Planet of Deep Color
"Planet of Deep
Color"
Oil on canvass,
1965 (The Greenwich Village Period).
The School of Visual Arts had a special classroom set aside and included a model for those who wanted to do extra work after school. That's where I did this painting. It's kind of a series which I have come to call my "Nude on the Planet" series, in which I combine the realism and representationalistic approach to rendering the human figure in the nude, but placing them in an abstract expressionist landscape, much like the abstract landscapes of an artist whose work I admired, Wasilli Kandinski. Now I can't say I was influenced by Kandinski, because I had been doing the abstract landscape before I heard of him, but I was glad to see somebody else was working in the genre.
I had the good fortune of being able to see an incredible array of live art (actual paintings themselves on display and not mere reproductions or photographs) in one of the major art capitals of the world, New York City. Mainly I would go quite regularly to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, since they had extended the courtesy, at least in those days, of allowing School of Visual Arts students to visit for free. I went several times a week, having to walk, too poor to afford the subway or bus.
I almost always went to see the Kandinski works. They had an eerie quality to them as the a la prima colors sometimes seemed to float as forms above the implied landscapes, interacting with the colors and forms around them. But the main thing seemed to be the energy. An almost assertive, peering, observant energy. As in my article "The Voice of the Pigments", we knew of the significance and importance of color. Especially the kinds of color that oil paint with it's medley of traditional and contemporary pigments afforded us. Kandinski is convinced of their spirituality. My impression is that how he views color and how it's arrayed is that it serves as a sort of gateway of comprehension to other invisible worlds that also comprise the tactile one we see. I think of it as a sort of food -- for what? I guess it is something sort of spiritual at that. The vision is linked directly to the endocrine system and immediately the gives the body something to work with, including the mind in the formation of nerve tissue that makes permanent memory.
I used to call it energy feed. The metaphor I chose for the gallery and museum was "visual gymnasiums". I even wrote a song about it. I thought it pertinent, so I put it on the page as the background sound. It should start up in a few minutes if your browser does sound. I know Microsoft Internet Explorer, I.E. for short, will do it. You can get the latest one free from the Microsoft web site. If background sound annoys you, sorry. Someday I'll learn enough code to include an off button, but for now you'll have to turn off the speakers temporarily if you don't want the song. It's called "Energy Thinks", and though some think it outrageous, it's my some-think-preposterous postulation that ours is a reasoning universe.
Here are the words:
"Energy thinks. And It's smarter than you. But then, you must think with energy too. If you've got a crisis and things have gone wrong, it's maybe you're weak when you thought you were strong. So feed with the energy feed. It's done with the heart, not with the mouth. Lifetimes of mystery. Don't ever doubt. The surface deceptive is all round about. Energy thinks and it teaches the fact. They say the truth hurts, but don't ever look back. In the world of the take, there's also the give. Though you've come to existence, you must choose to live. So feed with the energy feed. It's done with the heart and not with the mouth. Lifetimes of mystery, don't ever doubt. The surface deceptive is all round about.
An interesting effect of the use of color was the time I did a "Drive-Through Painting". That's right. It was one-third of a mile long and people drove through it. We artists are notorious for our exploits, sometimes, that can go right off the scale. At the time I was living in a garage and noticed that, at night, drivers on a little two-lane country road very close to chez-moi were indulging in what could only be described as motoring anarchism.. People were speeding. Some going over eighty in a thirty-five mph zone. One day a guy doing some crazy speed only controllable if you manage to keep the car on the tar, veered one foot off the road to the right, ran over the notorious maple root I was so worried about (premonitions, you know), skimmed the following bank which made him a driver-side two wheeler, arched back across the road on a trajectory straight for the garage.
I ran outside and there he was with his front bumper stuck on a sentinel boulder twenty feet from the building itself, spinning his tires trying to get back to the road. I ascertained the key area to apply minimal force, whereby harnessing the main energy of the spinning wheels and with a little effort, he was free, grateful, and on his way before the police got there. By then I was known at HQ of our men-in-blue as the guy with the perpetual rain cloud over his head. What can I say? Art has it's enemies. Whatever.
One day I was pruning a branch in front of the garage and a passing motorist reported me as a terrorist brandishing a pistol (it was a saw, idiot, a saw), another time I was reported by a distant resident because, not owning a car, I was walking twelve miles each way on the public sidewalk to a job I was holding down as a mechanical assembler. That's how I got the money to go to Venezuela to do "The Caracas Period" artwork.
Then there was the other stuff like the night of the paint-ball attack. Oh, man. And this place wasn't as bad as others I've been to. You've got to have a sense of humor, because sometimes things get so preposterous, they get really funny.
