Premonition of Mount Roskill, New Zealand
"The Traveler"
Also known as "Premonition of Mount Roskill, New Zealand"
Painted by artist in 1964 (The Connecticut Period).
Oil on Canvas
This work in a primitive painting, one of the first of the stretched canvases I did as a teenager in the basement of my parent's home in Connecticut. At that point, I knew I would somehow have to do a lot of traveling although that's not what I really wanted to do.
You know, when I mention the realization that I was actually doing artwork that depicted future destinations in which I would find myself, and what I'm describing here is an "ability", I'm not implying here that I have some unique ability that would set me apart from the rest of humanity as something special. Maybe this might shock you, but my impression is that this ability to envision "premonitions" is inherent in all human beings. That's right. Maybe you can get some "premonitions" as well. I have found in my travels, just as the painting above of the traveler implies, that the human being has many incredibly extraordinary abilities.
It's just that, due to extraordinary conditions, I somehow found myself able to just step out of the picture of everyday life. It gave me a chance to step back and get these premonitions, even though at the time, I didn't realize it. Fortunately, the act of painting kept my busy side occupied just enough to let it flow and actually get something more than just a picture. All the pioneers in art before me that had established expressionism and abstract art had given me the confidence not to really worry about the realism of the work. Were I to sharpen the realism it would have displaced the visionary aspect of the painting that had to really flow through before it got "erased" by the frenetic world around me.
The painting, when done, was set aside and nothing more was thought of it. I had done this work as I seemed driven to, by some compulsion and thrill to paint. Of course, history and everything else that can be vaguely described as such was, in a symbolic sense, mind you, waiting, as it were, in the wings ready to thwart such creativity not just in me but in millions, perhaps, of others. It was a quiet time of cold war brinkmanship and things were hovering between the Korean Conflict and the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. The hippy movement was to rob the artist of the one thing he or she could fall back on to keep working in the face of poverty: the Bohemian Lifestyle. Other things like aids and resistant T.B. and such things took out another huge chunk of the creative masterminds of the 20th century.
But, as I was saying, armed with the assurance that I didn't have to worry about the accuracy of the painting and that I could proceed without reservation regardless of how primitive or naive I might be; not having to mask myself behind some sort of polished accomplished and trained perfectionism, I could then get on with the business of producing something different than the norm in the world of historic art. I would face the blank canvass, which I myself had, at what was to me not a little trouble preparing and quite expensive, it was money in the blank. Now, I've heard stories of people staring into crystal balls and all that. But next time, try a blank stretched canvass.
So there it was, sure enough. I thought it was just an inspiration to set down some colors and do my best to as quickly as possible before the "inspiration" melted away, get it down on canvass. So twenty years later it socked me right in the face (I'm searching for metaphors, here). I had been forced to walk something like I guess ten miles each way to downtown Auckland from my rented room in the suburbs, Mount Roskill, and when I got to the top of the big hill, it might have been a small mountain, Auckland exists on a number of volcanoes, actually, being on one extreme of the notorious "Ring of Fire" around the Pacific. I was making enough to get by with my street singing downtown, but that meant no bus rides or I couldn't make ends meet. Then on top of that high hill, well, it took repeated trips of the daily walk to get me over the sense of denial, but, sure enough, it was the scene I had painted twenty years earlier.
Except there were some things I misrepresented in the painting, for example, the walking staff of the traveler was actually a guitar, the red hatband was actually earphones for a tape recorder (it was in the days before affordable walkmans), instead of a tree the vertical object was a telephone pole with a street lamp attached. But the rest of it was accurate, including the time of day I would be getting back, just after sundown when the lights were beginning to go on in all the houses in the distance.
The extraordinary abilities in human beings (and I assume there to be far more than this one ability to see ahead) are never realized because people demean themselves by being just too damn busy to see, as I so often quip in my economic section, beyond their noses. Did you ever think that life was so much more than stuffing your face and running in the rat race? I mean., just look at what you as a collective have done to the English language, for example. It's going the same way as Latin and Greek. You've hacked it to death, practically until just about the only thing it's good for is everyday business and coaching associates in the training room. I call it Hamburger English, a powerless, wimp language and it's almost useless to me right now trying to describe this phenomenon of common human ability. There are just no words in common usage to begin to describe these things. It would have been easier to explain in the type of ancient Greek the fishermen and shepherds spoke.
Maybe the uncommon thing I did was somehow take the time to realize that there really was something there. In a world like ours these days, that's a very, very hard thing to do. It means stepping out of everything your brain imagines will bring success and at least enough prosperity to survive, and just taking a good hard look at thing, the way an artist has to do when doing a sketch of something.
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