Wykeham Rise: When I was 16, at school, I had a roommate
, Wendy, who did beautiful exploratory abstract art. I'd wake in the morning,
and she'd have been up half the night, the resulting creation on the protruding
wall shelf of our dorm room.
So I'd sit up and rub my eyes and get this extraordinary evolution experience right before me.
Some rainy cold or snowy days, when I wasn't busy preparing to sneak out past the guard or teachers to meet my lover and sneak off to NY for the wee hours of the night, she and I would sit for hours, drinking tea and skipping meals and drawing/painting/sketching in our dorm room, pressed up into the hill by the woods.
There was a viable sense of electric sensory activation there , in with us then, an amalgam of youth and discovery and fast fast growth.
I'd never been in that circumstance; and there at this small boarding school of the arts , many of us were: pushed up against each other ,and art teachers of many sorts : music and dance and equestrian and photography and fine arts.
There were buildings for many of them, of all things. So for some of us, the tactile kinesthetic visual ones, there was a Library filled to the brim. With fantastic entire books on different artists, to bump into , if you were a library explorer.
To come upon with great wonder and curiosity and delight . To delve into with only your own determined sense of inquiry , and that of friends , companions on your path of discovery.
As you grew painfully, and with relief , out of the lives of your parents ; into the lives of your own.
So when Wendy came back to the room one day with a greedy stack of art books, I could hardly contain myself.
Because sometimes she needed to be
q-u-I-e-t and a-p-a-r-t, which I understood somewhat , being younger .
But sometimes in her quiet way, she would signal her readiness for celebratory exploration .
And then we'd sit up late by candlelight , carefully turning the pages of, one time, the work of a local artist, Yves Tanguy. Whose surrealistic twisted realism left us uninterested, but whose abstractions drove Wendy's delight, and fertilized her own work.
We'd gaze at one piece and then another , sometimes wordlessly pointing out one turn of curve, one shadow , one vital movement interaction of piece .
My own work was about one thing only - female figures. Over and over and over. Working out the kinks and excesses and obstructions and constraints and remarkability of life as I knew it.
Her work was abstract and ever changing. Caring about her, I learned to traverse the realm of the abstract . I learned that the shapes were not hardly-hidden-realism as in irritating surrealism , but like any symphony or piece of music, they were landscapes of existence . Snapshots of themselves.
I learned how abstract pieces drew you in, resonated with your dream or your conceptualizing or the storm swept past your eyes-shut moment in a storm or the eliciting agony of emotional pain .
I came to see that an abstract piece was everything and nothing, and that if you were patient with mindfulness , enabling all your own representative moments to slowly file past, it was then you could sit empty and quietly and the piece itself would emerge.
So I'd sit up and rub my eyes and get this extraordinary evolution experience right before me.
Some rainy cold or snowy days, when I wasn't busy preparing to sneak out past the guard or teachers to meet my lover and sneak off to NY for the wee hours of the night, she and I would sit for hours, drinking tea and skipping meals and drawing/painting/sketching in our dorm room, pressed up into the hill by the woods.
There was a viable sense of electric sensory activation there , in with us then, an amalgam of youth and discovery and fast fast growth.
I'd never been in that circumstance; and there at this small boarding school of the arts , many of us were: pushed up against each other ,and art teachers of many sorts : music and dance and equestrian and photography and fine arts.
There were buildings for many of them, of all things. So for some of us, the tactile kinesthetic visual ones, there was a Library filled to the brim. With fantastic entire books on different artists, to bump into , if you were a library explorer.
To come upon with great wonder and curiosity and delight . To delve into with only your own determined sense of inquiry , and that of friends , companions on your path of discovery.
As you grew painfully, and with relief , out of the lives of your parents ; into the lives of your own.
So when Wendy came back to the room one day with a greedy stack of art books, I could hardly contain myself.
Because sometimes she needed to be
q-u-I-e-t and a-p-a-r-t, which I understood somewhat , being younger .
But sometimes in her quiet way, she would signal her readiness for celebratory exploration .
And then we'd sit up late by candlelight , carefully turning the pages of, one time, the work of a local artist, Yves Tanguy. Whose surrealistic twisted realism left us uninterested, but whose abstractions drove Wendy's delight, and fertilized her own work.
We'd gaze at one piece and then another , sometimes wordlessly pointing out one turn of curve, one shadow , one vital movement interaction of piece .
My own work was about one thing only - female figures. Over and over and over. Working out the kinks and excesses and obstructions and constraints and remarkability of life as I knew it.
Her work was abstract and ever changing. Caring about her, I learned to traverse the realm of the abstract . I learned that the shapes were not hardly-hidden-realism as in irritating surrealism , but like any symphony or piece of music, they were landscapes of existence . Snapshots of themselves.
I learned how abstract pieces drew you in, resonated with your dream or your conceptualizing or the storm swept past your eyes-shut moment in a storm or the eliciting agony of emotional pain .
I came to see that an abstract piece was everything and nothing, and that if you were patient with mindfulness , enabling all your own representative moments to slowly file past, it was then you could sit empty and quietly and the piece itself would emerge.
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