Get Ready to Explore

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Form is certainty. All nature knows this, and we have no greater adviser. Clouds have forms, porous and shape-shifting, bumptious, fleecy. Each form sets a tone, enables a destiny, strikes a note in the universe unlike any other. How can we ever stop looking?

Mary Oliver wrote that. So just look. Don’t try to imagine anything but something that isn’t there other than color, form, location and their interaction with your eye and mind. If delight is not in that interaction, in what then does aesthetic delight regard?

Plato’s shadows are forms cast on the wall of a cave. In The Republic he uses these shadows as an allegory of how easily we can be trapped in ignorance by our failure to recognize the difference between reality and appearances. We might call that trap one dimensional thinking or imagining that what we see, even three dimensionally, is the limit of our vision, the limit of what is real. So when we look at an impossible form, like the one in this painting, we’re inclined to see an illusion, a trompe l’oeil, that tricks us into thinking that what we see cannot be real, even though it exists mathematically.  

A dolmen (loc.cit.) is a megalithic structure consisting of two or more upright stones supporting a large, flat capstone. Dating from the late neolithic period, four to three thousand years before the present, dolmen are sometimes called “portals” thought to be associated with burials. But who knows? Their structure is mysterious in both function and construction. If “portal” is an appropriate attribution, for whom? to where? and how? Who knows? And yet there they are, opening to enter or leave the mystery of Plato's cave.

(The impossible form in the center is set back 1/4 inch from the surface on a separately attached canvas.)

At the center of the tree form are nine hearts.

In cartomancy the nine of hearts is the card of joy, satisfaction, and fulfillment in life often associated with love and one’s relational connections both immediate and writ large. In numerology, a “Life Path 9” individual is considered compassionate, creative and disciplined, driven by high ideals with a thirst for knowledge and experience. They are known for their empathy, charisma, and spiritual depth but are challenged by their emotional sensitivity, self-sacrifice, and at times the need to let go. 

This is pretty intriguing, but I was thinking of none of it doing this painting. So is it there? I know nothing about either cartomancy or numerology or for that matter any of the esoteric arts. The only thing esoteric here is the artwork. To be both frank and accurate, I learn from my painting. I have often said that for me, art is part of my spiritual practice. There is no hidden meaning that a viewer is supposed to puzzle out and “get.” Above all things, this painting is an illustration of nothing other than what it is in the eye of the beholder.

How does the sacred enter life? Is it an awareness or a wakening of a particular depth of meaning? Is it derived from experience? or is it something that is imposed by culture through convention or learning? In other words, does it arise from within or enter from without? 

In Shinto, the indigenous religion of Japan, an architectural structure called a torii is an entrance to a Shinto shrine. It marks a place where kami pass through and are welcomed. The torii is thus a liminal structure through which one moves from the mundane, the everyday presence of ordinary life, into a spiritual realm.

However the torii is not simply the doorway to a temple dividing the sacred from the profane. Torii are erected almost anywhere from a bustling business district to a remote natural vista. Passing through a torii or simply gazing through it like a window what one sees on one side is no different from what one sees on the other. And yet. . . the torii is a gateway. For what? For something we cannot understand and often fail to recognize.

The Trylon and Perisphere were monumental structures that served as the centerpiece of the 1939 New York World's Fair, held in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, Queens. Designed by architects Wallace Harrison and J. Andre Fouilhoux, these structures symbolized modernity and the theme of the fair, "Building the World of Tomorrow."

The Trylon was a spire-shaped tower, the tallest structure at the fair, 610 feet. The Perisphere had a 180 foot diameter  housing a diorama called "Democracity," depicting a utopian city. 

• The Trylon and Perisphere were constructed using steel framing and plaster board facades, designed to be temporary.
• The Perisphere featured the world's longest escalator at the time, connecting it to the Trylon.
• Inside the Perisphere, visitors viewed the diorama from a moving sidewalk, while a multi-image slide presentation was projected on the dome.
• The spire and the sphere are key emblems of human aspiration and optimism for the future.
• Both structures, built to be temporary, were demolished when the Fair closed.