Philosophical art review: "The Bermuda Group (Dean Berkeley and His Entourage)"
THE BERMUDA GROUP (DEAN BERKELEY AND HIS ENTOURAGE) Oils on canvas, (begun 1728, completed 1739) 176.5 x 236.2 cm (69 1/2 x 93 in )
BY John Smibert American, born Scotland, 1688 - 1751
Painting on display in the Yale Art Gallery exhibition "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness"
thru December 31, 2011.
In 1729, Dean George Berkeley set out from London to found a college in Bermuda "for the better supplying of churches in our foreign plantations and for converting the savage Americans to Christianity." Berkeley's friend John Wainwright commissioned a portrait of the members of the expedition from John Smibert, a minor Scottish painter whom Berkeley had invited to teach art in the new college. The painting was begun in London, and was completed after the group arrived in Newport to wait additional funding for their college. Although Wainwright did not accompany Berkeley to the New World, Smibert places him prominently in the foreground. Dean Berkeley stands at the right next to his infant son Henry, his wife Anne, and her companion Miss Handcock. The two wigged gentlemen are John James and Richard Dalton, administrators for the new college. At the far left, looking out at the viewer, stands the artist himself. When the Bermuda college scheme failed, Smibert, the first academy-trained painter to work in the American colonies, established a studio in Boston, where he became the city's most sought-after portraitist, enjoying a lofty professional reputation. The Bermuda Group would remain his most ambitious work. As the most sophisticated group portrait painted in the colonies during the first half of the eighteenth century, it was a source of inspiration to numerous artists during the succeeding eighty years. |
The Dynamics of Multi-Solipsism
by Johnes Ruta, AzothGallery.com
This is a strangely fascinating painting, as George Berkeley is an important figure in the history of 18th century philosophy. A careful study of the figures in this painting reveals many curious clues to the sensibility of a pivotal movement in intellectual history. Here we see Dean George Berkeley with his family, his sponsor, and teaching administrators as two wigged gentlemen. In 1729, twenty years after the publication of his theory of Immaterialism, this group left England, ostensibly to open a college on the island of Bermuda, for the purpose of training ministers especially for the churches of the southern colonies of North America. They first traveled to American and landed at Newport, where Berkeley bought a plantation while he waited for the promised funding for his school to arrive.
Bishop George Berkeley, consecrated in 1724, was a modern figure in the philosophical movement called “Empiricism,” a system that in the Western world originated with Epicurus in ancient Athens, who maintained that the senses, rather than reason, were the only sources of knowledge. This principle was perpetuated by Berkeley’s philosophical predecessors Thales, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz. In terms of the categories of idealism and materialism, the concept of “Immaterialism” argued by Berkeley has been variously misunderstood and quite often mocked as absurd, ego-centric, and irrational. But where it borders solipsism, and has generated seemingly conflicting interpretations, it needs deeper understanding, and deeper analysis.
Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist, the epistemo-logical position that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure. To better understand Berkeley’s Immaterialism, we should compare it to the principles of solipsism, which are divided into defined into three levels: 1. Egotism, that is, the isolation or self-
perceived supremacy of the individual personality; 2. Metaphysical, encompassing the questions of philosophy regarding individual perspective and relationships; and 3. Epistemological, in the study historical development of the field of knowledge, in this case of the juxtaposition of matter and perception.
The principle of materialism can be traced back in the West to the beginnings of thought about nature and the composition of the world: Around 585 BCE, the astronomer Thales argued that matter is derived from water and is always in a state of flux. Around 80 years later, Heraclitus compared the sensation of the passage of time to the flow of a river. Heraclitus also postulated that Fire was the basic matter of the universe, also that all things are in a state of flux from am opposite perspective, thus in a process of “Becoming”. Parmenides, born 510 BCE, opens the door from physics into “metaphysics” – whether “being” is objective or cosmic: In the sentence structure of his allegorical story-telling in On Nature, and later in The Way of Truth, and The Way of Seeing, he constructs and uses new linguistic conjunctions of subject, verb, and predicate objects to both establish and equivocate objects which exist thus illustrating them as the focal points of experiential reality. This technique thereby raises the dialectical question of an existential nature of “Being,” that is, human experience considered in a cosmological context.
