Reflections on my show

English Channel (Night) was the image I chose for the postcard. It was based on a small oil sketch I made in Paris in June, 1994, from memory and a drawing made the night before while crossing the channel. I had in my mind the distinct and troubling experience of sensing, during part of that trip, the effort of so many of my father's generation to liberate Europe during D-Day. It struck me how powerful a feeling resides in certain places, and of course I could say this is only my subjective experience projected upon the world, because of a certain knowledge . . . and yet . . .

Knowing I was going to Prague later that summer for the first time to see relatives there, and that my father had just gone there before me, was bringing our family's history to a unique sort of closure. The cold war had continued to separate my father from the land he had fought to free, and this one trip he was taking was to be his only return to the land of his birth. I think I was quite conscious of him and his struggle on that crossing.

One experience I have of art is the effort to convey my empathy with those who have gone before. Landscape evinces the passing of some moment, like a stage after drama. We know a place can often serve as memorial -- and so it felt to me.

The following was a statement I wrote for the show, under the show's title:

Myth and Landscape

The paintings based on the Greek myth of Hero and Leander owe a debt to the Veronese painting of Diana at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, due to the sequential events narrated in that painting. This in turn is retrieved by Veronese from earlier Medieval examples.

The myth of Hero and Leander relates the love story of Leander and Hero (a priestess at the temple of Aphrodite). Leander swims nightly across the Hellespont to be with her, guided by a fire she lights for him. One night a storm puts out the light and Leander perishes. When Hero finds him washed ashore, she kills herself as well.

One might think of landscape as stage, and myth as the actors, but as we know, the environment is not passive. Everything from the weather on the night before D-Day, to the storm that puts out Hero’s beacon to her lover, there is another actor in human affairs – the all-encompassing universe of which we are, even in the art we make.

How well does an artist grapple with, and get down on canvas, the awesome and soul searching all, the infinite in the moment, the very worth and work of our obsessive living and reflection? Art is life’s own advertisement to itself – a broadcast by which we may communicate the deepest things, of which we cannot tire, and that ride with us, even on a painted canvas, homage to the life of life.

January 9, 2008

Here is Hero meets Leander

And Apotheosis (Leander and Hero)

After Apotheosis, the last painting in the show was called Exile, which one viewer thought showed Hero and Leander banished by death from earthly existence. And there is exile in my father's story. I think there is something to this -- the sense of the world as separate from its history. I certainly feel a separation akin to exile since my father died two years ago.

And so, here is Exile

And here is another painting from the show, The overturned Boat

I would like to go on and explain all the background material concerning water, my father, my own experiences, only to show how art funnels many influences into each painting.

The practice of reflection on a show, or a body of work in the studio, is a requisite of the artist's journey. I have demonstrated part of that here, and showed that even in a relatively small show of ten works done in six months there are loose threads, ideas for other ideas. And how to gather these matters together for the eyes, by narrative painting?. . . by landscape. . . ? remains a question, too.

Art itself is a struggle for the proper means, for a means commensurate with ends. How and what attempt to become one. The artist cannot be satisfied until he finds a way to achieve that.