Run & Paint

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

the rhyme of contrasts. . . . an inchoate ramble, a run in sand.

The rhyme of contrasts, the balance of paradox. 
(random thoughts of Howard Finster, painter-preacher.)

nc museum of art, the grand glass doors framed by polished bars of steel, arriving with apprehensions against the funky-lego rigidity of the post-renovation building, now counteracted by a trail wrapping the rolling raleigh landscape, the massive sculpted coils on top of a hill, rodin's le penseur with clinched bronzed toes.  inside were the greco-roman statues, beat and aged, marble torsos of grandiosity. renaissance imagery, the usual ascending christs and compassionate marys and serene martyrs, interesting for a glance. . . the nineteenth century european painters, their street scenes and plein air peintures, still lives of meat markets and aristocratic patrons, their mythologies of body.  the american painters, o'keefe to wyeth with some damned fine american landscapes. . . the impressionists, the impressionists. . . into the modern now, what i consider the relate-able, giacometti, richter, a room full of mid-scale rodins (iris, burghers, balzac, ugolino, etc) and a garden with heroic-scale works (meditation, shades). . . . salle, scully, liu, motherwell, a perfect kline. . . a furious landscape by a nc painter gayle lowry. . . ultimately the nc museum of art hosts a damned fine art collection, is a good day trip, and after moving the mind you can move the body on the easy nature trail of the museum park.

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arrived stagnant, tired, but left with energy, momentum, craving a new image-repertoire, craving to push a new pictorial vocabulary into paint-heavy canvas.
looking, collecting image-scraps, extending my visual vocabulary beyond michelangelo, the ny painters, the post-war german painters (some of my personal favorites and thus aesthetic ruts). art realigns the paradigm, invigorates the psyche, inspires cross-referencing across time and geographic impossibility, denies cultural polarities, pursues a continuum in the annals of creative energy, scripts connections against disparateness, balances the paradox of things, conjoins the sacred and the vulgar.  this is my perpetual essay: the myth of synergy, of the ephemeral, of the holistic in creative work.  a nexus, a fusion of experience and expression, mind body spirit. art resides as an exacting and necessary presence in all layers of the collective unconsciousness, a core of the experience of the eternal mortality.
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kline motherwell mitchell de kooning pollock twombly and the postwar german painters, beuys and polke, kippenberger, baselitz, grosz, hesse, auerbach, richter. . . . freud and rauschenberg and bacon, schnabel.  rembrandt rubens carravaggio michelangelo titian. . . . the power of rodin, a room of rodin casts. . . . eternal brutal humanity, cut in clay, hatched in paint, craving.
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millet in mind while running sand, the toil of foot-falls as digging slow miles across carolina beach state park, running steep sand mountains beyond sugarloaf on unmarked trails and into sunny point perimeter where pulling back into trails barely marked by deer, dogs, squirrels. . . . the push of isolated miles on a saturday morning, wife and baby three hours northwest and full sun in march wonderland of easy time.  
millet and the honesty of work, of harvest, of seed.  my body reels easy breath across vast stretches of sand and i feel a clarity of mind, a soundness of belief, a push of body which is mine and strong.