In modern Western philosophy, the epistemological doctrine had been begun as a core tenet of Descartes—that what is in the mind is known more reliably than what is known through the senses. Descartes, trying to establish the continuity of personal identity, and as a remedy to an inevitable skepticism of everything, proposed that the continuity of the “self” derives from thought. This would soon enable the extreme view that the orientation of the senses is the sole reality of the world.
John Locke in his Understanding of Human Experience came to the conclusion that we are not born with any innate knowledge, even such as the presence of God, and that human identity is “the gift of experience”— that the sum of these is what defines the personality. The first prominent modern Western idealist in the metaphysical sense was George Berkeley who argued that there is no deep distinction between mental states, such as feeling pain, and the ideas about so-called "external" things, that appear to us through the senses. There is no real distinction, in this view, between certain sensations of heat and light that we experience, which lead us to believe in the external existence of a fire, and the fire itself. Those sensations are all there is to fire. Berkeley expressed this with the Latin formula esse est percipi: "to be is to be perceived."
In response to Locke, Berkeley put forth in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) an important challenge to empiricism in which things only exist either as a result of their being perceived, or by virtue of the fact that they are an entity doing the perceiving. (For Berkeley, God fills in for humans by doing the perceiving whenever humans are not around to do it). In his text Alciphron, Berkeley maintained that any order humans may see in nature is the language or handwriting of God.
To trace the theoretical history of Berkeley’s logic, this form of perspective is carried to its logical extreme in his view of the world which defines a subjective reality for each person, in which there is no other material dimension than the pure imports of each person’s own perceptions. It is as though when one walks from one room to another, the physical reality is only that in which one is present from moment to moment, and forms as one arrives, and is dissipated and disintegrated from the space from where one has moved away. Berkeley's “Immaterialism” is defined as a subjective idealism in which is a purely subjective uni-verse. The disconnect favored is between the senses and any acknowledgement of an independent material reality, and that there can be no distinction between primary and secondary qualities of objects, because objects themselves cannot exist unless perceived by the senses. Berkeley would go on to reject both Newton's system of Fluxions, which Leibniz also developed as The Calculus, and Leibniz' mathematical theory of Infinitesimals, as based on introspective measurement of particulate existence, which would acknowledge motion in an external material reality.
Berkeley's philosophy was mocked and rejected in his own time by many, even by the lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson, who while walking in the woods, demonstrated his view of Berkeley's error by the act of kicking a stone, "I refute Berkeley thus !"
The interpretations of Berkeley's philosophy range from it being seen as a denial of any external reality, to a more comprehensive view that now appears an as advanced theory of the functions of brain synapses in cognitive science -- that all perceptions form cohesive patterns in the mind reflecting real external realities.
In this nearly mural size painting nearly 8 feet wide by 6 feet in height, John Smibert has captured a revealing situation: the essence of solipsism that Berkeley’s ideology encapsules is evident in the expression of each figure: George Berkeley himself gazes off into the heavens, looking diagonally upward across the foreground of the painting. His mind is set on the functionality of the Church of England as a tool to promote the greater solipsism of the Crown of England: his college has been designed with the purpose to train Presbyterian ministers who will be disseminated to the colonies where they will work to keep the indentured servants, slaves, and Native American “savages” from rebelling against the ceaseless exploitation of their plantation masters, under the threat of eternal punishment. Berkeley’s right hand rests upon the authority of the Book, perhaps either a law book, or one of his own published philosophical treatises. His left hand is folded in a properly posed, yet unconsciously sinister hidden manner around his back. Berkeley’s friend and sponsor John Wainwright sits at the left looking with adoration at Berkeley, his hands inscribing George’s pronouncements. Berkeley’s wife Ann and infant son Henry gaze out at the viewer, as does the figure at the far left attributed to be Smibert himself, all seeming to appeal to the empathy of the viewer. Ann’s companion Miss Handcock looks to Ann at her left, while she quietly points with her left hand to the wigged person of John James standing at her right, as though he were her paramour. Meanwhile Richard Dalton stands behind her left side with his hand poised on the back of her chair, in the proximity to her bare shoulder, while gazing with an expectant, almost inviting look at John James, whose own eyes fixedly press down ambiguously, or flickeringly, both in the same direction as the writing in Wainwright’s large book, and upon the glowing skin of Miss Handcock’s open, elegant décolletage.
