Premonition
of an Outer Banks Dawn
By
artist Paul Hall
Premonitions of an Outer Banks Dawn
...or as I used to call it, "The Oucher Bonkos"
Oil on gesso-prime film only (the cardboard backing long since
peeled away).
early 1970 (The Oakland Period)
Article by the artist, Paul Hall:
Maybe it was because of our one meal a day of rice and cheese and while I was painting this I was imagining two eggs sunny side up at the Redwood Café down the street from our leaky little rented shack on Broadway in Oakland, California back in the late nineteen sixties, but it was another case of aesthetic deja vue (or was it Degas vous?!) when I stood out there that morning over twenty years later and saw the early sun beaming through the thick fog over the dense indigenous vegetation of Kitty Hawk out there in the Outer Banks of the state of North Carolina.
It's a real version of Lewis Carols' "Alice Through the Looking Glass". When I painted these works of art in a sort of semi abstract expressionist style, I would tend to feel almost as though I could actually approach and enter them and become a participant of the world I was depicting. As Joyce Cary pointed out, there is a distinct connection between art and reality that is deeply rooted in intuition. As I point out, "intuition, not institution".
Societies and institutions as well as persons tend to force the artist into the miniscule role of producers of cute little pictures and then still others demand they produce a flow of experimentation at once as pointless as it is grotesque. But this is all a product of the academization of the artist ; such things as maximums, minimums, balance, harmony, discord, and so on. It is really as ridiculous as, say, requiring that an artist always paint in the same "style" as it were; that the artist should never go through a rose period as well as a blue period, in other words. To force or at best coerce to stereotype, to pigeonhole, to cheapen.
Here I reach into a part of the body beyond the limitations of the intelligence of the gray matter of the brain. The brain of the true artist is not his or her boss. We are helping the rest of you to find out that there is so much more to being alive. At least I feel I can sincerely make such a statement without being arrogant or presumptive because I am encountering on a regular basis enough evidence that there is really something to all this after all and that the true artist has a role far beyond what was originally imagined of him or her.
I got to the Outer Banks from Sydney, Australia just in time to help my aging mother return from thence to her property in Bethel, Connecticut, only to return to the Outer Banks several years later after she sold her Connecticut house. It was there where, against my better judgment, or so it seems, I got a job with The Outer Banks Moving and Storage Company at that time owned by it's founder, Bob Collettie. Months later I found myself on a typical moving job and we had just arrived at the customer's old house to pack the vans for this particular move.
As I waited for the truck to back up the driveway, I stood there astonished to watch the sunlight peeking through the thick fog. It was just like my painting done in Oakland during my 1969-1970 Oakland period of painting. It almost seems as though I had painted that in there, too: In the foreground in a sunburned reddish tan, is a figure that also seems astonished at the sight of an almost normal Outer Banks day.
Oh, one more thing. You may ask if this scene isn't really other worldly, because the planet in the painting clearly has two yellow suns. Actually, it's the same sun painted at two times. The first is the sun in position when we arrived at the customer's house, and the second was it's position when we had loaded up and were leaving.
Click on any of the following to go there:
The Premonitions table of contents
The Premonitions Introduction page
Paul A. L. Hall
Copyright © 2003 [Paul Hall]. All rights reserved.
email: premonitions@paulhallart.com