Hurricane
Also titled "Premonitions of Stormy Polynesia" (click to go there)
Oil on canvass, Greenwich Village Period, New York, 1966.
This was one of the bunch of paintings I got done back in my apartment in the West Village in New York City when I was going to the School of Visual Arts back in the '65-'66 college year. Unbeknownst to me, it was to be my best year ever (so far, at least) for artwork. I was pouring it on, maybe with the premonition that I had to make the most of a brief time of development.
I thought it was only the beginning of about six years of school and that I would come out with a master of fine arts degree. Actually it was going to be just that year. I had been accepted to the Rhode Island School of Design, but they were full that year and would have taken me the following year, so I was going to do one year at the School of Visual Arts. But then it got all complicated as I had to get an apartment and ended up with a three year lease. Which I did have to break anyway.
Maybe that's why I did so many paintings about storms and turbulence. Could it be that I saw it coming? What I mean is, this painting is done over another one: a peaceful scene of a decorated dug-out canoe on a beach. You can still see part of the bow of the canoe next to the tree stump on the left. I painted over decoratism with expressionism. It was a paint in the what next.
This earlier work, done about a half year earlier, shows what the painting underneath might have looked a bit like. Click to see enlargement.
That enabled me to really get in there with my favorite brushes: hogs hair brights, sizes seven through four. I try to mix plenty of color with a clean pallet knife, keeping a brush load of most colors in my left fist while holding the palette. I call it the sputnik. Sometimes I hold at least eleven brushes at once. At least that's what I did. Wonder what I'll do next.
I was able to work with several blue pigments. I forgot what I used there but it looks like at least two: cobalt and Prussian blue. But it was indeed a stormy scene. Hard to tell if I was preoccupied with the troublous times or just that a stormy scene can be very expressive.
It was indeed a portent of troubled times, at least for me. 1966 began the period of the escalation of the Vietnam conflict. We were on the escalator. Escalator alligator.
The buzz of every male in his twenties at art school was that it was the beginning of World War Three. Dominos would fall. Everyone except medical and engineering students would get drafted or so many of us thought. There were plans of trips to Canada or Sweden by many.
My solution was a desperate one and that was to join the army. I decided to get it over with; to jump in there and find what was what. There was a lot more, like questionable survivability, but maybe it's not good to write too much about it.
During my service I became an information specialist and was stationed on the south base of Fort Myers, part of the estates Robert E. Lee lost after the Civil War. If one walked through a tunnel going under a highway, one could walk from the south base in those days to the renowned Pentagon. Now the south base no longer exists and is rather a part of Arlington Cemetery.
I had enlisted for infantry but was injured in training. I used to spit shine my boots and I tried to jump a creek instead of wading in the mud. It wasn't that bad a jump. The bank was three feet higher on the side I jumped than the opposite bank and eight feet wide. We were in what is called "rough march" which just about means the whole company moved along as if it were a crowd on a walkathon.
When the men came to the creek they scrambled down the three feet bank (it was like monkey in the bank), waded across the shallow stream, made their way across the couple of feet of deep mud and walked up the opposite bank and that was that. When I got there in my nice shiny boots, I figured I could jump the whole thing. So I leapt. I can still remember the wind whistling underneath my steel pot on my head and watching my landing spot. The left knee shot out to the side and I was on the ground dealing with intense pain and embarrassment.
I could remember others landing around me. They had followed my lead, although none of them were injured. What was my problem. You want to know? Yoga. Yup. Throughout my youth, I sat in the full lotus. It had stretched the ligaments in my knees. So is yoga wrong? I think those boys over there were on to something, but, like everything else, they had to go and make a religion out of it.
Your brain has the blueprint, in a crass manor of putting it, to the rest of your body. If you can concentrate in just the right inexplicable way, you can connect your blueprint with the body. If somehow you can "connect", the body will be healed of any malfunction or problem. So let me put it this way: everybody is wrong, however sometimes they hit on something right. One thing they did right was they got quiet. Even if they had to humble themselves and go around with a beggar bowl.
In my travels I found something "gotten right" as it were, in every culture. That doesn't make them holy men. I mean, if that's your religion and your culture, that's your choice and your view. I've tried to avoid such extravagances as preferences and opinions. The objective observation I've had to force myself to admit to above my personal dissention is that all of us are wrong. To assume perfection is to deny discovery. That's a horribly dull way to eke out and existence.