So here we have a topographical map manifesting the essence of Berkeley’s theory of “Immaterialism,” which had been published in 1709. Each figure exists within the epitome of their own subjective reality. … This is a weird painting, in which Smibert, we know not whether wittingly or unwittingly, has nailed the impertinent political reality of Berkeley’s “Immaterialism,” in which each character on the surface appears to be part of a cooperative group mission, but in deeper, more subtle personal reality manifests their own self-seeking interests. . In political terms, I would describe Berkeley’s principle as “Reality Chauvinism,” and it can only be related in practice as the anticipation, 150 years ahead of its time, in the expression of “Social Darwinism” of the late 1800s.
Smibert was hired to teach art at the College, and accompanied Berkeley, his family and entourage, but without Wainwright. They sailed instead to the American colonies, where they finally landed at Newport. There Berkeley bought a small plantation, while awaiting the government funds to arrive that had been allocated to start his Bermuda College.
Were we to compare the land forms of Bermuda itself to the background landscape of the painting, we would detect an exaggeration of the rocky coast, and inaccuracy of the type of trees depicted. Smibert soon left Newport and went on to Boston where he lived and worked the rest of his life. As a portraitist in the colonies, his artistic vision became the prominent trend-setter for American portraitists of the rest on the 18th century. Berkeley went back to England in 1732. Some of Smibert's other multiple portraits such as "Sir Francis Grant and His Family" 1718, "The Continence of Scipio" 1726; "Daniel, Peter, and Andrew Oliver" 1732; as shown on Richard H. Saunders on-line book on Smibert at
http://books.google.com/books?id=Wklq3JItYOgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22John+Smibert%22+paintings&hl=en&ei=uIXhToHCLKjf0QG76oDTBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CEUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22John%20Smibert%22%20paintings&f=false do give some interesting clues to the interpersonal dynamics found in “The Bermuda Group” more difficult to analyze.
However, Berkeley’s stated purpose to create the Bermuda College, in order to supply the churches of the New World with ministers, no doubt trained in Berkeley’s perspective, would be agents first to perpetuate and ensure the rule of the King of England, that is, the imperial singularity of the monarch in the order of the “divine right of kings.” More to the point, Berkeley’s mindset was built to preserve the social order as the perceived and correct order of the universe : God maintains the imperial "observership" of all actions in the world, and hands down the protectorship of the moral order to the king, then the nobles, then the wealthy plantation owners. In this century in the New world, as in the Old, rights are the dominion of "Real Politic", specifically the class of land-ownership. The social order must be maintained against potential and feared uprisings of those “savage [native] Americans,” and the indentured servant and the slave classes who worked those plantations of the southern American colonies…! This was not the Humanism of John Locke, who advocated the principle of "the greatest good for the greatest number." For those workers no “subjective reality” would be permitted in any society or in any plantation church community before the American Revolution, and for the slaves, not until the Emancipation Proclamation. Subjective Idealism was surely only a domain of the privileged classes, and is still being fought for in the 21st century – witness the Arab spring and Occupy Wall Street movements.
Ironically, in terms of any persistence of Berkeley’s reality, when he left England and came to Newport, it appears that his arrangements of reality for the disposition of funds to found his college on Bermuda, then faded in the real world of English politics. Reality check.
CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT JOHNES RUTA’S ESSAY
CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT JOHNES RUTA’S ESSAY
“THE BERMUDA GROUP” AND BERKELEY’S
PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPT OF IMMATERIALISM
by VALERIU BOBORELU
Johnes Ruta, a complex writer and art critic and reader of Western Philosophy, presents an interesting and challenging essay which reflects social-spiritual tendencies in human society from Berkeley’s century until our times.
The idea of writing this essay was inspired by John Smibert’s 1729 painting of “The Bermuda Group,” displayed in the Yale Art Gallery exhibition “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
The artist Smibert depicts in a traditional and documentary style a major figure of Eighteenth century philosophy, the David George Berkeley and his entourage – family, sponsor, and teaching administrators. Ruta gives a subtle, aesthetic description of the painting, compositional disposition of personages – dominated by the tall stature of Berkeley. The figures are related to the whole atmosphere of art work, but in the same time each of them seems to have their own mind-inside preoccupation – similar to Berkeley’s concept of Immaterialism that Ruta relates to solipsism.
Berkeley and his group descended from London in 1729 with the main goal to create on the island of Bermuda a college “for better supplying of churches in our foreign plantations” and to convert the people to Christianity.
