WOMEN'S DAY ART SHOW

     This Blog is being published by me, Barbara J. Bucknall, to advertise the art show that Lynne Mawson and I will be putting on in the Community Room of the Mahtay Cafe  to celebrate International Women's Day which will be taking place on March 8, 2019.  The show will run from March 8 to March 15  and will be sponsored by Bethlehem Housing and Support Services and its Housing Hero Fundraising Initiative.  Two of my original framed paintings will be raffled at the Bethlehem Fundraising "Empty Bowls" dinner on March 6, 2019 and two of Lynne's will be raffled on the last night of our art show.  Both raffles will be fundraisers for Bethlehem Housing.

     Lynne and I are putting on this show together because we share an interest in portraying female figures, whether human or divine. Our dedication to art is deep and sincere, playful and joyful, serious and humorous and might even be called religious in its total commitment.  Not that you need to genuflect when entering our show, but we have both portrayed some women who stand well above the ordinary human level.  Lynne will be putting some actual goddesses on show but not putting them up for sale because they are too precious to her.  My own divinities are much more accessible.  While including some pagan goddesses, I also bear witness to a devotion to the Virgin Mary which is quite unusual in a Quaker.   We also paint plenty of human women and Lynne's are quite humorous.  Mine tend to be more serious.  It was in fact Lynne's sense of humor that endeared her art to me.

     About her goddess pictures, she says: "The goddess image comes to me from time to time.  This is art I cannot force.  I lay down three colours, close my eyes and move my brush around the canvas. Then I walk away.  Once dry, the canvas is observed from many angles.  It is then left on my art table. Walking by from time to time, I give the canvas a quick glance.  At some point, but not always, an image begins to appear.  At that point, I drop what I am doing and put chalk to canvas.  She is revealed!  The goddess pictures are very special to me.  I am delighted that her images cannot be forced.  They form such a personal and powerful connection.  People have commissioned goddesses. Never have they been satisfactory in my eyes."

     Most of Lynne's pictures are very human portrayals of plump Bathing Belles.  They are saved from being repetitious by the intense joy she takes in varying colour, contrasting foreground and background and varying the patterns she uses on their swimsuits.  She tends to go in for circles and spirals.  She says the way she feels about spirals is quite visceral.  Of these bathers she says: "Having had body  issues for my entire life, I strive to present the zaftig human female form in a positive and powerful, yet playful  way.  Working on these images helps me overcome the shame I have felt on inhabiting this body, by making the rounded form vital, strong and beautiful. While working through my own issues, I hope my work brings joy to those who view it.  Most of the images are cropped: perhaps a good shrink could explain that, but for now just know that these cropped images are aesthetically pleasing to the artist.   Perhaps there are issues that are not yet ready to be revealed in my art."

     Lynne and I both paint from our deepest feelings and the inspiration for my own paintings is just as random and comes from just as deep and hidden a place as Lynne's goddesses.  I have been painting since I was introduced to art in grade school at the age of six.   My teacher, unlike Lynne's, gave me great encouragement.  My younger brother Malcolm did the same thing and our mother encouraged us by setting us to work painting Christmas cards.  My art class was the happiest part of the school week for me all the way through high school.  But when the time came for me to enter university and I won a place at Oxford, I was strongly discouraged from doing anything so unintellectual.   Embarking on an academic career, I still loved to view and collect art, but I treated my own art as a mere hobby.

     As we were growing  up, my siblings and I  all paid regular visits to the Museum and Art Gallery in our home town of Birmingham, England.   Our grandfather was something of an artist since he was a silversmith, painted as a hobby and bought original art.  Our father had a knack for drawing but treated it merely as a hobby, as he wished his children to do.  As a child I loved the illustrations in my children's books so much that  I wanted to become a book illustrator myself, but my father denied me the opportunity.  Nothing, however, could stop my brother Malcolm from becoming a full time artist, although our father tried to divert him into becoming an architect and ended up calling him a fool.  But Malcolm's artistic career has proved a tremendous success, little as our father liked  his art and tried  to persuade him to take up writing instead if he was going to be creative.  As it happened, all of us turned  out creative.  Our sister Ann had quite a gift for poetry, which I have worked on together with her, and our brother Bill took his own path, plunging into music and medicine.  Our father even managed as a scientist himself to disapprove of that, telling him that medicine was not an exact science.  Perhaps our mother was the really creative parent, although it was our father who taught us to debate when we were quite young.  She was an excellent letter writer and story teller, having emerged from the strong Celtic oral tradition of the ceilidh or folk festivity.

