Premonitions of Stormy Polynesia
Premonitions of Stormy Polynesia
Also called "Hurricane" (click to go there)
Oil on canvass, Greenwich Village Period, New York, 1966.
At first the painting was of a decorative canoe on a beach, then I painted over the canoe with the present view you see in above. When I was doing these paintings I was sort of oblivious to what they were. When I looked at them drying on the apartment walls, I had the feeling that I could escape the city by going through them into the paintings themselves.
I felt like I had gone overboard on Lewis Carol's "Alice Through the Looking Glass" concept of escaping one's world by entering a depiction of another. Now, I had never read the book, my mother read it to me when we lived amid the ruins of postwar Germany, on Wolfgang Strassa in Frankfurt. I read the Rupert the Bear comic book I had found in the closet when we moved there. Something else English.
I was still a kid of seven back in those days. I can't begin to describe the incredible concept I encountered when the passages of Looking Glass were being read to me about the girl climbing upon the mantle and pressing against the mirror then subsequently being able to poke her head through into the reverse world of the one she was in. It was kind of like feeling glass turn to water that was suspended vertically. From then on, it was something I very much wanted to do. For me, memories feel less like recollections and more like actual visits to the real past.
You see, at that age and younger, a child's mind produces it's own mild hallucinogens. But if we can step away from our fallible know-it-all attitudes for a second and realize that this world is a very fluid existence, we can begin to realize that it is possible that Alice's Mirror has a good chance of being actually existent in one form or another. I mean you've got to have more respect for these worlds than any of us normally tend to have. You can't just go ram-rodding your way through life and expect to really get anywhere. Life is so much more than that. If we're preoccupied with what we observe in the immediate frame of reference, we're only looking at the equipment for the journey.
So by having the story read to me and considering it in my seven-year-old's mind with the appropriate natural ingredients to use the passage as a vehicle to punctuate the full impression of the bigger story being relayed to me at that same time that 1953 Spring-time afternoon in the Germanic latitudes, something clicked. I connected. And I would subsequently find myself sitting in my Greenwich Village studio, circa 1966, with the sensation that I could go through my finished paintings on the wall, all the time amused at what seemed to be disproportionate imagination back then.
But now it's hind sight, which tacticians and politicians are wont to say is one hundred percent. And hindsight helps verify to me the impression of what they were I was experiencing when I did the paintings. The best term I can yet come up with is "premonitions". So in hindsight I can say that teen-age kid really did his job back there in 'sixty six. I was only nineteen and sensing some incredible urgency, put everything I could into getting that artwork done, not worrying about perfectionism, not worrying about realism. It was as though I was painting windows to my future.
If it may seem that I'm accounting this with an air of certainty, I'm not, really. I mean it's arguable that it could have been a coincidence that I did all these paintings that somehow coincided with subsequent travels, but the more I consider these past works of art of mine, the more convinced I become of such certainty. I do know that I definitely had the premonition that I would travel extensively, often with little more than a toothbrush and a guitar. The guitar I sensed, the toothbrush I insisted upon.
But it's so very exciting to come to the realization that it's all somehow connected. That I went through the painting.
It was a busy morning at the Chief's hut. In those days, it was a building without walls, built in the traditional way. Visitors sat at the fourth pole from the left of the entrance. There I was helping out. At that time in early 1979, I was oblivious of the painting I had done thirteen years earlier. For all I knew, my art career was over, the rug jerked out from under me by the so-called "Vietnam Era".
I had done three oil paintings in Fiji before I was kicked out by the immigrations officials almost a year earlier. They would be stolen in Indonesia in 1983. I had done a series of drawings in Samoa after I left the Chief's village. They were lost along the way just like most of my artwork. But that morning in that Samoan village, everyone was getting ready for a storm. A tropical storm. It hit that afternoon.
The house without walls had a hidden quality I hadn't noticed. It really did have walls, only they were folded up in the roof area. They were hand-made out of coconut tree leaves which are huge. In fact the whole branch is like a leaf. The people had woven them in such a way that they slid down on lines like Venetian blinds and became walls. It was an ingenious devise. On a normal day at twilight you could see the chief's color TV miles away while you walked the road approaching his house but this was not a normal day. This day the house had walls.
I imagined that these walls would be defenseless in the brunt of a tropical storm but they held quite well. It was almost a cozy feeling as the storm hit it's peak and everything remained intact. You had to be there to see it. I wonder if the western-style house we later built next door would have held out as well.
It's taken me this long to realize that perhaps it was this storm I was depicting back in the 1966 Greenwich Village studio. Like a Nostradamus of my own future, like an Alice Through the Looking Glass, I depicted the island, the storm, the coconut tree leaves, and the canoe the ancestors arrived in which was buried in the past.
Click here to go to the Premonitions table of contents.
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Paul Hall Art, http://www.paulhallart.com, is authored and created by the artist, Paul A. L. Hall
Copyright © 2003 by Paul A. L. Hall. All rights reserved.
email address: art@paulhallart.com