Premonition of the Cliffs of Interstate Ninety-One
The Gold of Mount Ascutney
A Painting of the Cliffs of Interstate Ninety-One
Decades Before I-91 Existed
By artist Paul Hall
"Premonition of the Cliffs of
I 91,
The Gold of Mount Ascutney."
A view of the Quechee sky dancers of Vermont of the late '90's
from my Manhattan studio in New York City of the mid '60's
(decades before I 91 existed).
Oil on canvas, 1966.
I was fighting against this one. At the time I couldn't figure out why I seemed driven to paint the reddish crescent of cliffs between what I imagined to be two sections of forest.
Things keep coming up. Things that convince me more and more of the value of the artist. I assumed we had a niche, as it were, to fill for our audience, but now I'm coming to realize the potential value perhaps as of yet unrealized of the artist as a sort of visionary in a manor of speaking. It's the artist's role to reach out and try to push things beyond the limits of today's and yesterdays.
Of course, there are many artists who would not be able to do that. A lot of people are simply very good at a mechanical execution of skillful ability. I don't believe that they lack the special ability I'm referring to. It's more like they're fighting it for all they're worth, and that can be quite a bit, considering what some earn for cranking out work that does nothing more than mimic what's already there. But it doesn't have to. Even when a scene is painted realistically, it still can contain the element of timelessness, especially that of future timelessness in the segment of time it captures within it's picture plane.
When I painted this, I thought it must be some sort of jungle scene where the rain is so intense it denudes the hillsides but something else was happening. By my trying to get quiet and paint, getting away from the money minded busy world where frenetically they do things only to be busy, more than the painting was emerging. What also was coming through was something that had been forgotten for thousands of years. It was as though I was once again encountering the lost instincts of man.
Premonition: Driving south on Highway Ninety-one through Vermont, one can see to the right the imposing cliffs that have been blasted out of Mount Ascutney and this same view is implied in the work but as cliffs of red and yellow, not the usual pale greenish tans and grays of the sort of granite the area is renowned for. It was somewhat to my surprise that later I found out by word of mouth that Mount Ascutney is actually an ancient volcano as well as that there is actually gold there where hot gold-laden volcanic waters came in contact with the correct combinations of quartz and iron. That may be an explanation for the colors in the bare rock in the painting perhaps indicating igneous rock and gold. I have done other paintings that hint of premonitions of gold. Click here to see one of them, "Visions of the Cantilevered Walkways of Gold".
In the painting I supposed the figures dancing in the sky to be sheets of lightning which I thought I was adding as a source of color in that part of the picture plane. These forms are actually hot-air balloons which float over the cliffs once a year from nearby Quechee. I visualized them in my mind's eye at the time as sort of figures hanging on to the sky, viewing the balloons as "acrobats of the atmosphere".
Oh, there is also something rather ominous about the painting. In the place where the super highway pavement should be there is nothing but a thick overgrowth of vegetation. That's not the first time a premonition seems to involve more than one time depiction in the same work. There is a remove of several hours depicted in the work "Premonition of an Outer Banks Dawn". This could be a remove of several decades when interstate super highways might just be no more.
I have done a couple of drawings, drawings that might not be premonitions, but they do illustrate a time when travel was accomplished by more leisurely means. The New London Inn was a well established stop for stage coaches of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Lempster Meeting House was originally a church along a prominent colonial highway of the sixteen hundreds. In fact, I can safely foresee a time when mechanized transport as we know it will no longer be allowed.
Well, actually there was a premonition in the New London Inn drawing. I wondered why I had such difficulty drawing the tree top in the foreground. The next year that treetop was removed by a severe frost.
Click here to return to Voice Introduction for Oil Paintings, Page Six.
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Click here to return to "The Matrix of Economic Engines".
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Paul A. L. Hall
Copyright © 2003 [Paul Hall]. All rights reserved.
email: premonitions@paulhallart.com