     I received a strong impulse towards what was later to become in retirement my full time dedication to art when  I was teaching at the University of Illinois  in the 1960's.  I had already discovered the great novel of Marcel Proust when I was a graduate student at the University of  Illinois and had been deeply impressed by what struck me as his truly religious approach to the various arts, especially since I had already picked up a similar attitude from the PreRaphaelites in the Birmingham Art Gallery.  I ended up writing my doctoral thesis for Northwestern University on this topic.  As another religious interest I started attending the local Quaker Meeting which appealed to me by its emphasis on contemplation and meditation and almost complete lack of dogma.  Although I also attend High Anglican services, I have stayed with the Quakers ever since.  Another benefit I got from them was that they afforded me access to the Art and Music Departments.  I actually sold one picture, a fantasy oil painting based on an actual dream, to the Head of the Art Department.  In the Music Department I met Ben Johnston who was a personal friend of John Cage and introduced me to him.  I also took art lessons from Ben's wife Betty.  John Cage came to have a very strong influence on me eventually, although to begin with I was quite shocked by his insistence on the path to musical composition being the creation of random noise.  His final effect on me was to get me to abandon any planning and preparation in my painting  and just paint by inspiration as the spirit moved me.  Of course this is also a very Quakerly thing to do.  What I chiefly got from John Cage was his insistence on what is random.

     Nowadays I work mainly with markers on paper, since I like to draw rather than paint.  Mainly I use Winsor and Newton watercolour markers, but sometimes I use Prismacolour or coloured ink brushes.  I make random strokes with various markers until finally a recognizable picture emerges. This picture frequently takes me by surprise by its faithfulness to my own feelings.  Then I contemplate it, looking for a meaning in it and give it a title.  This seems to me very close to the way Lynne creates her goddess paintings although I had not heard of them until quite recently.  But of course in my own case any subject can emerge. 

     In spite of this similarity we came to art in very different ways.  Let us listen to what Lynne says: "I have been making art since I was a child in Kindergarten, when my teacher informed me that I was not colouring "the right way."  The task was to colour a picture of Santa Claus.  Having been to see the man, I was well aware that his suit had a textured quality.  Happily I set to the task, making tiny, tiny circles that left bits of wax on the paper, creating the texture I wanted.  The teacher, seeing this, took my paper to present it to the class.  I was so proud...until she informed the class that this was the way NOT to colour: we should follow instructions.

     Grade 9 art: we were to use plaster to make a textured painting.  Again, I happily created texture on the board and painted a landscape.  Nope.  The texture was to have the scene within it.

     In university, taking a teachers's college training course on how to teach art.  The instructor was most arrogant and unpleasant.  We were to create a plaster wrapped wire sculpture.  My mistake was titling the piece "So you think you are an art critic."  C minus.  I have been colouring my own way ever since.

     Most of my recent work is oil pastel over  an acrylic paint base.  I've found that good quality oil pastels spread like butter.  I enjoy the tactile experience as much as the end product.  While having had no formal training  (not much luck with instructors) I've picked up many a fine technique from the pages of Pinterest.

     Much of my inspiration was found when teaching art at the primary and junior levels.   During my last two years of teaching not much attention was paid to curriculum.  Having had minimal interest or success with formal techniques, I was not much inclined to go past the basics.  It was more helpful to teach these things as they cropped up or were important to the student.  Spontaneous expression seemed more important.  This was grade 4.  They had years to learn the technical stuff.

     I ran into a student when he was in grade 7. He said art wasn't as much fun any more and had I ever heard of this thing called "perspective"?  I laughed and apologized.  I explained that I was at the end of my career and wasn't much worried about administrative repercussions.  My program consisted of teaching famous artists and creating works based on or inspired by their styles.  The Georgia O'Keeffe lessons?  They were just flowers!

     The enthusiasm and excitement when it came time to create their own pieces was marvelous.  I can still see their faces when they came in from lunch to find that their art paper was taped to the underside  of their desks.  Michelangelo would have been proud.  If he could paint on his back for ten years they could survive eighty minutes.  There is much to appreciate and try to emulate in the work of children: exuberant and unselfconscious self-expression!'

     There is much that Lynne expresses here that is true for all artists.  Of course we all have to learn from great art and I have been fortunate enough to spend a sabbatical year in Paris surrounded by museums and art galleries.  Every Sunday afternoon I spent in the Louvre and I also received personal help and encouragement from a gifted professional artist, Basil  Ivan Rakoczi, who enrolled me in his life drawing group.   But I am sure Lynne learned as much from her students as I did from him.  My brother Malcolm once said, "When you see what a little boy of ten can do, it just makes you sick.  The only thing that consoles you is knowing that he won't be able to do it in a few years."  He himself makes a practice of telling his admirers that he is able to paint as he does because he is in touch with the spirit of his childhood.  As the great French poet Baudelaire once said, "Genius is childhood recovered at will" and Marcel Proust begins his great novel with his narrator's involuntary memory of childhood.

