TRUTH, BEAUTY, LOSS, REDEMPTION
When I began the painting, Saving Grace, I had been thinking about, reading, and listening to lectures about concepts of truth, beauty, loss, & redemption in relevance to the currents of expression and behavior of our times.
It was early 2020, just before the scourge of Covid-19 became a full-blown pandemic. The world was as I had never seen it. I felt a seismic change even though I knew the change had been happening for a long time. In my view, beauty was spurious and disappearing from our culture. It was becoming unnecessary, mostly superficial, and no longer perceived as a value. Instead, crudity permeated our societal norms. Truth no longer mattered; it became a tool of manipulation to serve any party’s needs. This is partially the result of the long term effects of the unscrupulous influence over society that ubiquitous forms of media, employed by opportunists and profiteers, use to manipulate thought through deception and emotional addiction. Emotional addiction has been carefully studied to enable exploitation of the vulnerable in order to gain control and make profits. And in turn the excessive material reward of profits help to breed a type of personality with little to no integrity, that tragically resonates with so many humans at this time in history, and so helps to install leaders of the most prominent global influence and power, who are embodiments of this manipulation, and whose actions are manifested through predatory greed, and subjugation through lies and deception. At its best, emotional manipulation can only be thought of as abuse imparted on the unsuspecting from an abuser with nefarious intentions.
I was feeling despondent. It seemed as though great achievements in culture and paradigms of civility were in free-fall. Lost to our society were social graces and respect for the inherent elegance of nature. Threatened was the foundation of freedom of thought and expression, and the mere existence of the world’s democracies.
Then Covid-19 became a Pandemic. The entire world became physically ill as a result of negligence and no respect for known necessary boundaries between humans and nature. Millions died; and millions died in vain. Leaders reacted too slowly to mitigate this and they claimed no accountability. I felt that life as I had known it, even as fragile and unpredictable as it is, was on the verge of spiraling to chaos.
I needed to make a painting that would express how I was feeling about all this because somehow it needed to be communicated. That is the thing about art that is mysterious, even to the artist. There is an internal drive felt by the heart and seen by the brain that needs to exist physically— outside of the imagination. I had already created a large charcoal drawing called Falling to Love that expressed a vague idea of how I was feeling. It was as though something of incalculable value was falling down and away, and it was happening fast, with no resistance.
Falling To Love, charcoal & pastel on paper, 48” x 36”, 2019
From the drawing, Falling To Love, a theme emerged and revealed itself to me. I was inspired by the the model Leah, who posed in horizontal recline, which I drew in multiple views, overlapping somewhat, but in a vertical format. The third view of Leah was cut off just below her waist and ran off the paper. This and the vertical format gave the image a sense of falling. I wanted to investigate through drawing and imagination where the third figure might be falling to, and so in a new drawing, I added space to the bottom of the composition, doubling the overall composition in size, and I transferred the image outlines to a 94” x 42” canvas. I worked on the painting everyday during the lock-down period of the Covid-19 Pandemic in 2020 and through to the spring of 2021. It went through many iterations. I used a lot of black paint and I limited the use of other colors in deference to the deadly somberness of the deep losses of life suffered through the Pandemic. I kept the line work of the drawing as a key element to the painting. I felt this best expressed through movement and rawness, the energy and emotion of human life in the process of a global force of disruptive change.
In counterpoint to the downward movement of the theme, I created a large archetypal male hero figure entering the composition in an upward emergent state. I state that the hero is male, but that is only because this hero needs to represent the greatest physical strength a human can possess, however, I did not have a model for the head, so I used my own and took some liberties with my likeness. So, in effect, in a symbolic way, this hero combines male physical strength with female intellect. From a void in the lower right corner of the composition, a confusion of doves emerge and fly upwards intensifying the drama of the counterpoint element. Is there hope through redemption? If we can muster Herculean strength combined with female insight and empathy, then could we hold up and save that which is most valuable?
This hero figure represents physical strength, but he also represents the emergence of heroes that do appear to aid those experiencing a human crisis. They come from all walks of life to the rescue because they have spent years of disciplined study and concentration to try to understand our existence and make sense of it. In noble and often quiet ways, mostly intended for a greater good, they study, through creative experimentation, the minute details of our makeup, tabulating data for analysis to find the patterns and statistics that could help us, through empirical knowledge, gain some confidence in predictably and reduce the odds of falling victim to life’s innumerable adversities. Unknown to many is the emergence of “ Tough Tech”. These soldiers of learning are finding answers to society’s toughest problems. Many found answers and they did show up to help the sick and dying of the Covid-19 pandemic. They saved the world this time, but while they were out there trying to save the world for all the living they were also fighting the force of chaos. Chaos is where the vulnerable are held down in ignorance to exist in a state of denial and apathy. This a problem to be solved by politics that are brave, empathetic, and forward-thinking.
Saving Grace is about movement, raw emotion, tragic beauty, and a representation of spiritual thought, felt by the artist during a specific time, and presented in a classical S-curve format. It was created as a metaphor whose meaning can be as varied as its viewers and their interpretations.
Ideally it could connect those who share a longing for a world that values the decent human achievements from the past but embraces the wisdom gained from human follies and disgraces; a world that moves forward, away from the retrograde pull of chaos, towards intelligence and peace; a world that embraces the immeasurable importance of truth, beauty, and saving grace.