Inspired by the philosophical ideas of Berkeley, Ruta develops a multi-layered social-spiritual web which represents a dynamic, dramatic relation between Idealism and Materialism, the continuing search of the human mind to define the truth, the reality, and the field of knowledge. He considers Berkeley a preeminent figure in the philosophical movement called Empiricism. This system originated with thinkers like Epicurus (senses: valid source of knowledge), Thales, Aristotle, Descartes (mind perception is superior to the senses), John Locke (experience if essential), or Leibniz.
Ruta shows that “in terms of categories of Idealism and Materialism, the concept of Immaterialism – argued by Berkeley has been variously misunderstood.” and also, when the idea of Immaterialism “became close to solipsism (only one’s own mind is sure to exist), there have been generated conflicting interpretations…” The principles of solipsism can be summarized as: 1. Egotism (isolation of the self), 2. Metaphysical (individual perspective), and 3. Epistemological (history of the field of knowledge.)
Ruta emphasizes that Berkeley, as this “preeminent Western Idealist in the metaphysical sense” sustains that deep distinction between mental states and external things, and, Ruta continues, “Berkeley expressed this with the Latin formula “Esse est percepi” (To be is to be perceived.) , and thereby concludes that “Berkeley’s concept of Immaterialism is carried to its logical extreme “with this view of the world which defines a subjective reality from each person” (a purely subjective uni-verse.)
The philosophical Berkeley sees the whole universe as a manifestation of a supreme deity, the God and “any order humans may see in nature is the landscape of
the handwriting of God…”
In the Eighteenth century, the sophisticated term of “Immaterialism” (and solipsism) would be applied only to the privileged classes, superior beings, and the land-owners (“to preserve the social order as the perceived and correct order of the universe.”
In the conclusion of his essay, Ruta says “Subjective Idealism,” as proposed by Berkeley, was surely only a domain of the privileged classes and is still being fought for in the 21st century. There are indeed many problems of our contemporary world: social movements discontent with governments, the struggle of people to find truth, the correct relations between the members of society. Inspired by Ruta’s essay, I would like to present some additional ideas, concepts from some philosophical thinking, religious teachings, and some spiritual thinkers and writers.
* Buddhist School – Vaibhasika
-- Direct Perception and inference are valid conditions.
-- Existence of: * sense perception
* mental direct perception
* yogic direct perception
-- existence of Ultimate and Relative Truths.
* Buddhist School – Sautrantikas
-- existence of Ultimate and Relative Truths.
-- Ultimate Truth: a phenomenon that is able to perform a function.
-- things that exist momentarily.
-- physical sense powers are not valid cognition.
-- mental perception is valid cognition.
-- existence of direct perception: sense, mental, yogic, self-consciousness.
* Buddhist school of Mind only (Cittamatras)
-- the basis of all phenomena is the mind.
-- the appearance of all external objects is similar to dreams; external objects do not exist and they only exist in the mind.
* Buddhist Mahayana school
-- all phenomena are in a continuum of change, and flux movement.
-- all phenomena are depending arising: depend on causes and on conditions.
-- Theory of Emptiness: lack of inherent existence.
-- Selflessness * of beings
* of objects
-- all phenomena are impermanent , except 3 categories: * emptiness
* space
* analytical and non-analytical
-- the existence of the mind of clear light : the most subtle mind, the Buddha nature
-- Bodhicitta : the love, compassion for all beings
-- the Great Beings – Bodhissatvas – take the vows of Bodhicitta – to help all other beings to become liberated from Samsara abd obtain supreme state of Enlightenment.
-- Buddha Sakyamuhti : never think “I, mine, me.”
* Sri Ramana Maharishi
-- the essential question: Who am I ?
-- the nature of self : contrary to perceptible experience, not an experience of individuality
but a non-personal, all-inclusive awareness.
* Self = God
-- the self is ever present
-- the silent self is god
* Sri Chinmoy
-- “Man and God are eternally one.”
* Pard Mahansa Yogananda “The Divine Romance”
-- “Christ is right here, he can be seen if you look within your forehead at the point between the eyebrows, the center of Christ-consciousness, the seat of the single or spiritual eye.”
* Caroline Cory “The visible and invisible worlds of God.”
-- the Creator Source is without beginning and end.
-- the Creator Source is not one being or one person. It is layered multi-dimensional existence.