     My sister Annabel has observed that her grandchildren create much more freely than her adult students, who are seriously hampered by fear of not doing "the right thing" and making mistakes.  I feel that I have been liberated from this fear by allowing myself to be completely free and random.  Not everything I paint is all that great, but this knowledge does not inhibit me and I feel that I too may be able one day to recover my childhood.  I have spent many years of my life studying Marcel Proust but the  time has now come to treat him as a source of inspiration. 

     Lynne and I hope you will enjoy our show.  Neither of us has exhibited a great deal.  I have had three shows and have shown in the Pumphouse gallery.  Lynne has shown in church arts and craft shows and in the Pumphouse gallery and also has a Facebook page, titled "Baubles and Babes."   I am not as good at handling technology as she is and I am indebted to her and Natasha at N.A.C. for their technical help. We are looking forward to meeting a wider audience.

      

ART AND POPULAR CULTURE

     A  long time ago I gave a paper at a conference on Popular Culture on the way the word  "lady" is used nowadays.It used to be used to describe a woman of the upper class  who was well behaved  and had good manners.  She was entitled to respect and had to be treated with the same good manners she showed to others.  She was unquestionably superior to the working class and expected deference from her social inferiors.  No special talent or skill was expected from her to justify this deference -- simply the accident of birth  and a certain inculcated code of behaviour.  Talent and skill, if she had them, were supposed to be limited to drawing room entertainment such as playing the piano. For instance, Jane  Austen was known both  in life and in death as a lady rather than as  an author.
     A lady's social role  was largely decorative.  In so far as she was useful, it was in the social arts and in household management.  She was expected to be attractive without being explicitly sexual in looks, dress and manner.  A lady was a person with  whom a gentleman  could find respite and solace when he relaxed from the onerous demands of his necessary duties.  What was considered serious work was incumbent on him, not on her.  All this  set her apart like a luxury article and made her superior without necessarily bestowing on her any further wealth or prestige.
     This view of the role of a particular kind of woman was expressed very eloquently in a Pears soap advertisement of the Edwardian era.  It showed a little girl washing herself to the accompaniment of the slogan "Preparing To Be A Beautiful  Lady."  Physical Beauty was part of the lady's role and had to be worked towards like all her other assets. At this point, I  should add, gentle birth was becoming less of a requisite  for a woman to be called a lady. Talent and skill were beginning to be recognised and becoming a lady was something one could acquire by merit.
     Pears soap advertisements were attractive and even inspiring  and my sisters and I were happy to have them decorating our bedroom.  But there were many other advertisements surrounding us, most of which were equally attractive and ingenious.  For instance our Tate and Lyle Golden Syrup tin bore,  as I think it  still does, the Biblical motto "Out of the strong came forth sweetness." This allusion to one of the feats of the Biblical hero Samson carried  a very loaded message. By devouring Tate and Lyle Golden Syrup, it suggested, we would not only  be acquiring strength of a legendary nature by enjoying its sweetness; we would be performing an outstandingly morally worthy act.  I was born in 1933  and I enjoyed all the advertisements with which I was surrounded as I grew up. The art of the advertiser was sufficiently  recognised in the skill it took that Dorothy Sayers used an advertising company as background for her detective story,  "Murder Must Advertise."
     As Melanie MacDonald has shown in her artistic reinterpretation of the advertising of the twentieth century, advertising took considerable artistic skill. Respected and successful  artists were often  commissioned as was Georgia O'Keeffe by Dole to paint a pineapple. The company paid for her to travel to Hawaii to do it.  She had respect as a working woman rather than for  birth and breeding, but respect was still involved --respect for the artist and respect for the general public. One series of advertisements I appreciated for  its wit and humour appeared on billboards for Guiness. It showed a zoo with a prominently displayed zookeeper. In each poster in the series a different animal was snatching his drink away from him as he exclaimed "My Goodness!  My Guiness!"  I looked forward to those posters although I was much too young to drink.
     Respect for the general public seems to be disappearing and when some attempt at respect is made it is pretty superficial, as when one says "cleaning lady", which is quite meaningless, rather than cleaning woman, and refers to all the women one knows as ladies and all  the men as gentlemen. The African Americans are not the only ones to feel that more respect is needed in our society generally.

ART AND HEALTH

    I am 85 years old and as is only natural at my age I have been having problems with my health. In fact if it had not been for medical intervention, I would be dead by now. Not that I even wanted the medical intervention all that much. I was not suicidal, but as a result of remembering previous lives I am quite convinced that death is neither final nor permanent but we just go on from life to life, learning all the lessons we have to learn before being released to a state of bliss. Not that the prospect of all these future lives is necessarily a pleasant one. Some orthodox believers think that believing that God is loving  means that all we have to do is be reasonably good -- not even perfect --  and we only have to ask God to hear our prayers and He will make  life easy for us.  Our own memories of personal experience can tell us that this is not the case.  A loving God does not necessarily want to make life easy for us any more than loving parents choose to give in to  their children's every whim. Expecting life to be easy is simply not realistic.

