Monday, December 10, 2012

Getting to Utopia


RIVER LIFE, mixed media drawing ©Joy Kreves, 12"X36"
When was the last time you thought about Utopia?  What does Utopia mean to you?  It's an idea that comes to roost on my shoulder now and then.  In the birthing class I attended years ago as preparation for our daughter's arrival participants were instructed to visualize and thus create in our imaginations a Utopia to go to, in order to ease the pain of childbirth.  I'll bet you that a pure, sparkling river was a common feature in all of our imagined refuges.  Rivers have long been part of our collective vision for a Utopian landscape.  How Utopian are our rivers really now though?  Most of their clear waters have been contaminated to some degree by all sorts of organic and industrial wastes, plastic garbage and now, increasingly with fracking poisons.

Olana with Views, photo ©Joy Kreves
Olana exterior details, photo ©Joy Kreves
Painter of large, magnificent landscapes, Frederic Edwin Church (1826 - 1900) built his mountaintop Persian style mansion, Olana, overlooking the beautiful Hudson river. He charged entry fees whenever he (literally) unveiled a new painting in his home studio. According to the docent at the now historic museum site, he made sure the viewers got their money's worth by incorporating a multitude of visual intrigues in each painting to hold and reward their gaze.  I'd already been rejecting the less is more path to creating an aesthetic experience in favor of much more is even more ideal. The docent's comment about Church's attitude appealed to me!

I was visiting Olana for the Artist's Talk of a friend, contemporary painter Dan Ford.  Dan has studied the Hudson Valley School of landscape artists (in which Frederic Church was a key player) and has evolved a body of work that matches their lushness while incorporating witty, contemporary references in the scenes.  Therefore, this was the perfect venue for him in which to reveal his connections to and departures from the Hudson Valley School of painting.

Both Ford's and Church's paintings have things in them just waiting to be discovered.  You look at Church's painting and your eyes keep finding things to alight on that are an unexpected delight to behold; in Ford's idyllic landscapes your admiration of the beauty of nature is suddenly interrupted when you spot the little gas station or fast food joint that has cropped up along the mountain stream.  Whose idea of Utopia includes a view of the Golden Arches?  Our culture and conveniences extract a huge cost from our dreams!  I wonder, if Frederic Edwin Church were painting today, would he paint the idealized, Utopian version of whatever landscape he was working from, or would he include any of the contaminants of contemporary civilization?  The docent had reported that Frederic Church had done lots of nature editing (cleaning up, rearranging trees, etc.) to enhance the breathtaking vistas surrounding his magnificent house. Getting to Utopia requires lots of editing!

As I completed my mixed media drawing, RIVER LIFE, this week (photo at top of page) I kept thinking back to those ideas that Olana had brought up for me: themes of Utopia vs. of the Here and Now; More CAN be More, and Prolonging and Rewarding the Viewer's Gaze.  I added another turtle, a ceramic one, and I felt compelled to add some bits of plastic wrap to the composition; it's a more realistic portrayal of the condition of our contemporary waters. Yes, there is purity and beauty there, but there is also pollution and garbage.  The sparkle of the plastic related to the gloss on the collaged photographic area anyway.  Pollution isn't always ugly!
Tiny Quarter-Sized Smashed Turtle, photo ©Joy Kreves

Maybe getting to Utopia is actually less interesting to me now than the actual journey there.  Currently I'm less interested in creating a sublime vision (in spite of my past exhibition title!) than in creating a time-released experience of little discoveries and multiple focal points.  That's why Japanese hand-scrolls are so appealing though it's a format I haven't tried yet.

It's amazing, the little discoveries one simple walk can hold.  Once there was what appeared to be a smashed  coin on the road ahead of me but when I got there it was a tiny smashed turtle no bigger than a quarter.  Although saddened, I was amazed to see that such a small creature had been trying to cross the wide road probably en route to the creek yet another street downhill from there.  I wondered how many of these tiny turtles make that journey successfully each year, and where it was coming from.  Had my car been the one to end it's journey?  How many lives do we obliterate without even realizing it?  Later in the same walk I heard some creature calling from a tree.  It almost sounded like a kitten, but maybe not quite.  I could not locate the exact place it came from, but it was regular and persistent.  Perhaps it was a baby squirrel.  I couldn't see anything moving in the treetops.  A bit later I witnessed the canal-side take-off of a large heron.  If you've never seen a heron alight you've missed one of the most sublime visions there is!  The emotional keys touched on in this one walk included sadness and wonder, concern, and awe!

The unfolding of that walk is the way I'm currently thinking about my artworks.  I want to create multiple interests that are there to seize and ponder and simply to relish, in a time-released fashion. Instead of painting one show-stopping moment in time, I am combining several moments that reveal themselves over a little span of time.  The cinematic ribbon-like journey of a walk or of a river is the model that continues to inspire my compositions.  Does that lead to Utopia?  Who knows?  It seems the Realist in me is most interested now in what's on that journey. What ideal is steering you?


2 comments:

  1. Love steers me. Enjoyed reading this. A Red Tailed Hawk flew over our Home & took my breath away with Him. Art is an unfolding & evolving journey if wonder. When we took a cruise recently, the Water held me captive. I ponder the damage to it fairly often. Now the Tsunami remnants are washing up in Hawaii. Scary stuff.

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    1. Your artwork is decidedly joyful in spite of your having had your share of struggles. Did the Gulf disaster change your work in any discernable way, Becky?

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