Lent Week 3

Art from Ashes

I took down an installation of my art the other day that had been hung for several months at a therapy center. One of my friends told me they saw it there when they visited their therapist and laughed, as though it was some kind of self-disclosure that she did not want to make, as if getting some help was seen as embarrassing.

The work was taken down and carefully wrapped and stored. I thought that these pieces would exist long after I did, some perhaps passed on to others, some perhaps taken to the dumpster and destroyed. I wonder how many Frida Kahlos or Jackson Pollocks or Francis Bacons went to the trash. But everything, however beautiful, lives in permanence and impermanence. They are permanent because they exist in this universe that is ever living, ever expanding. And they are impermanent because we are all prone to decay, decline, and decomposition.

It is the same for the person who is houseless and the person who is a billionaire. Even the billionaire’s name will be lost one day when those dollars will mean nothing to us. It is not that the art or art making is meaningless, but knowing its limitations allows every stroke of paint to have meaning. Every line then counts for something within the expanse of the canvas when the area has its boundaries, from one side to the next.

My life is a stretched canvas on the frame of my body. This is how I know its meaning, that I only have within this life, this space to do what I need to do: to create, to explore, to laugh, to feel what another might feel. The other day, someone shared with me a time when he was on assignment in the Middle East and it was a dark and depressing time in his life. He crawled out of the hole by one day deciding to assimilate as much knowledge and culture as he could during his time there. His daughter was present, a high school valedictorian, and I could tell that he passed this insight on to her, this kind of curiosity and zest for life.

The word Lent comes from the Old English word lencten, meaning spring. It is about the stretching out of time, the lengthening of days. Of course the Christianization of the West gives us the meaning of the 40 days of fasting, moving from desert to crucifixion to Easter. This is how we imbue significance into time; we retell stories of its significance, we give it another life, so to speak, another frame.

In my space, the confines of our tiny apartment, the need to create and give life is so much stronger than ever. Even with the frustration of no longer being able to paint at home, I still have a place to produce my work in a distant warehouse. The paint, the oils, the stretchers, the canvas, are only living dormant, not a full stop, not a permanent halt, but a pause, until I become situated again. Paula wanted to bring four more paintings home for our little space. Perhaps they could be a constant reminder of what was and what is to come.