The Knoxville Museum of Art opened to the public, by appointment only, this week. It opened to members last week, and I was there, desperate as I was to for an art fix. My intention had been to look at the Delaney/Baldwin exhibit, but I thought I would take a “quick whirl” through part of the permanent collection and found myself lost there, completely absorbed by the experience of what I was seeing.
It started when i walked into the Currents gallery, where I was stunned by the vibrancy of this painting by Jered Sprecher, A Plane Is A Pocket In The Corner of The Mind. The painting had been in the gallery for some time, but its previous location, on an end wall, made a different kind of statement. Here, with the light striking it in a way I cannot really capture in a photograph it seemed to leap out and envelop this observer, filling the mind with an overwhelming sense of both chaos and light-within-chaos or hope.
I spent most of my time in that gallery, and I am certain that my focus was shaped by many things: My joy at being able to return to the museum, one of my favorite calming spots in Knoxville; the general tumult and uncertainty roiling about in the greater world right now combined and contrasted with the sense of solitude shaped by sheltering-at-home; the flash that seeing the Sprecher provoked in my heart upon turning the corner into the gallery. So many things influence what we see and how we react to what is seen. I constantly wonder about this conversation with the soul that art, in its many forms (painting, sculpture, music, dance), provokes. I wonder about the process, but also about the artist, what the process of creating something that can provoke reactions that one may not anticipate, or perhaps even desire, evokes.
I cannot say. I can only write about the experience of one person, one day, fully recognizing that even this viewer might find herself experiencing the same work of art in a completely different way on a different day, the new experience shaped by the previous, but also by all of the experiences that come together in that moment of time. This painting, Green Picture In My Meadow, by Jim Dine snuck up on me. It was not new to me, I can’t say that I saw anything on that visit that I had not seen before. And I am not certain that any idea that struck me about that painting was new either, was anything that I had not thought before, but on that day somehow, the impact was more profound.
I have long been fond of Dine, finding his works simultaneously elementally simple and present but also complexly layered and enlightening. I like the way they seem to reference the pop art movement, but without the sarcasm, almost as if they are both inside and on the fringe, looking in. I find myself constantly challenged by the use of the quotidien, by symbols, referenced in ways that make them simultaneously fading-toward-invisible, while at the same time brought forward in sometimes shocking ways. I like the sneaky emotional resonance which is not necessarily overt, but which seems to slip in sideways, almost unnoticed.
I suppose that is how I first approached this painting, beginning not with the whole but with the small, approaching from the side, noticing the detail as seen in the photo above, the layers of paint and straw and the way they reference a field and nature, layers of grass and soil, new and old, the dying back of old grass overtopped with new leaves, and the layers of soil and matter that make up everything. The way the surface, what we see, is only that, a gloss on something deeper. It was only then that I stepped back and looked again at the entire painting. Noticing the heart in the field, the many layers of meaning, from the very simple and unremarkable to that which could be deeply unearthed.
Then I noticed other smaller bits. This bright eye, in the center of the picture above, shining out, filled with light, like the eye of the divine if one is so inclined, or light and hope, shining out.
When I stepped back, I saw that, to me at least on that day, there were two eyes, a face even, in the heart of the heart, in the center of the painting. The light eye balanced and contrasted by the dark eye, less overtly obvious perhaps but no less presence once my mind decided it was there. This eye is slanted, shaded, almost hidden, the way we hide the darkness within ourselves, but no less present. Ego, fear, darkness are always present, even in the midst of light. These things I see: A field; the earth in all its bounty; cycles of death and life hidden in the behind the initial impression of green; the heart; the soul of earth and of humanity; the contrast of shadow-self and true-self, of ego and id, of hope and despair.
Poor Jim Dine might be despairing of what I think of his painting. Hopefully not. As I said earlier these reflections might simply be a bubbling up of all the things going on in my own inner world in this time of what feels like two pandemics, one of the body and another of the soul. Perhaps the painting is only a trigger, but I think art is always more than that, that the artist is more than that as well. A conduit perhaps to some greater truth, and who knows how each of us may confront, or avoid, that truth.
Then, as I turned to leave the gallery I was struck by something else, another contrasting of images. Next to the exuberant, world-filled outburst that is the Sprecher painting seen at the top of this post is a quiet painting of two people embracing in a room. I thought I took a photo of the plaque identifying the painting, but if so it is lost. I do not know the name of the artist; I believe the painting was named for the pattern on the carpet. My failure. But what struck me then, still, was the contrast of inner and personal versus the outer and public, but also of the mental turmoil vs inner peace, of the contrasting yet simultaneous needs for creation and safety that make up the human condition. I applaud the curatorial impulse that can layer meaning in this way.
I tried to take pictures that captured my own feelings about this pairing, but I failed. I tried to make a collage in photoshop and instead I somehow I accidentally created this overlapped transparency. I apologize to the artists for bastardizing their work and yet somehow this captures my own overlapping and confused feelings about the juxtaposition of the two works: Public and private existing both separately and simultaneously. Perhaps all these random bits are just the flotsam created by the various wreckages of this unusual year. But also perhaps, through art, we can also find our way to new pathways.
