Two Paintings...

A change of pace today, Bush, for the first day of a new month. Let's talk a bit about art. It's what I've been doing for a good part of my professional life, so it will be a pleasure for me. I hope for you, too.

If you, like many, have been missing the image of humanity in art in recent years, you need look no further than the work of my friend Mark Strickland. There was a time in the progress of art in the 20th century, when it became an act of defiance even to paint, let alone to include the human figure in your painting. At that time, Strickland had the vision and the daring to return to this most deeply historical of all artists' concerns.

Now in the context of a world gone seemingly mad with in-humanity, the artist has produced two mural-sized paintings that seek with notable ambition to address our human predicament head-on. His "Humanity in Crisis" confronts us unsparingly with a bleak image of what we have come to in our history. This is not a story that we want to hear, but it is a true story about ourselves--a fiery, tortured arc from a circle in Dante's Hell. Outlined in expressive black slashes of paint against a vast blood- or fire-red background, these figures reel and twist in agonized extremis. Their dance, whether alone, in pairs, or groups, is the dance of human vulnerability, the mortality of the flesh in the face of violent forces beyond their control. The pathos of their individuality, in the foreground, recedes in the topmost panels into an epic, indistiguishable mass of barely recognizable human forms, the charnel grounds of a whole earthly species.

But Strickland offers us an alternative to this grim vision in the second painting, "The Raising of Consciousness". Here, the story is one of gradually blossoming hope. We read it left to right through six imposing panels. In each of the lower four, the space is dominated by a single giant head--reminiscent, perhaps, of those ancient stone heads of the Buddha, though each of them is human, individual. The lower part of each space, however, is occupied by outlined figures familiar to us from "Humanity in Crisis". In the first, to the left, the background is once again red, and its figures struggle in agony...

Bringing our attention to the eyes, though, and working from left to right, we notice how they change from panel to panel: closed, shielded, shamed, averted from the pain they witness in the extreme left panel, they open slowly, rising and turning with the slow turn of the heads themselves until, in the last painting to the right, they achieve a kind of transcendence--a transcendence realized in their placement, now in the upper range of panels. For if the lower panels represent--in broad, rough terms--the physical aspect of our existence on this planet, the upper panels bring to mind the spiritual dimension, the level of consciousness to which the painting's title refers. Here, in these rectangular panels that sweep across the top of the huge painting, an undulating wind seems to flow, following the overall color sequence from predominant tones of red, to orange, to yellow, and finally to blue.

It is here, in the last panel, that we find the giant face almost, now, benign, eyes raised, lips full and slightly smiling. Those outlined figures which before had seemed locked in strife are seen now rising toward spirit with the breath of consciousness. The moral here--if we follow this complex and visually compelling painting at the level of its moral structure only--is the story, precisely, of the redemptive power of the "raising of consciousness". It teaches--insofar as a painting teaches us anything: and why not?--that for us human beings the only way out of the predicament we have created for ourselves is the path of consciouness, the constant, unwavering awareness of our selves and our actions in the world. The first rule of enlightened consciousness, of course, is to do no harm… if we could only learn it.

A part of what artists do--a part of their ancient, shamanic function from the earliest of times--is to make marks. And Strickland reminds us forcefully of that function (it's not for nothing, perhaps, that his first name is Mark!): everywhere in "The Raising of Consciousness", as on the walls of ancient caves throughout the world, we find the mark of the human hand. Sometimes it seems to slide and grasp, sometimes to clutch, as if in desperation. Sometimes to caress. And sometimes it is simply there, a lasting token of the human presence, and of the consequence of human action. It is, in its utter simplicity, at once the poignant record and the symbol of who we are, and what we do. It ends, in this painting, reaching upward in a gesture of hope.

So that's it for today, Bush. Apologies for the length. I hope you had time to read it, though I expect you're getting ready for that big speech tomorrow...