Another early work. This is the first painting I ever made. I was influence by Caravaggio, my favourite painter, who I had only recently discovered. Completed in on January 29, 2010, it measures 24"x30". Acrylic on canvas.
Not for sale.
On the back of the canvas is part of T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men II:
"Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star."
Make of that what you will. I wrote an account of its creation, at the time. More than anything, it is record of my own eccentricity. The story is based on true events, but highly dramatized, and stylized, in order to have the reader understand the mindframe within which I was working.
Listening to the third of Debussy's Six Épigraphes Antiques, Pour que la nuit soit propice, I am lulled into a dreamlike state, and am on the verge of being transported to another time and place. I place my brush down on the family antique dining table. Looking outside, I wish to see the lights, of 120 years past, shimmering on the cobblestone of some renaissance-era Florentine street; the gas lamps dripping from an spring shower, youthful opera goers in harlequin masques scurrying past, trying to avoid the shadows of the cloistered facades; this is where I belong. Unfortunately, my reverie is shattered by the soulless floodlight of that hideous triplex, across the garbage strewn alley, catching a lone icicle, precariously suspended from the fire-escape.
The sun retired many hours ago, dragging away what energy I had into the depths of time and space. Chocolate smears adorn the already paint-spattered tips of my fingers — I have been fueling my work on a baguette-sized Toblerone. Nothing is working. Nothing is capable of finishing this painting, equally as hellish in subject as it is in execution.
I feel an intense resentment towards my passive tyrant of a teacher, which robs me of any motivation remaining. I know that until he has painted the canvas himself, until it is just a mutilated mimicry of Hubert Robert à la Paul Cézanne, it will be considered a monument to mediocrity. There is no art with him, beyond the art associated with squirting out shapes from a plastic Play Doh factory. This is not what I came to learn, but despite the shackles of the public school system carving away at my soul, I realize that rebellion is worthless this time; I would only punish myself more in losing precious marks.
Hark! Radio-Canada’s Espace Classique website has malfunctioned; now there is the vacuum of silence. Prensently, I hear the lugubrious moan of the second movement of Malipiero’s Concertante in eco. In this moment of invaluable inspiration, I turn around so quickly that my painting hat, a vintage fez, falls from my head and rolls to the piano. I leap to my computer to open a favorite painting by Caravaggio: San Girolamo in meditazione. Surely, this skeletal figure, illuminated in the darkness of human existence by a divine light, the source of which is not known, will provide the guidance for which I search.
With equal rapidity to its ignition, my brief candle of inspiration is extinguished. I have not truely experienced the mastery of this tenebristic painting; I am merely teased by a Baudrillardian simulacrum in an elongated series of ones and zeros. Similar to the loss of truth in the translation of any literal work, a televised live performance, or an artificial flavour, a digital reproduction of a work of art is incapable of conveying the energy and emotion of the original piece — especially one by Caravaggio.
I have exhausted myself and my resources. Thus I dangle on the verge, eternally on the verge of knowing without comprehending; of grasping without holding; of feeling that, with guidance, I too can belong to this great continuum of creativity.
A preparatory sketch dating from September 3, 2009:
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