Sunday, August 7, 2011

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. 


Sunday, June 12, 2011

stepping into darkness

fireflies inhabit margins
the sound surrounds
summer's first
listening upward
the margins between
rest and sleep
between forest and pasture
between earth and sky
in the vocal abundance
of a midsummer's night
of tree-top's rustle
and northern lights
in that intoxicatingly
luxuriant atmosphere

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Architecture and Intuition


Beckett Studio Tour at
Detwiler's Escarpment Studio ( south East of Guelph )

May 27- 29, 2011

Friday 7 pm- 10 pm
Saturday 11 am - 4 pm
Sunday 12 noon - 4 pm


Is there a common language spoken between these paintings?
Does the installation bring something of the architecture of
the forest to the interior space?
Is there an architecture of intuition?

Catalogue Available

Directions:
from 401
take Guelph Line north
turn left on 15th Side Road
turn right on First Line (at Dar's Delights)
turn left on 17th Side Road
turn right on Midway Lane


the Studio is behind 11497 Midway Lane,
drive to the left of the garage and follow the lane back


For more information or
to make an appointment to see the exhibition at another time

Detwiler; email: smdetwiler@hotmail.com
phone: 519 836 2534
Beckett; peterbeckett11@gmail.com

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

the Noble White Pine



Detail -- oil colour on white pine-- aprox. 10 x 36 in.

I have some old wood that I save for special occasions. There's some old-growth white pine that was cut originally for the timber frame barns of Ontario at a time when the select stock was being used for the top-masts of British warships. The deep golden colour of oxidization has penetrated the thickness of the timber in the century since it was cut. It was a pleasure using a hand plane to transform a rough sawn knee brace that I salvaged thirty years ago into an architectural detail. The plane producing long fragrant curls of translucent history.

In contrast, I was hanging a new "pine" door the other day and was dismayed to find, under a thin veneer of white pine, some knotty brittle pine that had grain like fir and was nearly impossible to work with even the sharpest hand tools.

A short piece of white pine "barn board" that had been propped against the studio wall took on a new significance. As I watched this particular pine board respond to linseed oil, turintine and damar varnish - the mediums for oil colour, the word "nobility" came to mind.