Visions of The Seven Walkways of Gold
"Visions of the Seven Walkways of Gold"
Acrylic on canvas.
June 1987 (The Caracas Period)
Evidently there are things in the work from the present time I painted it, the future of the time I painted it, and the past. A view from a Caracas hotel room.
The cylindrical objects in the painting on your left in the background are large plateaus. The first with the green on it's top actually is a somewhat abstract form of some bizarre sort of plateaus that actually do exist in Venezuela. Someone who saw the work at the Hotel Myriam actually was quite surprised that I had painted them having never seen them nor actually realized they existed. It turns out that my small hotel room was indeed a room with a view. He also mentioned that huge visible deposits of Lapis Lazuli do exist in the Andes Mountains in the vicinity of Peru.
I had seen those in my work, "Visions of the Forrest of Blue Lapis". I include here a photo of the acrilic painting and a preliminary study I did of the painting, after having pictured it in my mind's eye. Of course it's nothing like what I saw, but I wouldn't let that stop me from making some sort of effort to depict it. What I saw was the nude bather on a rock of lapis in the midst of a lake under an enormous vaulted ceiling of lapis lazuli. But I was under such extreme stress at the time in Venezuela that my first and only attempt turned out to be somewhat of the vision, but mostly a subconscious rendition of the approach of the Staten Island Ferry into one of the docks at Manhattan, the approach buttressed on both sides with enormous wooden pilings. A sight I had seen hundreds of times commuting from Staten Island to drive a taxi in Queens.
"Visions of the Forest of Blue Lapis", Caracas, Venezuela, June of 1987. Acrylic on canvas.
Quick pastel sketch for "The Visions of the Forest of Blue Lapis"
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At the time I did the paintings, I just did them. I knew by the time I did this painting though, The Seven Walkways, that definitely one of my paintings I had done of the Venezuelan series was of somewhere I would be at a future date of a remove of some twenty years, give or take a few. So here I am in Southern California, a place I had never planned to go, just four years shy of the twenty year average in the later part of 2003. What of the Walkways painting do I find here? I'll let you know later.
But what I saw back in Caracas in the vision pertaining to the golden structure which can't be seen in the painting (as it's done from far enough away to see the whole structure) were people. In fact I'm seeing it now as I write this. It's past 5 A.M. and I had another sleepless night. There were throngs of people on the decking of the seven ridges. It was as if the structure had it's own gravity, because no matter where they were, each of the people were perpendicular to the surface they were walking on.
They started their pilgrimage on the forest floor, shown in the painting in the far right toward the background, they proceeded to walk steadily up the paths on whatever path they took, any of all seven. When they reached the tip, they kept going. I don't pretend to understand, but I assume this structure to be some form of space travel where the individual stepping off the spire at the tips of each of the seven walkways of gold were then at that point transported instantly to destinations in the universe perhaps thousands of light years away.
If this were to be so, I assume this would be a phenomenon to take place in some far distant future, perhaps several millennia from now. According to relativity, therefore, if their transportation were instantaneous, it's sort of fascinating to realize that were this to happen they would already be there right now. Of course, light couldn't reach us from their location, if this was what I envisioned, until several thousand years from now depending on how far they went. The Universe, of course has in it, among other things, beyond trillions of galaxies like ours, the Milky Way.
But if there were a telescope in space with each of several thousand receptors in the parallax several thousand miles apart, it might be possible to spot some evidence of this were it to be so if such a telescope could pick up human activity at distances of three to five or so thousand light years. Of course you'd have to wait thousands of years for the light of that time to reach Earth. If that is what I was visualizing then that's really phenomenal. But I did see people and they were going one way: up.
I assumed the reason for the angling of the spires was so that the pilgrims would step off at the appropriate trajectory for their determined destination. The impression I got was that these human beings were in the process of peopling the Universe. I suppose this goes with the other painting I did that same month, "The Visions of the Cantilevered Walkways of Gold". And there was one more vision that I never had time to paint, because I decided abruptly to leave Venezuela. The title of the painting I wasn't able to do would have been "Visions of the Terraces of Silver". Which I saw from the air.
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Paul A. L. Hall
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2003 [Paul Hall]. All rights reserved.
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