-- we are one minute particle of the Creator Source.
Creator Source
|
|
+
Creator Consciousness
| |
| |
Divine Creator Creator Energy
(Father) (Mother)
| |
|_____________|
|
O Massive Body of Light-consciousness
particles “Split-off”
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__________________________ |_______________________
| | |
Divine and Celestial Solar and Planetary Intelligent
Beings Systems Evolutionary Being
* Gabriel of Sedona “The Cosmic Family”
-- our planet is going through important changes : we are passing now from 3rd to 4th dimension.
-- subtle, superior beings are involved in helping our planet.
-- some of these great beings take the human re-personalization in order to help direct our planet.
-- Deo-Atomic = atomic structures in alignment with God and Paradise absolute and are connected to cosmic vibration patterns.
-- Deo-Atomic Cells aligned with Paradise absolute and are cells of future Light Body.
-- the fourth epochal revelation was fulfilled when the Creator Son of our local universe,
Christ-Michael bestowed himself as a human mortal, Jesus of Nazareth to portray the nature of his Paradise Father.
* Urantia – the cosmic name of our planet.
-- Urantia is Planet 606 in the system of Satania, in the constellation of Norlatiadek,
in the universe Nebadon, in the super-universe of Orvonton.
-- Michael (Christ) of Nebadon chose among all the planets in his universe for his Seventh Bestowal, as a human mortal, in which he revealed the loving nature of the Universal Father.
-- Urantia is sometimes called “The World of the Cross” because it is the only planet in the 700,000 local universes where a creator son was put to death by his own creatures.
* KRISHNANANDA (“2012 End or beginning.”)
-- “There are ‘Light Beings,’ Astral Masters and a Divine Plan waiting to help us and gift to us higher living facilities and comforts. We have to get ready to receive them. We can qualify by just going back to our original state : the state of love, peace, and truth. Positivise,
remove all violence, corruption and aggression.
-- We have to meditate and channel Light a lot to transform. It is actually possible for the transition into the Light Age to be peaceful; and painless.
* Quantum Theory
-- All our thoughts, emotions, and activities are recorded on a subtle level (“Crystal Cave”).
When we are passing away the recordings from the “Crystal Cave” are transferring to the matrix of the Earth (the subtle energetic grid) for the benefit of Humanity.
January 2012, Valeriu Boborelu
Forum: METAPHYSICS IN SCIENCE, POETRY & ART
A Philosophical Forum
Sunday October 24, 2010, 12:30 - 7:30 PM
105 Howe Street New Haven, CT 06511
Julianne Davidow - Neo-Platonists in the Renaissance
Richard Harteis - The Metaphysics of Poetry: Emotions, Eros, and Loss
Kathleen Damiani, PhD. - Sources of the Divine Sophia
Magda Mraz - Ancient Egypt: Spiritual Transformation of the Universe
Steve Bass, AIA, ICA - Geometry Lessons from the Great Library of Alexandria
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Ficino's Commentary on Plato's Symposium of Love
Julianne Davidow
Author: "Outer Beauty, Inner Joy: Contemplating the Soul of the Renaissance"
http://www.juliannedavidow.com/
footsteps of the ancient Platonists. Their work initiated what is now called Renaissance
Platonism or Neo-Platonism, and had widespread effects on literature, painting, and
music, as well as on the development of mathematics and science.
the re-emergence of Classical philosophers, and the growth of Humanism. It will then
discuss the new philosophies forged from the Platonic and Hermetic traditions.
subject matter of some paintings by Italian Renaissance artists.
Near Eastern Wisdom & sources of the Divine SOPHIA
Kathleen Damiani, PhD.
http://sophiaandthedragon.com/
The Metaphysics of Poetry: Emotion, Eros, and Loss
Richard Harteis, poet
Author: "The Revenant", "Marathon", "Sapphire Dawn."
http://williammeredithfoundation.org/
Ptah, Osiris, Isis, & Horus
Magda M. Mraz
Artwork: http://azothgallery.com/
Click on the image to view the video stream.
Geometry Lessons from the Great Library Knowledge,
myth and transformation in ancient Alexandria.
Steve Bass, A.I.A., I.C.A.
Click on the image to view the video stream.
