EPIPHANIES

     I am starting this blog again, not with the immediate intention of reviewing any of the shows at N.A.C, but rather  with the intention of holding forth about Art and  Beauty as  I have  felt their impact at various moments in my life.

     I can clearly remember that first moment of revelation. It was a vision of colour which I have never forgotten. I must have been about four years old and my mother had taken it into her head to take me to a dance class in a studio near our home. I don't know if she had any particular reason for doing this, but she was always keen for me to acquire elegant accomplishments,  to make me into a lady.  She came from a poor, country family  herself, but she had ambitions for her children.  I remember that I was walking along,  holding her hand, full of trust and  confidence, when I suddenly caught sight of an empty Milk of Magnesia bottle lying in the gutter. I was instantly transported by the sight. It was such a beautiful blue, of the shade of blue  I  later learned to call Cobalt, that I felt I had never seen anything so heavenly.  I was far too young to think of an empty  bottle as trash. I was willing to accept everything I encountered as potentially wonderful. But this was an experience beyond anything I had come  across before.

     I was already past middle age when I  came across Abraham Maslow and learned what he had to say about peak experiences and their importance in forming a creative personality, but this was definitely my first peak  experience. So far as I have any conscious memories, at any rate. But before I came across Maslow, my studies in English literature taught me to call it an epiphany.

     For the benefit of those readers who do not know what an epiphany is, I turn to the Oxford English Dictionary.  It gives two definitions.  One is ecclesiastical:  "The festival commemorating the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles  in the persons of the Magi, observed on Jan. 6th, the 12th day after Christmas." The second one is more general: "A manifestation or appearance of some divine or superhuman being."  In English literature it is frequently used figuratively, which is the sense in which I am using it. The blue of my Milk of Magnesia bottle struck me as so truly glorious that it seemed almost divine, entering our ordinary world from some higher sphere. Not that I could have used those words to describe it at four years old, but it was what I experienced emotionally and only now can I find the words to describe it.

     Epiphanies do not come too often, and I can only think of one other one, although I do experience a more human, natural kind of joy every time I encounter Art or Beauty and particularly when I practice art myself.  This other epiphany came when I went abroad for the first time, to the South of France,  I had received a good grade in French on my School Certificate  examination, a test which all English high school students had to pass at the age of sixteen before going on to pass a more advanced one at the age of eighteen.  To reward and encourage me for this achievement, my father had arranged for me to go on an exchange visit with the daughter of a prefect, that is the man in charge of one of the administrative units into which France is divided. His prefecture, in the Southwest of France, was a handsome old building but the full glory of the South of France did not burst upon me until the prefect took us to their summer cabin on the beach by the Mediterranean.

     Before that I had only swum in the chilly waters off the coast of Devon, and the Mediterranean was so smooth and warm and calm and welcoming and such a beautiful blue. Furthermore I had come equipped with a shabby one piece bathing suit whereas the prefect's daughters sported bikinis, which has just come into fashion, and I did not want to be seen sitting around on the beach with them. So I was hardly ever out of the water, to the  alarm of the prefect who thought I was so much more immature than his daughters that I was hardly safe to be left on my own. He kept watching me from the beach, afraid  I would drown. But I did not let his fears stop me.

     I emerged from the water one  morning in such a state of bliss, it was another epiphany. In fact I felt even closer to the Divine than I had done on  the previous occasion. It was a true mystical experience  and just as unexpected as my first epiphany had been.  No one had  told me that such a thing was possible. Apart from getting lectures from a tiresome, Calvinistic  aunt, my only spiritual training had consisted of reading the Psalms as part pf my exploration of the  Old Testament, which my mother had told me to read but had not attempted to explain to me.  The chief thing I got out of the  Old Testament was respect for a lot of impressive characters who led very exciting, sexy lives. But no one had suggested that my own experiences might  be anything like theirs.

      My mystical experience was one of joy and love -- universal love. I felt I had fallen in love with the whole world and with everyone in it. I had heard a lot about falling in love since I came to France, especially from the prefect's daughters, but  I had been attending a single sex school  and had never experienced anything like this before. I thought "What is this? What is happening to me? Can this be love? Yes, I must have fallen in love. But  who with?  It must  be Maurice Doucet, the  prefect's secretary, who has been so kind to me."  And I did make sheep's eyes at Maurice for a while, but without embarking on much of a romance. In fact it felt like a bit of a disappointment to  be reduced to one man after  having been in love with the whole world. But the memory of that pinnacle of bliss as a reaction to natural beauty remains with me as a lasting memory and does not fade away.

