Dyads

Some days ago, as I was reflecting on recent work, I noticed that dyads showed up rather frequently in my recent work. Take a look at these:

The Parking Lot

The Homestead

Look at this painting of a single item:

The Blue Bicycle

           Two wheels! Also object and shadow.

            My most recent:

Ed's House

Pairs of pairs, for Heaven’s sake!

What does it mean? Is there a secret significance here, something symbolic? Does it represent, for example, a wish to be part of a pair? Or an awareness of being part of a pair?

Other paintings appear to represent something about choices.

The industrial or the natural:

Leaves and Steel

                In The Bridge we can choose to enter the dark door or we can gaze out into the green trees.

The Bridge

        The lit building or the dark copse:

The Grove

        The canoe or the dock:

The Yellow Painter

        We follow the zig-zag railing in The Patio to a point where we choose, again, a door or a little natural area at ground level. And look, there are two pipes in the ground.

The Patio

These pairs could characterize choices, some of which are fraught with meaning, some not so much. We could go on and on about choosing the canoe or the dock and what each choice represents in a life. What does it mean if we enter the door or go into nature? Three paintings juxtapose architecture and nature, most dramatically in the choice between dark trees and a brightly illuminated building.

I can assure you I was not thinking about choices or dyads when I created these compositions. I was looking at colors and shapes, as I was when conceiving the compositions of the many other, non-dyadic paintings I am not showing you here.

And yet, it is engaging to think this way. We do enjoy pondering possible meanings and significance to our own lives of these apparent symbols, intended or not. Here again is that recurring theme of self-reflection. When you think about it, symbolism functions only with self-reflection. For a symbol to operate as a symbol, awareness of both the symbol and its meaning is necessary, as well as the realization that their relation is symbolic! 

Is it interesting to wonder what was in the artist’s mind, especially if he claims not to have been thinking in terms of dyads at all? Possibly, but not for that long. Such pursuits are the work of art history, which is very different from the creation or the contemplation of art.

Once a painting is hardened into its final form, the important dialogue is between the viewer and the painting. The purpose of visual art is to engage the viewer and provide stimulus for contemplation, hopefully for a very long time. Symbolic content may be there, but its true value lies in what it does for the viewer, and the viewer has more important things to wonder about than the mental state of the artist.

I hope. 

The Yellow Painter

A canoe is tethered to a dock with a yellow cord, called a painter. It is a light cord; it doesn’t take much to hold a canoe captive. A gentle breeze quickens the water, and the boat pulls gently at the painter, holding it taut.

Isn’t it like that for each of us? The ties that bind us to our moorings are mere strings and, for most of our lives, the tug to freedom is really quite gentle. And do we want that freedom? What happens to this canoe without the painter? What happens to me if I slip away? What happens to you? Do we truly want to be adrift, even though we tug?

The title of this work is a bit of a pun, and my intention was that the two definitions of the word “painter” each be meaningful. How does a painter hold two worlds together?

The composition of this image is strongly diagonal. Only the water has any semblance of horizontality. The boat is actively angled, but so is the dock—and so is the painter.

The side of the boat is a large mass of fairly bright red, and if we are sensitive to color, we are drawn to notice that the blue, out-of-date sticker (this was painted in 2013) is of a similar intensity. As is the painter. These three colors constitute the primary triad. Now we notice the muted colors of the world in which the canoe rests. Perhaps as we muse we match up the muted blues and greens, and then go for the grays. Next, if we are really into color, we compare the relationship of the triad of primary hues with the bundle of muted colors and the grays.

Or you might follow lines, or the masses. I leave further musings to you, though this image is a very poor substitute for the original.

This is why I believe that paintings belong on walls where people live and work, in houses and offices. I detest mausoleums—I mean museums—and attend them only out of necessity. Galleries make good orphanages for art—and you should know that the artist really does feel like she is abandoning her work—because a gallery provides a place where you can meet a painting that has a future for you, and then take it home and live with it.

A painting does worlds more than decorate your house, just as does your spouse. A painting offers one side of a conversation, and you keep up your end through reverie and contemplation. What you notice about a painting, if it works for you, was probably thought about and put there deliberately by the artist. You might be very surprised to know the care we artists take in the creation of a work of art. The intention is that your conversation with the painting will occupy you for hours and years—that is what makes a painting good, not so much that it “looks like a photograph” or is pretty or is any better than you could do.

There is no right set of things to notice about a painting, or to think about, or to muse upon. The only no-no, in my opinion, is to make up a back-story and impute it to the artist. If you had a teacher who led you to that practice, well, education is in a sorry state, isn’t it? The true back-story to this image is that my daughter Julia and I spent a week paddling the Everglades. Every evening we tied up to a wooden, roofed platform called a chickee. On the afternoon when this painting was conceived I sat and watched the canoe play at its tether, and watched the shapes and colors and began thinking about a new painting.