Historical Introductions
1. Mesopotamia: The Newborn Universe and the name of Time
-- Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Kant, & Hegel
Johnes Ruta, independent curator
Art Gallery Director New Haven Free Public Library
http://azothgallery.com/dialectics.html
music review "the porno years v.1" Bop Tweedie CD
music review by Johnes Ruta, independent curator, AzothGallery.com
Bop Tweedie’s first album release is a professional sounding and technically well-produced musical experience which creates a colorful fabric. His tracks have the sensation of being “songs” with no lyrics: a diverse range of jazzy layers of melodic and harmonic sounds.
The first cut, “a crash course in crashing,” carries a medium up-tempo beat with a “Trance” melodic flow, the effect is mesmerizing. A second layer of musical melody then envelops us and draws us down on a penetrating descent into psychic depths which remain navigable along extended lines of harmonic sounds. This is great and sophisticated listening !
Tonal harmony appears to be the underlying structure of Tweedie’s music, where the strains also carry one off into the ether, but without the loss of one’s bearings. The musical tones work mostly in the positive major keys, starting and ending with feelings of exhilaration. The instinctual effect is that of birds in migration, flying far above the land by internal compass.
The second cut, “doe a dog”, generates a positive hypnosis with an array of strangely familiar voices: quiet conversations of incomprehensible words below the threshold of meaning. The next cut “doesn’t the rain smell nice?” brings forth oscillating water-like waves of feeling; underscored with quiet laughing voices that are set to a dance beat.
“fee plus fie equals fo fum” builds a trance that rises up from beneath into a motive energy flow with upbeat harmonic levels added. “headphones plugged into nothing” carries a sweet Calypso island beat in a melodic progression. In “i’d rather be famous,” quiet voices up rising from the depths are now layered over the buzz of an electrical current in the key of C, with the refrain “I’d rather be infamous!"
In “march of the cicadas” as in “milk of wonder,” mating calls from insect antennae radio signals invoke hyperactive speed dancing. – Welcome to life and love in the cicada dimension! In contrast, “the rise and fall of your chest when you are sleeping” then presents a sweet and sonorous relaxing piano melody.
There is a fine continuity of mood in Tweedie’s compositions in lessons perhaps learned from early electronic composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Steve Reich, and Pauline Oliveros. But Tweedie significantly evolves beyond intellectual-sounding synthesized notes into a deeply emotive compendium. His patterns of voices, instruments, and electronics in experimental jazz time-signature progressions like those of Dave Brubeck, Eric Dolphy, and Ornette Coleman, produce moods opening into a future-conscious dimension -- the kind of future we hope for, rather than dystopia. -- Indeed, Tweedie’s titles, culminating with “think before you think” and “standing in a garden on a whim” propel this positive evolution, and trail us off into affirmative consciousness with a hypnotic back-beat…
Comments on the Herb Rogoff Lecture and Exhibition
Thank you, Curator Johnes Ruta, for giving the public including myself the rare opportunity to meet and speak with "painter, illustrator, filmmaker, lecturer and publisher," Herb Rogoff on Thursday, December 9th. Had it not been for the holiday season, I firmly believe this would have been a "standing room only" event. We were quite fortunate to have a memorable evening with the remarkably talented Mr. Rogoff speaking to such a small crowd so personally and intimately about his experience in and of the art world. His chronological presentation of the comics both in the United States and abroad was fascinating and his well-articulated point that the comics and the artists who create them should not be relegated to second class status in the art world was especially well-taken...how easy it is to rifle through the pages of a newspaper seeking the news of the day and wholly ignoring the comic pages of the newspaper without realizing that it is in those comic pages where the comic artist creates some of the most relevant socio-political discussion of the day.
SOME THOUGHTS ON FAVRET'S EXHIBIT by DONNA MARIE JOYCE
Cordially, Donna Marie Joyce
"Deer & Other Stories" by Susan Tepper -- BOOK REVIEW by Johnes Ruta
views the circumstances from their own perspective, but then the focus gradually weaves its way into the voice and even the heart of one member of the array.
COMMENTS ON THE ORJUELA EXHIBIT - by Donna Marie Joyce
Lisie S. Orjuela "flowershells & honeycombs" oil on canvas, 2007, 60” x 63”
What a day it was Tuesday, April 27, 2010, to visit the Lisie S. Orjuela exhibit at the New Haven Public Library. En route to the exhibit, thick grey, ominous clouds suspended in the sky and then suddenly, the sun split the skies on the eastern horizon and for a minute or two the sky was evenly split between utter darkness and utter light...and there I witnessed the Divine's manifestation of what the artist Orjuela conveys so vidividly in her canvases namely "The World of Paradoxes."
