Statements
Thoughts about Painting and maybe other things.
You find yourself alone in an empty room. A room filled with beautiful light reminding you of long summer afternoons, time slowing
to a pale yellow with a hint of warmish grey. You begin to move, feeling the space compress with your presence. you turn, go straight, then down, then across. The beautiful empty space is your partner in a solitary dance. You move with concentrated grace, melodious in form. You hum a tune of color that is your identity in this moment to moment song of feeling. your color caresses the color of the room.
You then find yourself coming upon this graceful dance and, with a different voice of color, you begin a new dance. There are two of you now, moving in response to each other, sometimes touching, sometimes veering away, sometimes interweaving your paths. Always aware of each other, always aware of the room and the space between. Your combined dance creates a new form, a new identity that transcends each individual voice.
As more dancers enter the beautiful room, new voices are added to the songs, creating a greater variety of syncopation and melodious counterpoint. The entire room has been transformed into a massed fabric of pulsing energy and a rich complex sound of vibrating color. Bleached grey sand twining around strands of the summer sky, ribbons of the deep evergreen's blush skipping alongside a coral from an exotic land. An entanglement of multitudes creating a symphony of life.
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How colors coexist is a complex subject because colors can scream and yell and scratch and claw at each other or they can murmur and blend and sink into each other or they can turn their backs on each other in spiteful ignorance. But most mysterious and delightful is when two colors seek to complete each other, when each finds in the other something it lacks, something it desires. Then the two colors hold each other in a tight loving embrace, their union making each one feel more than they were alone. For each, the other has made them whole.
So it occurs to you that you can create two new rooms that will sit side by side, with a definite but permeable barrier in between. And, you will make a solid space of color for each room and you will blend and mix and stir each room's color so that the two rooms begin to desire each other. You make sure that they are different enough from each other so that their conversations can find insightful comparison and discovery. Like sunlight and shade. Like sand and sky. Like beauty and sorrow side by side.
Then, as if with a conjuror's wand, you gently pull forth from each room voices that grow out of their glowing hues and you move those voices to melody. The dancing voices multiply creating distinctive personalities in their separate spaces. Each chorus is always aware of the other across the boundary. They will mimic each other, sway with each other, almost touch each other. Until, at some point, a melody crosses over and interweaves with the other room's song. More exchanges occur until the two room's initial desire for each other is consummated in a new dynamic of polyphony. Neither room loses its identity in the other, but the intertwining connections bind them together in a kind of symbiosis.
So maybe this is how the world is born. Disparate dancers side by side, interacting, intertwining, weaving together a fabric of reality. A whole that is always more than the sum of the parts, diversity never fused to sameness.
Whidbey Island,
Summer, 2021