   

NAC AS A SPIRITUAL SOURCE

     For two months there are going to be no further art shows at NAC as the gallery will be closed for renovations, but the Quakers will continue to meet there for Worship every first and third Sunday of the month at 11 a.m., going on to discussion at noon.

     Steve Remus was surprised when some people from the church of the Silver Spire approached him about the spiritual significance of art, as he thinks of  himself and his colleagues as atheists. Perhaps it is a rather old fashioned idea as it was in England in the latter part of the nineteenth century that aesthetes and artists believed that they were practicing a religion of art. This was sufficiently well known that Gilbert and Sullivan made fun of it in their comic operetta "Patience", singing
                   "Though the Philistines may jostle,
                     You will rank as an apostle
                      In the high aesthetic band,
                      If you walk down Piccadilly
                      With a poppy or a lily
                       In your medieval hand."
This was particularly directed against Oscar Wilde but it targeted aesthetes in general, the enemies of art being termed Philistines by analogy with the enemies of Israel in the Old Testament.

     No one talks about a religion of art nowadays, although I once did in connection with Marcel Proust, but yet the people who love art feel that there is a spiritual component to it, although that spiritual component may be more like Zen than it is Judaeo-Christian.

     I am a Quaker, so I can safely say that the Quakers who meet at NAC like to do so because of the spiritual component of the paintings hanging on the walls. I think it is fair to say that we think of ourselves as spiritual rather than religious in any orthodox sense. We gather to sit in silence until one of our number feels inspired by the Spirit to deliver a message which comes from the heart. No direct reply is made and those present will continue to sit in silence until some other message is heard. But we cannot force the Spirit so maybe no message will be heard.

     At noon we shake hands and a discussion follows, mainly about things that passed through people's minds but which they did not feel ready to express. There is no discussion of doctrine, because we avoid dogma. If any controversy were to arise, it would not be about belief.

     One of my friends calls me a Bitsa -- bitsa this, bitsa that -- because I remind him of his Chinese father, who could be Buddhist, Confucian or Christian depending on the occasion. In this I feel I am not exceptional as a Quaker.

     Anyone who thinks they would feel comfortable with this approach is welcome to join us. If I were speaking in Meeting, at this point I might say that we welcome any  individual truths that point to  that one overriding Truth which is only known to the Spirit. But that would just be me talking, although others might agree. Our minds are all different, so Meetings vary, being  predictable only in the broad, general terms I have already stated. I hope this gives you some idea of what to expect.

EMERGENT ART

                                                      
     When I look at the current show at NAC  by Justin  Pawson  and  Geoff   Farnsworth, the term "Emergent Art",  which I found quite baffling when I first came across it, begins to make sense to me. These pictures seem to be emerging from the artists' lower depths like improvised jazz pieces, without regard for standard categories such as "representational", "abstract" or "surreal." These categories are mixed.  The representational faces that look out at us from what seems like a rupture in an abstract surface, in Justin Pawson's paintings, seem to belong to the world of fantasy and science fiction, and a very aggressive world at that. The titles are no particular help in identifying this world. Steve Remus compared them to the quite arbitrary titles attached to jazz pieces when I commented to him on this.

     I think the picture by Justin Pawson I found most striking is "Babel" because the title is such an obvious non sequitur. When you hear the word "Babel" it is natural to think of the Tower of Babel, with the builders, stricken by God for attempting to reach the heavens, opening their mouths to offer incomprehensible fragments of speech, the languages having been divided. But the huge dark red face which dominates Justin's painting is alone in quite a pleasant, appealing abstract area, with light, cheerful colors that in no way suggest Divine Retribution, while the mouth is tightly closed. It is such a severe face-- my companion said it looked like Joseph Stalin--that it seems to be expressing condemnation rather than enduring it.

     I said in my last Blog that Amber Lee Williams seemed to be engaging in soliloquy rather than inviting dialogue. Here we seem to be listening to two soliloquys harmonizing with each other. The comparison to jazz comes to mind again. Geoff's paintings are less immediately self contradictory than Justin's, but here too the line between abstract and representational is blurred, the two styles being broken into squiggly fragments, while the titles, such as "Amygdala Unit", are equally disconcerting.