Dr. Felix Bronner "How I Got Here" art exhibit at the New Haven Free Public Library - by Donna Joyce
After receiving several art invitations this fall, I’m sorry I was unable to attend the final art opening before renovation of the gallery area in the New Haven Public Library and reopening in spring 2010.
Nonetheless, I did stop by to view the Dr. Felix Bronner exhibit this past week. As usual, it was another inspiring set of works. I noted a palpable feeling of particles/ matter/ energy in all of the works. With the restful and calming primary color of seafoam green, “Seascape” was a great way to start the exhibit. “Roaring Over Print” is fantastic to me – it’s an apt metaphor these days for my state of mind, and equally well depicts my office space.
Finally, I enjoyed “And What Can You See?” .. I’m still not precisely sure what I did see .. Every time I glanced at the work during my short visit, the experience was different – but it was a great adventure!
Hope to see you in 2010! Thanks again for continuing to include me on your art opening invitations list.
All the Best,
Donna Marie Joyce
November 16, 2009
Going Home: Reviewing the “Wheel” painting of the late Philip Guston -- essay by Ellen Hackl Fagan
Home is where the truth lives. Where all affects are removed,we live with ourselves (and possibly others) along with our flaws and our triumphs. For many, this is a place inside a building. For others, this is a feeling deep inside our conscious. When pondering the topic of“home,” in the context of a gallery, it seemed opportune to discuss the work of an artist whose attempt to depict this subject transcended particular places, but speaks of the internalized meaning of “home.” The artist who really “hits home” for me is Philip Guston, and I want to discuss one of his final paintings, “Wheel” painted a year before his death in 1979.
In Guston’s later works we see his self-portrait emerge as a Sad Sack, schlumping along the surface of the earth, his stubbly bandaged face,his Cyclopean stare. His gaze sees his world, his problems with himself and with the act of painting. He also looks at the problems in our world in its time. If you’ve ever painted or struggled with creating something, Guston’s hand will tear at your heart. Gooey, thick pink blobs, peach and red, crudely rendered black lines and tan mushy, gushy paint resists casual flow and shows us that the artist has been humbled in making his mark. I could wear his reddened paint as a skin, or I could dive into its viscous depths, traveling to the internal workings of his all-too-human heart. It’s his self-portrait, but it speaks to anyone who has ever felt like that Sad Sack, unable to ignore the siren’s call of paint and surface, to attempt transforming the intangible into the palpably tangible over and over again.
Guston’s Everyman is a trusted observer, reporting on the way it feels to question one’s own abilities as well as the authorities in charge of our lives. Fearlessly honest about his position in this life, underwhelming on the outside, this grubby, stubbly man goes along unnoticed and unhampered. We are invited to take the journey with him, through the course of his ugly, raw paintings. To paint about the life of Everyman, and possess an ounce of truth, we have to submit to showing it’s ugly side. Guston shares the company of history’s heavyweights: Hugo, Goya, Bosch, Joyce, Bukowski and Kerouac. We know his Sad Sack to be, atleast in some small way, ourselves.
As Guston’s paintings evolved, the self-portrait externalized and became more universal. Symbolism is the way to abstraction and Guston’s Everyman became a Wheel. After working my way through his oeuvre at the Met years ago, the last canvases stopped me cold. The simplicity, the palette – born of flesh,blood and bone, and his beating heart, rang so true that I couldn’t stop my tears. These canvases, printed themselves upon me and gratefully, have never left my memory, still remaining powerful and immediate.
That wheel was going “home.” Guston suffered from a near heart attack that same year and death was a question he undoubtedly explored. The sky is darkening in this painting. The wheel is monolithic, its rustic bolts and crude wooden construction heavily outlined in black. The rough wood glows yellow (like a halo?). The moon rises to the left of the half-buried wheel from the horizon line of a deep scarlet earthen road (or is that a turbulent sea?). The moon rising is reminiscent of mythology. The reflection of the moon on the earth/sea surface shows us the path to the Underworld or the Spirit World or redemption. It signals that death is imminent.
Going “home” might entail a final judgment before God prior to being granted entry into
Ellen Hackl Fagan
efagan4@optonline.net
