Spring always gets good press everywhere, but it does especially well in south-western Tennessee where the mighty Mississippi is not only a river, but also our state line and our climate-control system. Our summers, being definitely southern and southern hot, are more intolerable even than most because of the Big Muddy and its gift of stifling humidity. Our winters, while moderate-rarely below 20– can none the less flip within an hour into sleet and ice storms of sometimes impressive proportions, also thanks in large part to the river. Autumn, which is my favorite of all of them, saunters through our parts being always a little dusty and always just a little too hot for comfort until that moment comes when suddenly winter is back, icy winds and all.
But spring is another matter. If the South is tough in the summer, it is embarrassingly self-indulgent and opulent in the spring when everything turns lush and the sun is only pleasingly warm and the rains are by and large predictable and transient. Spring is our out-doors season in Memphis, Tennessee. Our urban life, in the spring, is one festival right after another from early April through mid-June. Truth told, there are sometimes even as many as a half dozen big festivals or parades or street fairs going on more or less simultaneously during those months. But it is the art shows that have absorbed my interest this spring. That is undoubtedly due to the fact that Sam and I have been to three or four really stellar ones in the last few days.
Art shows in the spring may, for all of the reasons above, be a Memphis custom, but ours are also as various in format and ambiance as anyone could possibly imagine. Two of this season’s have particularly lingered in my thoughts. Both artists are life-long West Tennesseans, so they share a common regional history and culture. Both are painters, so they share a medium as well. Likewise, both are fairly established, commanding a supportive audience for their work. After that, they are remarkably different. But it is not so much the nature of their differences that has continued for several days now to absorb me. Rather it is the implications of them.
One of the shows was in a commercial gallery and the other was an outdoors showing in a park-like space with canvases on easels rather than walls. One was elegantly lighted…actually lighted to perfection. The other was what it was…paintings bathed in sun and tempered by the shadow of a passing cloud or tossing tree branch. Both contained representational work… a great deal in the open-air show with fewer such in the gallery showing…but the bulk of the canvases in both shows was deeply interpretive studies in color and outline.
The gallery pieces employed subtle shadings of grays and yellows to open depth into the center of largely non-representational experience. Their surfaces were various with sometimes the tracings of a brush and other times the solid lay-down of a pallet knife or the almost-not-there swiping of a rag just ever so lightly over an area of canvas. They were as peaceful as a city loft, high above the roar of urban noise and wrapped in the steely beauty of simple, calming architecture.
The open-air pieces were greens and reds and delineating browns. Their content–fields, trees, and earth-was more mythic than tranquil; and the canvases were vibrant with an immediacy and a constancy that pulled the heart out from itself and into the strange impermanence of our humanness upon an immortal earth.
The collected or aggregate work of an artist always gives us, ultimately, the world-view, the interior realities, the “truth,” so to speak, of the artist himself or herself. In the same way, of course, the collected work of an author, in the final analysis, really gives us the author-his or her interior realities, his or her “world,” his or her truth. None of us looking, as did our two Memphis artists, at the same physical objects, sees the same essence. Nor does any one of us choose from physical reality the same list of essences to bring in into ourselves as subjective furniture.
That is why every one of us is, of course, a distinct creation or cosmos, unique unto itself and skin-bound unless purposefully and energetically shared….which-obvious as it may seem and naïve as it may sound-I now understand to be at the very root of why the words of Jesus rendered into Sayings format has been so haunting for me all these many, many months: Read them, and there, spread out before you, is His “world” or interior or world-view or truth or whatever other word we may choose to employ. Read them, and you are in.
Shocking.
