PREMONITIONS.
Introduction :
About artwork that foresees the future, premonitions in the artwork of Paul Hall, elements that have occurred in the abstract expressionist or surrealist expressionist techniques in the artwork of artist Paul Hall that successfully predicted future situations at an average remove of one or two decades, premonitions that have happened, the usefulness of intuitive artists, surprising facets of abstract expressionism, hindsight of artwork over a span of 36 years verifies something in certain early works of the future.
Evidence of Actual Premonitions (the "premonitive")
The signs of the phenomenon that triggers premonitions are all around us. They exist in the random world; patterns emerging out of the seemingly haphazard. The problem is to see what they're saying. One would, out of feeling less than comfortable about the "premonitive" prefer to conclude that it is saying nothing. But everything says something. Everything has a voice. In a sense there are no accidents. There is after all some sort of tomatalogical blend in the dimension of matter and time between that which is and however many combinations of could-be's to point in some wispy way to the would-be's. The determination behind the elements of inevitability that make up what we sense to be the future is so powerful that at least at certain points these combinations tend to converge in some way that is irreversible.
And so I have a chance to share this with you, considering how unlikely it is that you would even so much as have had the time to read this, and that it seems to be adrift in a sea of millions of websites all clambering for your attention.
During break time at the School of Visual Arts on East 23rd Street in New York City back in '65 in the cafeteria (during the first three weeks of a month when I could afford something to eat), I'd get a chocolate covered doughnut and a cup of coffee and often I would sprinkle a bit of salt on the black Formica table top in front of me.
Salt, sodium chloride, is nice to look at because it's a crystal that forms a perfect cube (at least the salt they served in that 1965 cafeteria did). Anyway, it usually does because that's it's "lattice". After looking at the cubes for a while, I then would look at the patterns of the salt crystals as they fell randomly. Each time the crystals fell their random pattern emulated the constellations in the night skies.
As I grew up I spent a lot of time looking at the stars. The "light pollution" of urban sprawl wasn't so bad in the early 1960's and one could see pretty clearly. I've studied that pattern in the painting "Visions of the Cantilevered Walkways of Gold" that I did back in 1987 in Caracas, Venezuela. If you click on the link really quick you can see what I mean. If you sit back and try to see the whole painting, the stars in the work will begin to acquire for you an almost familiar "voice" as it were. Of course you must realize the picture is a medium quality jpeg over the net; the real painting has a round moon and straight lines (not jagged ones).
Of course hindsight is one hundred percent. With that benefit I'm able to relate the following collections of "premonitions". All I can say is that I painted them as if I were there and finally, usually about 20 years after they were painted, is seems in some cases that, yes, I kind of was there. The market place in Jakarta, the foggy morning in The Outer Banks, the balloon floating over the cliffs if I 91, the hilltop at Mt. Roskill.
It often makes me shudder when I see the mountains of artwork being painstakingly churned out that do nothing more than copy their immediate reality, what is seen, to the minutest possible detail. Of course there is a time and place for that as well, but we must not forget the greater task of art and that is to stretch our vision to greater worlds which also exist before our heretofore unsuspecting eyes.
Premonition: The true color of the unknown violin was visualized. At the time it was a brownish dull color, which according to the man who restored it seventeen years after the painting was completed, Charles Bere of London, the brownish color the violin had at the time the night club violinist had it was due to neglect and being played constantly in the atmosphere of cigarette and cigar smoke in the nightclubs and so on over the years that the violinist had it.
At the time I decided to paint it as I saw it in my mind's eye, so to speak, as a vibrant living thing and so I used various hues of red. After the restoration, it turned out that it really was made of a lovely but unusually red wood.
The painting might go further in somehow using aesthetics to enable us to visualize a reason why the Stradivarius instruments sound so beautiful. If you see the painting, you will notice the attention I gave to the veins of energy flowing through the wood. At the time I didn't realize I was depicting a Stradivarius, only that I was trying to show the life of the sound pulsating through the instrument.
Premonition: The scene depicted here matches remarkably the scene that came to view as I got back to the room I was renting in Mount Roskill, a suburb of Auckland, New Zealand. I used to sing in downtown Auckland and had to commute to my room on foot. It was a long walk involving a small shortcut over a brook and between a few blocks of private land along the boundaries where there was a right of way. One night four white horses grazing on one of the properties trotted up to me at the fence and on the way trotted round and round in a circle three times and then, in a line, came to the fence, the breath from their nostrils steaming in small straight jets of cloud in the late evening moonlight.
The work called the traveler, done in 1964 or so, was actually a self portrait. I knew that I would be traveling or at least I had the feeling that I would. Nevertheless, at the time I felt the painting to be sort of whimsical but I completed it nevertheless. But as I rounded that hilltop in Mount Roskill each evening, I could recall the painting done some twenty-one years earlier. In reality, the tree was actually a telephone pole, and the staff was a guitar and the date was Autumn of 1985. In the mid ground, the bright paint was the glow of the suburban New Zealand homes with their lights lit at that time of the evening. In the distance the brushstroke caught rather accurately the shape of a distant hilltop and it's unusual stand of majestic trees.
As I've felt many times, it wasn't only a sense of dejavue, but rather more like "deja painted".
Premonition of I 91.
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.
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 Quichee. 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".
Premonition of Tober
Detail: Drawing of "Little Blue Clay Dog"
Detail taken from the drawing "Figurines from the Mother's Piano-Top"
Bethel, Connecticut, 1990
Premonition: When I was ten years old I did a small sculpture of a dog which closely resembles a pet dog I would later own when I was fifteen, "Tober". Having Tober around in those days was a privilege. His being there helped to realize that there may be something about inter species communications. I was able to apply what I learned later with the black wolf in the Forret du Rennes (I think that's the forest, it's hard to remember the name for some reason) on the ancient king's highway between Paris and Les Mollieres back in 1982.
Now, there's not supposed to be any more wolves in France, I suppose. But this animal was far too big to be a dog. Any breeds I'm aware of that are that size have different forms. He stayed with me for miles and then when I took out my boef burgenion, large cubed beef, beneath the ancient oaks, and placed it on the glowing coals of a small cook fire of oak twigs, he stood and watched. I held out some beef for him but at that point he walked away.
Tober was a good friend and in a special way, a sort of teacher as well. Even though he long since passed away, a victim of a busy roadway, I see him every now and then in dreams. I just saw him a couple of months ago (2003) since we moved to Southern California.
In the drawing "Figurines from the Mother's Piano-Top", I was able to do a drawing of the figurine.
It was also during that time (age ten) that I realized I would be playing the harmonica. It kept me going during those long bus rides home through the Fort Mede radar testing installations of the fifties.
Click here to return to the mini article of the painting "Realization".
Premonition of an Outer Banks Dawn.
Link to go to the special "Outer Banks Dawn" page: Premonition of an Outer Banks Dawn
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, North Carolina day.
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Paul A. L. Hall
Copyright © 2003 [Paul Hall]. All rights reserved.
email: premonitions@paulhallart.com