     The one of Geoff's I liked best was "Satori in Red and Blue", which shows a male figure in a red coat and blue  boots standing in a snowy backyard.  The term "Satori", which is applied to a sudden burst of consciousness after Zen meditation, seems appropriate, given the ordinariness of the scene.  "Before Enlightenment you chop wood and carry water.  After Enlightenment you chop wood and carry water."  But for all I know, Geoff's intention may be just to pull our legs.

     But I now have another artist to mention. While I was viewing the above paintings at NAC  I was invited to step round the corner to Melanie MacDonald's sale.  There I picked up the catalogue for her show "Scraps" at the Niagara Falls Art Museum, which I had unfortunately been unable to attend.  The introduction pointed out the sheer novelty of her completely unironic approach to the commercial art of an earlier time as it had been preserved in scrapbooks.  She really elaborates on that earlier vision on a very large scale.  This too can count as Emergent  Art because it is so surprising and unexpected, a completely new departure.

     My final comment comes in the form of a poem I wrote some time ago about an experience of my own.

                                             THE DOOR

     We come to the door and find it locked.
      No answer to our call.
      But picking the lock we think should present
     No difficulty at all.
     However if we with craft
     And cunning machinery come
     To pick the lock,
     The intricate tool refuses,
     The skilled electricity fuses
     And we are forced to stop.

     But then one day we are wandering,
     Lost in a dream:
     The door stands open wide.
     Without volition
     We find we have stepped inside
     And gifts are in our hand.
     The unknown glory lights unbidden
     Our purpose and our land.

DISTANCE LENDS ENCHANTMENT, MAYBE

     As I consider  the recent Voix de Ville Extravagonzo and the present show at NAC by Amber Lee Williams, I am left with an impression of distancing.  The foreword by Steve Remus to the little brochure accompanying Extravagonzo talks of resisting attempts to possess and oppress us. In other words, the young people at NAC are Romantic rebels, committed to a work of liberation from prevailing accepted attitudes.

     Part of this falls under the umbrella of atheism, which is what I cannot go along with.  When I was a student at Oxford in the1950s, obstructive, domineering authoritarianism was applied  by atheistic professors who disparaged and even persecuted the Christian creative thinkers J.R.R.Tolkien and C.S.Lewis. Consequently  I found the comedians in this show profoundly alienating.

     I was not alienated, however, by most of this show, which I found fascinating and charming and above all surprising. I felt that I had somehow entered a stranger's dream with all its bizarre twists and turns and sudden leaps of faith, without quite knowing how I got there or what prompted it.

     The distancing in Amber  Lee  Williams's show is rather different.  There is only our own movement, from one  part of her show to another, no sound and very little color.  We remain on the periphery of what Amber chooses to convey.

     To begin with, she superimposes white scribbles on a series of commemorative photographs which explore identity by displacing it. Then we pass to a cluster of used tea bags. Then we are confronted with old children's books which seem to be placed on a rustic base out in the country with twigs overhead. The pages have been  glued together and then perforated  to reveal photographs of the artist's daughter and mother. This is followed by a solidified bag of baby socks and a series of photographs from a family album. Old and young, male and female, are pieced together and surrounded by a diaphanous watercolor haze.

     Altogether we find ourselves listening to a soliloquy rather than being engaged in a  dialogue or swept along on a flood of eloquence. We may in fact be listening to a language spoken before we were born and to which we will return after death.  Amber's show represents a challenge: a challenge to move out of our accustomed reality and cross a strange frontier.  This is very much in keeping with NAC principles.

     The same challenge occurs, in a much more recognizable and welcoming way, in the puppet show in the NAC window, now in its third incarnation   Here we are presented with four tiers of puppets admiring a three ring circus, with a lion and his tamer on the middle level, acrobats above and merry and sad clowns below.  To me it came as a welcome return to my own highly peculiar brand of normality.

IS OUR ART DISPOSABLE?

     I should begin by apologizing for posting this blog so late.  I was held up by a bad cold.  Two of the exhibits have already been changed.  However I will go ahead and post the blog as I originally wrote it on October 25 2016. 
 
     Is our  Art disposable?  Is anything that we create nowadays built to last at all or even to be taken seriously for very long?  That is the question I was asking myself as I came away from the three exhibits that are currently on display at NAC. 

