Premonition of Old Town, San Diego
A.K.A. "The Fifteen Minute Break", oil on canvass, 1965, Greenwich Village period, NY, NY.
The first painting "Heat Dripping into the Desert" was a premonition of historic rains visiting a fire-devastated, drought stricken San Diego.
As with the other paintings, when I did "The 15 Minute Break", I didn't know it was a view I was seeing from the screen window of an apartment Jen and I would be renting 40 years later. As time goes by, I noticed more and more of these premonitions, and I'm beginning to recognize more and more the feeling I get when I recognize a scene from reality, something I painted decades ago.
This was a painting within a painting. I had done another painting, and it was hanging on the wall. I'll never forget it. I would be sitting on my bed in my small Greenwich Village studio, one of the few pieces of furniture I had, and over on the wall to the left, a painting that I had done was drying and hanging there, as I would put as much artwork on the walls as possible, so that I could study to get some ideas for subsequent work. And then it occurred to me when I was looking at this painting, which seem to be somewhat of a failure -- I mean, a lot of the stuff that I was putting in the painting just didn't seem to work out -- and it suddenly occurred to me that there was something nice happening on the horizon of this painting
So after a session of stretching canvasses one day, and coming up with a piece of canvas that was rather oblong in shape, I had a picture plane that I normally don't deal with: an extreme rectangle about 2 feet wide and 4 feet long. I usually work with a square canvas, or almost square and they were usually about 2.5' x 3'. So, I mean, there I was looking at that painting again, and I realized that in the scene I was looking at on the left side of the canvas would fit my oblong-shaped canvas that I'd stretched earlier.
So I placed the long canvas on the easel, long side up-and-down, and began to paint in the scene. I can somewhat remember the sensation to this day. It was in a hot desert area, but for some reason it was nice and cool at this time when I was seeing the view, and it was evening. I had a comforting feeling that it was going to be a better time; that the scene was a depiction of a time of arrival onto a better situation, and I would be able to do something, because it looked to me like my little Greenwich Village studio was coming to an end because things were escalating in Vietnam and all the guys in art school thought they were going to be the first students to be drafted, art students. Even though those in college were exempt, we wondered how long that would last.
So just last winter, only a few months ago from when this article is being written, I opened the window just after sunset and looked out beyond San Diego Bay. And there it was! It was the scene I had painted 40 years ago, give or take a few details, complete with the red winter sky as far south as it was going to get, reflected on the waters of San Diego Bay. The funny thing is I could barely see it from my window. I had to take off my ball cap and press the side of my face gently against the bug screen, and even then I could only see the scene with my right eye. This was a rented apartment, I didn't dare take the screen off, and it looked like that could only be done from outside on a tall ladder anyway.
That made it all the more strange. Here was a bizarre view of the bay that I could only see out of one eye, and in the dead of winter, which isn't really bad at all here in San Diego -- the temperatures just going to the forties, not even freezing -- at a time when the sun would set at almost the right angle to the window I'd be looking out of.
But it wasn't the scene. It was the situation. It was the sense of relief of having finally escaped all this governmental stuff both at the time I did the work and even later; this vulnerability of becoming the property of the state at any moment, even after three years of active duty. And also all the resultant setbacks of subsequent situations that never did seem, at the time, to go right, even though they did eventually work out -- in a way, a bizarre way at that. It is less a painting of the scene as it was the painting of a portal: a point of promise, where I would finally be getting away from the "Gulf-of-Tonkin-era curse that had befallen just about every young American man in the time of the sixties.
It was one of my mother's favorites and while she was having this one and several others framed, it got stolen. Every now and then that happened. A weird form of compliment, that, I suppose. Mom would visit the studio on weekends to help me tidy the place and see how I was doing, since at the time the folks lived on Long Island and it wasn't that far to drive into New York City. She took this photo once when she brought a camera, I think it's the only picture of the painting.
--Fine art, digital art, music, several voice introductions by me about my work, articles about my artwork and other topics such as sociology, the cosmos, economics, education, medicine, mathematics, poetry, humor, something I call premonitions, and a series about covered bridges, all by yours truly, the webmaster, Paul A.L. Hall. There are feedback, a website search engine, and exhaustive contents pages. Plus my weblogs are on site, an art school
A painting of where I would be forty years
afterward.
Copyright (c) by Paul A. L. Hall. All rights reserved.
A premonition of the eventual escape from the Gulf of Tonkin curse.
05 April, 2005