I cannot (with joy) shake the feeling of an impending tragedy engendered from the whole image. I think the dripping paint in the foreground only re-enforces its tragic air.
It’s never easy to convey pathos in Painting without it seeming overdone or purposefully sentimentalised and manipultive. In other media it’s obviously easier; films, theatre, opera, photography and dance even. It’s because in the end, all art is about death. And the way to death is of course, through life. Many of us choose to sing and dance our way to the other side in one fashion or another, while others will cry over spilt milk, all the way from the crib to the nursing home. Others still, sit on the sidelines complaining the whole time. And yet, everywhere, in temples, churches and mosques, the faint buzz of small prayers persists like crickets on summer eves. I’m sure this sounds a bit dark, but it’s not, because every second that goes by is a breath and it has its own life, like a metronome. How do we live this great spectacle we call life?
After so much heming and hawing through my own life, as I’ve admitted in these pages, I finally got the answer for myself, and it’s simply to devote everything to creativity and light. Yes, painting, of course, but also in the participation of spontaneous friendship that I can develop with others if I choose. So hey, we’re all here on earth together, why don’t we all sing, dance and cry together? Is it that hard? Apparently so, but just because we don’t all do this collectively doesn’t mean that we cannot do it in private because many of us also do that. Not all of us need churches and temples to celebrate light. As we all know, human life is brutally hard at times. In many parts around the globe too many people live a life of misery, from beginning to end. And too often, it’s not of their own making for some are born on desolate plateaus while others in a clean hospital in Greenwich, Conn. But suffering also comes equally to both rich and poor for a whole host of reasons also out of our control.
So at this late stage of my own life, I can make my own happiness and joy, or misery and sadness. So as a result, I choose both art and light, and whether one comes as the main course or the desert, it doesn’t matter the order. It’s after all, my own meal, no one else’s.
Lot’s of people say that art can change our society for the better but personally I disagree. When and if it touches us, it’s as individuals. Art cannot change a whole society because as I’ve already said in these pages that if Brahms or the Beatles, Shakespeare and Robin Williams, couldn’t prevent Hitler, then, no art can save us. But, I do believe that practicing the art of creativity in any fashion or form, can and will change us one by one on our road to the end.
Lest I sound too depressing, I admit to having been changed for the better by so many writers, artists, and people whom I’ve known in my life. Painting, films, books,,,, so yes, art has helped to reformat my own faulty memory stick of a life.
Suddenly I remember seeing a video by a conceptual artist back in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s that really knocked my socks off. The artist made short simple videos of various friends and strangers who visted her. In her studio was a box full of plastic cartoon plastic masks; Cinderella, Micky Mouse, Pluto, Snow White, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Goofy, etc, etc... She would ask her friends pick out one to wear for her project. She sat them down in an old chair in the middle of her large studio. She coaxed them into revealing their saddest, most painful memories of childhood while wearing a mask. It was the most inventive idea imaginable. The one I remember the most was of a woman who had picked out the mask of the cartoon character Goofy. She proceeded to recount a horrid story about incest that involved her father and uncle I think. I was spellbound, and what I learned from this artist’s work is that we can never know the truths behind anyone, no matter what we may think while looking at them. Isn’t that what Art teaches us about ourselves whether we are looking at Rembrandt or Bacon? But on top of that, can we ever know the emotional truth of any artist who is behind the work of Art?
In portrait painting, which actually has a tangential relationship to the video artist because no matter how Goya painted The Marquesa de Pontejos (1786), in the National Gallery in Washington, we’ll never ever know what she hides behind that stoic pose. I think I know more about Goya than his subject just from looking at his portrait. In a work of art, where does the suffering exist, in the sitter or the artist? Inverse to this, the video artist lets her sitters do all the contextual work in this art form. Remarkable!
So in this picture, the sky, like the sitter I saw wearing the Goofy mask, was real, but its interpretation was an abstraction bound by the rules of my own memory that’s both flexible yet stern.
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