     The most striking and immediately accessible one is in the window of NAC and takes up the whole window.  It consists if interesting, grotesque looking hand puppets, at least thirty of them, all different.  Most of them are arranged in three tiers on one side of the window, all gazing in the same direction and forming an audience.  They are looking, with wooden fixed expressions, at a terrifying scene that is taking place on the far sider of the window.  A huge monster is griping a helpless puppet in preparation for destruction, while observed by two other puppets, one male and wearing a white jacket, obviously a doctor, and the other a terrified female, presumably his assistant.

     The whole thing has been constructed and put together with a great deal of care and skill and is easy to appreciate as Halloween entertainment, but it is on show longer than that and will be replaced by similar exhibits by the same group of artists.  None of all this will last forever, but, as the French say, nothing lasts like what is temporary.  Perhaps this is actually the least disposable exhibit, the one that best accommodates traditional aesthetic criteria, even though made of perishable materials.

     As we advance into the Dennis Tourbin gallery, we are faced with a spectacle that initially seems quite dull and normal but is in fact disquieting.  The walls are hung with framed photographs from the St. Catharines Museum of public buildings, most of which used to form the architectural background to our lives but are no longer with us.  They were designed with some care by respected architects but have been replaced with buildings that are roomier and more convenient but not remarkable to look at.  There has been quite a drastic change in our streetscape but I doubt whether anyone outside the St. Catharines Museum has really noticed it.  I know I haven't.  Buildings used to be constructed once upon a time with an eye to beauty and durability, like the Parthenon and the medieval cathedrals, but this is no longer the case. 

     Coming to the third gallery, which is habitually more offbeat, I found myself face to0 face with conceptual art.  I had only heard about it before.  For instance, I had heard about an artist who exhibited elephant dung to show his disdain for all previous art.  A museum bought it in order to fulfill its obligation to record all trends in modern art but then became concerned about how to preserve it.  This paradoxical dilemma shows that the curators have not really understood what they were investing in.  In conceptual art it is the idea that counts, to the exclusion of any visible, tactile or audible phenomenon to which it is temporarily attached.

     The exhibit in question is called "Twenty-three Days at Sea."  It was commissioned by Access Gallery of Vancouver acting in partnership with the Burrard Arts Foundation and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.  It wished to support four young artists in residence but was deterred by housing prices in Vancouver.  Consequently it sent them on a twenty-three day sea voyage, each in a separate container ship, from Vancouver to Shanghai.  They had instructions to record their impressions, knowing this would be difficult as container ships are so much more anonymous than merchant vessels used to be.  In an earlier age the artist would have brought back detailed journals and albums.  As things were, they brought back a log book, lists, videos, recordings, barely visible photographic prints and small wooden models.  The small wooden models are the most tangible and creative items, but the other items tend to represent the absence of any Romantic value in this sea trade. 

     This kind of art the Access Gallery's curator calls "emergent," that is, rising from the depths but not yet completely in view.  I can in fact grasp the idea and can imagine doing this kind of thing myself.  I can imagine setting out on a sea voyage with twenty-four empty jam jars attached to pieces of string.  A jam jar would be lowered into the sea on twenty-three consecutive days and its contents carefully preserved.  The twenty-fourth jam jar would remain empty to embody the idea of the project.  When I got back to a galley I would set up a series of microscopes where people would analyze the sea water to enter into the spirit of the voyage. 

     What would emerge would be their reactions in response to my reactions rather than anything strictly tangible, although they might form a feeling for the sea.  It would be a new sensation, quite different from anything previously considered art, which would make it conceptual.  It might be quite fun as a conceptual experiment.  But, speaking personally, the idea makes me sad.  This art is so disposable that it makes me feel that our very humanity is disposable too.

bill bissett

     Although Bill Bissett is an important figure in modern Canadian literature, I had not heard of him until a couple of weeks ago.  This is probably because, although I got a thorough grounding in British literature, I am much more familiar, as a French teacher, with Canadian literature in French than in English.   I told Bill that when I met him.  He says he has French ancestry and also Micmac and American, so he is not only affiliated with Canadian English speakers.  In fact, although he did not bother to say so because it is such a well known fact, he makes reading his poetry as difficult as he can, since he groups his words into clusters of sounds spelled phonetically. 

     Reading his poetry takes quite an effort, but once you have made that effort, he reveals himself as very lyrical and spontaneous.  He was young in the sixties when he started writing and he seems never to have lost that youthful freshness and exuberance.  There is something so forthright and direct about his expression of his feelings that it seems quite childlike.  Jesus said that we had to become like little children and find the kingdom of heaven within us.  I do not know if Bill subscribes to any official religion and it did not occur to me to ask him, but he did tell me that he attaches great importance to practicing meditation.

