Confusing Art With Words

The Abstract Landscape (Workshop)

First a photo. A moment in a particular day when you exclaimed
and clicked your mnemonic device.
The image now resides pixillated and printed,
history devolving to this shot of life already lived.

Now, new instructions. Take the picture and see even less than you remember.
Instead of what journey led you to this view, see only a triangle of hill and rectangle of sky. Tetris them together on a sheet of paper with a line.

Then mix paint in colors you feel like today.
Notice everyone is choosing different hues.
Notice how we cannot bear to copy even the teacher.

Now there are the layers to put down, starting with a light wash,
working into dark writhing shapes of shade,
remembering the goal is to follow a semblance of geometry we stole
from the picture of a place at which we pressed pause. Or is it?

Then, this long afternoon of staring into pigment, trying to make splotches of color meaningful.
Yes, by all means draw a horizon for the eyes to travel toward.
Yes, remember the near is bright and far away is dim, and how amazing
when imagination highlights a place that should be hidden from view.

It was the line of trees when sun broke the fog.
It was a moment when the rising wave thinned and caught the sky.
It was the way a rock in the ocean turns every color before night claims it.
It was the purple space between the green trees.

If there is any message in this method it is that we have been so lazy
naming the color of things. Likewise, we rely on labels to tell us who we are.
Stripped away from context, in a random lovely place,
trying to mutate beauty into beauty,
we are all Van Gogh.

But back to the painting, paper heavy with experiments and disguises.
We labor on the dark pigments, we paddle in watery dazes.
We defiantly define flowers, trees and stones.

But as the day goes on we yearn for that dark horizon of rest,
seemingly reachable across a mirage of land or sea,
color always changing under an uncertain sky.

7/29/08