     So when I had a heart attack in New Year 2016, I knew that I only had to wait for death and it would come. I was  not at all afraid  of anything about it except the fact that  I was living alone and consequently would have to die alone. I did not want to die in hospital where the natural process of death would be interfered  with.  I wanted to die at home in the presence of  a good friend. So I called a really good friend who is very protective of me, but, since he is such  a good friend he refused to do any such thing but  called Emergency.  The ambulance came and I was shipped off to the St, Catharines General Hospital  and fitted with a pacemaker, which saved my life.

     A change that came about as a result is that a neighbor who  was living  in the rooming house next door and who had seen the ambulance come and go offered to move in with me and look after me as he had looked after his mother in her last years. He is still with me. He is a real expert on the subject of physical health since he once trained for the  Olympics.  He has helped me so much  with my exercise and nutrition, which are both really essential for health, that in spite of the fact that I had surgery for colon cancer in 2017 -- of course because of it as well -- my health is actually getting better. When I  last saw my cardiologist he said I was in great shape.

     But there is an additional reason for my improved health, both physical and  mental, and that is that I am constantly doing art. I always loved to do art ever since I was a child.  There is a longstanding tradition of artistic talent and interest in my father's family although my mother could only draw stick figures. My father could sketch quite well but   preferred to  treat it only as a hobby  and quite actively tried to discourage us from taking to art as a career because he said there was no money in it.  His father used  his  own interest in decoration as a silversmith and was successful at it, so my father really had no reason to be  so disparaging.  He actually had three children who were actively interested in art: myself, my younger brother and my youngest sister.  He succeeded in diverting me into an academic career, since this was also something in which I was deeply interested. and the teachers at my high school were strongly encouraging me to pursue it.  But my brother and sister both managed to get into art school. My sister went on to a respectable career as an art therapist for mentally ill patients until she married and was able to pursue art as a hobby. She has ended up giving art classes to tourists on Hawaii. My brother was absolutely determined to be a great artist and with the help of his wife, who supported him, he has achieved that goal, painting under the name of Malcolm Bucknall and showing his art on Facebook. He makes a lot more money in his old age than our father ended up doing, but of course that is quite an exceptional outcome.
     Until I retired I did not spend much time doing art, although I did find time for it on two occasions: in my last year at the University of Illinois and when I went on sabbatical from Brock to Paris in the l970's. I'll tell you about these two occasions later on. But ever since I retired in 1993 I have dedicated myself t artistic creation of various kinds and been deeply fulfilled and blissfully happy. I have been doing some writing but most of my creativity has gone into visual art. My Brock pension supplies me with ample means to do so.
     Part of my joy in art comes from the sheer application of color. I started out with watercolor and would just take a big brushfull of color and draw it across the paper in different directions. This was not a particularly  sophisticated technique, pretty naive and rudimentary, and I took no great pride in the results. Some people give up on art because they feel they are not  producing great art from the start and have little prospect  of   ever doing so,  but I did not even want to produce great art.  I left that to my brother, from whom I was actually buying his art because I admired  it. (I bought from other artists too). I just wanted to have fun and I got it by the application of color and the free and easy movement of my hand and arm across the paper.  It was quite as much therapy as what my sister had been doing with her patients and I felt completely relaxed.  I am sure this simple happiness was good for my mental and physical health and aided the good effects of exercise and nutrition. There was no struggle or striving, no competition as there had been in academic work, just the simple satisfaction of  doing this thing for the sheer sake of doing it and for no other reason.

     I have tried other media, such as gouache and oils and marker, and have continued to have fun trying these different techniques. I get quite a rush of inspiration every time  I try a  new medium. It is genuinely exciting. As I  get more proficient  with constant practice I take increased pleasure in the effects I am producing and like to show off the results. I took a course from Linda Hankin, another Niagara artist, in how to use the right or intuitive side of my brain in my art and the result is increased skill and joy as I apply my watercolor markers, which have become my preferred medium, to the paper , with no preconceived plan about what I am doing, and astonish myself about what takes place on the paper. I hardly need to watch television or read  as I have such an endless source of entertainment at my disposal. Strength through joy, as Hitler said,  But I think I have a far better way of obtaining it than Hitler ever did. I had times of being happy and productive in my academic career but also times of being completely miserable. I suppose there were things I had to learn from my distress. But now I am learning to be completely happy as an artist and something tells me that that is what I will be doing in my next existence. I am already looking forward to it.

 

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.