So the full lotus weakened my knees. But, man, once you got those ligaments stretched it was sure a comfortable way to sit. But after that episode, I started sitting normally and eventually the knees tightened up, though the left knee is permanently injured. So eventually I ended up in Washington, D.C. in on-the-job training for what they called an "information specialist". A skill I've been using to this day. The dissemination of information.
My teacher used to say to me it seemed every day, in the second grade, "...look before you leap." Which is why I didn't turn down the Information job. I had to punctuate my second grade teacher's good advise with a bit of hard experience concerning the jump across that Fort Jackson creek. It must've worked. I made it through my two hundred thousand mile, twenty-year world travels without jumping.
During my tenure in the Washington area, I got some artwork done at the Corcoran Gallery next to the White House. So I was able to continue art school by being an information specialist at nearby Army installations during the day while attending night classes at the Corcoran School of Art.
That's where I drew "Performance"
and painted "Planet of Flowers".
and also did some far-out stuff.
A View Beyond The Edge of the Universe
One of them, "A View Beyond the Edge of the Universe", is a painting of what I saw when at night I lay outside my barracks on a bench occasionally in an effort to see beyond all the entirety of outer space. It was a painting I did at school after class of an empty bed, actually part of the stage on which the model would recline to pose for paintings during classes. But since then there was no model, so I painted in the "memory" into the reality. The furniture was there, but the blue waves of eternity were a memory of what I saw.
But I digress. Anyway, Hurricane was done at a time when I foresaw that my little studio in New York would be no more. It's a disturbing feeling, you know? I really knew better than to play with ideas like being the heir apparent to the greatest culture in all history and stuff like that. The only heir to that nonsense was to be the hamburger and a bottle in the shape of May West's figure.
And the "great culture" thing? Well, it didn't happen. At least not in my book. You're entitled to your opinion, kid, but that doesn't change reality. It's like the Romans, only this time there are no ancient Greeks to imitate. So you've got a roof over your head and food on your table. Who am I to argue with that? Get on with your everyday life and your cheap skate pop culture and go to oblivion. If there's any future to this mode of politicized mankind, a future people would be more interested in the dark ages than you with your plastic culture and your junk civilization.
In my painting, "Hurricane" as with others that are now lost, I repeat the theme of the invisible storm out there, blowing everything that isn't attached to something substantial to bits. This recurs in my later painting "Tree Storm"
Tree Storm
...a painting done during the rainy season in Oakland, California, in 1970, before I had to finally leave because of an economic recession and hitch hike to New York City where I was to get a cheap apartment in the slums of the lower East Side and work as a cab driver in order to raise the money to get to Paris to try to get into L'Ecole des Beaux Arts which ended up to be a year at the Ashmolean at Oxford University in England.
It's as if I'm even now in a long hard stormy winter of my own art production, still struggling against economics and the continuing efforts of a pop culture world of plastic so-cool materialistic hippies in all economic strata trying to keep artists at bay by consigning them to two-job-a-day menial labor.
A winter in cold country is something to be prepared for. It's tough, it's expensive, it's life-threatening, it's exhausting. If you live in an area where it snows a lot, it's a different kind of wet; an icy wet. When you're warm enough, just get into a situation where you have to exert yourself and you sweat under your clothing and then you're in trouble if you're in below-zero weather. But it's also really beautiful and so wonderfully cool. You can make it if you're very careful.
We'll see how stormy the next batch of artwork will be.
Click here to look at digital art based on the painting "Hurricane".
Click here to return to the Hurricane thumbnail in the Greenwich Village Period thumbnails
Click here to return to Voice Introduction for Oil Paintings, Page Two.
Click here to go to the Premonitions table of contents.
Click the thumbnail to see the digital art used in the background,
"Image115pastel1".
Click on any of the following to go there:
The Paul Hall literature Directory
http://www.paulhallart.com is authored and created by the artist, Paul A. L. Hall
He who goes forth in stormy worlds must proceed with respect.
email address: art@paulhallart.com
Also
titled "Premonitions of Stormy Polynesia" (click to go there)
Oil on canvass, Greenwich Village Period, New York, 1966.