So anyway, back to the problem with the speeders. The law couldn't really handle it, there were too many, and they feared being rear-ended as they waited by the roadside. I mean, you can't blame them. They're doing their job but they seriously had enough on their plate. So I did a study of the situation and discovered that one big problem seemed to be, that at night time, the driver was subjected to an actual impoverished environment. Subconsciously, they wanted to get through it as quickly as possible, because it may be shown that boredom actually does have an adverse effect on the mind after all, making a situation on the night road where a sort of survival instinct kicks in. I depicted the dilemma in my painting, "The Night Drive".
The Night Driver, 1965. Click thumbnail to see enlargement, backspace key to
return.
So I came up with a concept using my idea of the scientific discipline of "applied aesthetics", in which I developed the passive aesthetic roadway definition device. This is something that will not distract the driver, but exist only on the peripheral of awareness, serving to define the environment through which the driver and passengers are passing in a night time headlight-lit situation. But it provides the observers with enough roadway enhancement to furnish the individual with enough environmental enrichment to function in safe (or suitably enriched) operational mental parameters. This may arouse skepticism, since these parameters are really heretofore unestablished, but I am persuaded that in deficient stimulus situations, the memory and higher functions of the intellect are actually successively and irrevocably destroyed. Very few have recognized aesthetics, or art, as it were, as a safety device. Like you're going to hire a Monet to make a do-not-enter sign. Well, why not? Has anyone considered that?
So I actually did a drive-through painting on the road, extending one-third of a mile, with specially determined pinpoints of unobtrusive light using the headlamps of oncoming vehicles. I used glazes of actual fine arts pigments such as yellow ocre, thalo blue, alizarin crimson and so on. The results were astounding. No one ever speeded through that section ever again. Until I moved on and the vandals picked it clean. The speed limit was thirty-five miles per hour, but everyone went fifteen. Anyone abusing substance and driving that road found themselves unable to continue and would avoid it or proceed at vastly reduced speeds, whereas normal unintoxicaed persons had no trouble at all.
At the high point of my prominent display, the area near the garage which I was most concerned about, well, I called that the "voluntary stop sign". For no reason at all, almost every vehicle stopped for an average of seven seconds at that point. One lady said it was as though the extra terrestrials had landed and left a present. I had obtained some sort of unwanted notoriety. I became known, in nearby Danbury as "The Glimmeister". I got write-ups in two local papers. The business of the seven eleven at the bottom of the road went up exponentially. Vehicles appeared from all over the county. Drivers would pull over and wait their turn to drive the road without oncoming headlights spoiling their drive. This is what the people needed. The poor guys needed some art in their lives.
One interesting side effect is that it cured depression. People would drive the road at night because they noticed that it relieved boughts of depression. Someone remarked that whenever she felt depressed, she would visit the road. Aha! So you thought art was useless, eh? People have been trying to deal with winter seasonal disorder for years, trying to treat it by sitting patients down in front of huge banks of lights. It's not in the quanta of the external candle power, but in the quanta of the stimuli on the optic nerve. Minimal light stimulating the cones of color reception in a nocturnal situation with the iris dilated actually causes more optic nerve stimuli than placing the subject in front of a bank of fluorescent light. You've been trying to simulate the sun when you needed to simulate pre-dawn refraction that just begins to show color.
So go ahead, you idiots. Live in a world without art and artists, of bare walls and garish thoughtless expanses of one cheap synthetic color after another for advertising or signing only. See what it gets you. A world full of mindlessness where reason destroys itself as a survival mechanism in impoverished environments. And there's something worse. The impoverished environment effects the stability of the genetic code. So now you're not only aberrating, you're mutating as well. One evidence of this is the spread and increase of so-called "environmental illness". And where do you think your one plague a year is coming from? Impoverished environments and down the Silk Road. So what am I saying. I'm saying you've got a problem here.
But I digress. Let's wind things up.
In this work I have taken the study of this model in this work into a different realm of color, energy and form. Things that stimulate us to bring out the best in our civilization. I mean... what's left of it. As I was working on in an essay called "The Homogenous Society", civilization seems to work best when the citizens form a mix of disparate genetic backgrounds. Yet these disparate elements also need certain stabilizing elements such as, perhaps, a visual environment that reflects the colors and forms of their genetic pasts to help bring them foreword into their genetic future. As I learned in visual physiology during my studies at Oxford University, the visual plays a pivotal role in the development and stability of any society of individuals.
Click here to return to same place in Greenwich Village Period thumbnails
Click here to return to the same place in Voice Introduction for Oil Paintings, Page Six
Click here to return to the English Girl digital art project page.
Click on the following links to go there:
Copyright © 2003 [Paul Hall]. All rights reserved.
email address: art@paulhallart.com