     There is no barrier to getting close to his painting.  It is very spontaneous and direct, full of strong, bright colours, especially red, yellow, blue and violet.  He even uses quite a lot of gold.  They are painted full on without any compromise, often in squiggly lines which look as if he just picks up his paintbrush and launches a direct attack on the canvas without stopping to think.  I asked him whether he paints without planning.  He said that he often meditates before painting, but without making any preliminary sketches, and if anything interrupts the flow he stops.  I felt very sympathetic to this approach.

     People are portrayed in his show but there are very few depictions of human bodies.  Instead there are a great many faces in simplified, graphic outlines.  Some bodies under the faces are reduced to masses of squiggly lines in primary colours.  His pictures are quite large, allowing for the full sweep of the painter's arm.  Some of the faces look straight at us and some are profiles looking at each other, but what he seems to prefer is to show one profile impinging on another, forming an egg shape.  Something about this makes me think of Pre-Columbian art in its directness.  He seems very concerned with communication in its most genuine form.

     His use of colour is very strong, direct and emotional.   Besides faces, there are quite a few free hand circles enclosing circles in contrasting colours.  Although these circles do not contain geometric patterns but remain empty at the centre, I take them to be mandalas, which Bill does go in for.  They also make me think of the art of Zen.  But Zen art is freer, airier, less substantial and solid. 

     He also paints what one would be obliged to call abstracts, although they do not use geometric patterns but rather resemble thick tree branches.  However the colours are not naturalistic. 

     The paintings are what first catch one's eye, but there are also a number of small black and white drawings composed of small, circular clumps attached together to form designs that lead one into fantasy.  He uses them to illustrate his poems. 

     I am very happy to have met Bill Bissett who, in spite of being famous, is so friendly, natural and unostentatious in his approach.  He seems like a special human being. 

    

"Devolve" and "Scenes from Late Capitalism"

     "Devolve" is very impressive.  Everything in it is labeled untitled.  And yet these works do seem to convey a definite message in spite of the lack of words.  When I came into NAC and saw the array of huge flamboyant pictures, mainly in red, orange and yellow, by Wayne Corliss, it made me think of Indiana Jones and The Raiders of the Lost Ark, it was so suggestive of fire from heaven.  I would like to suggest that Wayne's pictures be reproduced as illustrations to Milton's "Paradise Lost", they seem so much like poetry about Lucifer's fall from heaven.  Light and fire and an awe-inspiring violence are all suggested in swirls of very definite downward movement.  And of course the massive size of these pictures also suggest something truly grandiose. 

     Each picture is different in spite of their basic similarity, like coming again and again to varied expressions of similar emotions in music or poetry.  The same theme is touched on in different but equally glorious ways.  As in the case of Milton's poem, Lucifer, the fallen Light Bringer, is still a glorious angel in his fall.  However the final picture in this series seems to show the calm, peaceful radiance which filled heaven after the rebel angel's departure.  I may be letting myself be carried away, but the two cubes poised on their corners which introduce and conclude this series and contain a lot of dark green and dark blue could represent Lucifer ruling in Hell after serving in Heaven.

     The equally poetic works by Amber Lee Williams follow.  They are much smaller and to tend to run to shades of grey, beige and blue.  They are quite decorous although some are dark.  The poetry they evoke is private, personal and domestic, making me think of Emily Dickinson rather than John Milton.  Amber does say in her artist's statement that she has drawn on her own life experiences in her art.  She works in beeswax, with a blow torch, and says that sometimes she the medium takes over, but to me it all looks very precise.  I noticed several pictures with small light coloured circles like portholes for the artist to look through.  These pictures seemed to be painted with the inner eye, giving the viewer entry into the artist's mind.

     The second show, "Scenes from Late Capitalism" by Nathan Heuer, is quite different from anything in "Devolve."  It is drawn with a great many straight lines, in a reasoned, abstract, understated, somewhat satirical way.  There is a definition of a straight line as "the shortest distance between two points" and Nathan covers the shortest distance between constructing a motel or a factory and letting it fall down.  Nathan says that his object was to show utilitarian buildings set up and abandoned in the spirit of consumerism.  However in his drawings, they still appear intact.

     The works by Wayne and Amber might be described as abstracts, for lack of a better word, but Nathan's work, while strictly representational, is far more abstract from the emotional point of view.  The two shows are a study in contrasts.