freejazzecho

48 x 66 in. "freejazzecho"

Extending the Moment

Echo, in the sense of sound bouncing back,
but different.
Different than what one usually thinks of as an echo
because a couple of years have passed since the
sound and painting came into being.

The painting's illusion of space, a stand-in for the illusion of time.
The painting connecting to and reverberating from that place and that "now"
through recollection and experience into another now -
a now in this case of the theatrical and
of the a mid-summers afternoon out-doors
in the forest.

The painting was one of the "beginnings" of a late winter afternoon
when I had the Gallery in Flesherton.
It was an afternoon of painting in collaborative improvisation
with Roger Martindill on bass and
Kenny Baldwin on Saxophones.

O b s e r v s a t i o n

Peter
That painting really is three dimensional
Kudos my friend.
There is enough depth there to warrant an 'echo'.
Would it be inappropriate to say I also see a woman there?

Wendell
Good morning from the maple forest-
which is enjoying intermittent showers.
Do you know where "jewel weed" gets it's name?

Thanks and
since improvization comes from the intuitive,
and since you and the perpetrators are male,
it shouldn't be too surprising that a woman
might be emerging out of the mist.

I'll have to go and have a look at the painting.
Do you suppose we'll be seeing
the same woman?




from, "Beauty Will Save the World" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 

Who is there so bold as to proclaim that he has defined art? That he has enumerated all its facets? Yet perhaps in ages past someone did comprehend and define it for us, but we grew impatient: we listened in passing and paid no heed and discarded it ... and in our eternal haste to replace even the very best with something else just because it is new! And then later on, when the old is restated, we forgot that we had heard it before...
The artist is only given to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world and all the beauty and savagery of man's contribution to it- and to communicate this poignantly ... even in the midst of failure and down at the lowest depths of existence the sensation of a stable harmony will never leave him....
Through the instrumentality of art we are sometimes sent—vaguely, briefly—insights which logical processes of thought cannot attain...
One can construct a political speech... or philosophical system , so that in appearance it is smooth, well structured, and yet it is built upon a mistake, a lie; and the hidden element, the distortion, will not immediately become visible. However, It is vain to affirm that which the heart does not confirm. In contrast, a work of art bears within itself its own confirmation: there is a special quality in the essence of beauty, a special quality in the status of art: the conviction carried by a genuine work of art is absolutely indisputable...

Works steeped in truth and presenting it to us vividly alive will take hold of us, will attract us to themselves with great power- and no one, ever, even in a later age, will presume to negate them. And so perhaps that old trinity of Truth and Good and Beauty is not just the formal worn-out formula it used to seem to us during our heady, materialistic youth. If the crests... of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot reach the light, perhaps the whimsical, branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar up to that very place and in this way perform the work of all three.

In that case it was not a slip of the tongue for Dostoyevsky to say that “Beauty will save the world,” but a prophecy. After all, he was given the gift of seeing ...
and consequently perhaps art can in actual fact help save the world of today.