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 Paradise.  “Home” is the place to die and put the earthbound body to rest.  The Wheel is a timeless metaphor every tribal storyteller, shaman or folk musician has passed down.  Through Jerry Garcia, Johnny Cash, mountain music, gospel songs and spirituals, and eastern religious practices, The Wheel of Life keeps turning.  No one can get off; it keeps going ‘round.  The fact that Guston evolved in his painting to the point where he, too, entered that storytelling tradition shows anyone brave enough to look with an unblinking gaze, that “home” is very real, very true, and that we, too, will one day be that Wheel.  Slowly turning, revealing its face to the viewer, resolute in its direction with the moon rising in the horizon, half stuck, no longer able to hide flaws, like Guston,we are on a path to “home.”

Ellen Hackl Fagan
efagan4@optonline.net