On Heavy Between Light, Filling Emptiness and Kicking Another Kan Down the Road

I found this one in an oversize book of Kandinsky color plates I don’t remember purchasing but must have valued enough to take along in the move and stash in the downstairs library where it very likely would have remained unopened for who knows how long were it not for a story telling bowl turner, a brother, a ripped recliner in the weeds, a scrappy Calder loving kazoo creator, and a blog named Levity. Such is the power of splooge!

Heavy Between Light is the name of the painting, with these words from the artist on the back of the plate: “As in a mobile, all the forms are moving, set in motion by their position on the pictorial plane and in relation to one another”.  

Sitting and reading outdoors in the sun with the cat yesterday,  I came on the excerpt below from the book,  Drinking from the River of Light, the life of expression, by Mark Nepo, with this dedication by George Bernard Shaw:  “You use a mirror to see your face, you use art to see your soul”.  

From the author:  "I thought at first, that real, lasting work--whether building a barn or writing a poem--was a matter of honesty.  And it is, and so there is no choice but to find the skill to do it cleanly.  But I have learned that essential work is not even feasible unless one is immersed--unless in the midst of discovery one is patient, exhaustive and determined to keep things honest overnight, through winters and lazy moons.  For in a world where we are pressed to be quick, timely, catchy, where acceptance and celebrity looms as the soft addiction of our culture--in such an industry of filling emptiness--it requires courage and perseverance to stay authentic and to pursue your depth, your spirit, your truth--for months and years and, possibly, for the rest of your life.  

It seems impossible to counter the age we live in, but our enduring testaments lie under all our noise:  dormant, waiting to be created, waiting for sustained crisis and attention to release them. Waiting for unmitigated effort, the way Virgil worked The Aeneid for ten years, though he exclaimed along the way, “I’d rather die than look at it one more time." The way Lorenzo Ghiberti took twenty-five years to carve the bronze doors of the Baptistery in Florence--a quarter of a century to sculpt bodies in relief so real they seem to have been breathing just moments ago, then dipped in molten gold.  Unmitigated effort, the way Friedrich Schiller, on his death bed, kept his feet in iced buckets in order to stay awake to finish his play, Mary Stuart.”

Though I’d most likely give up before the ice buckets, I understand the imperative, with another story on that to share another time.  For now, I'll say that the canvas I'm currently painting on is one that I stretched and prepped 44 years ago for a college art class I didn't complete, with nothing more done to it while it sat waiting in another basement to be carried along with the Kandinsky book to a new home where it would finally receive more color and light.  The idea of sustained crisis and attention serving to release what is waiting within intrigued me, as did the enduring testimony and invitation present in another's out of balance yet in balance expression of Heavy Between Light (painted in 1924 and sold in June of 2012 to a private collector for $1.74 million) that gives voice to where I sit today, seeking and finding my own balance and expression of color and life somewhere between heavy and light.