Well I’m largely a painter, so for the sake of brevity I’ll concentrate on painting.
Paintings are an example of portals into stories, are they not? And for Humans, the importance of storytelling cannot be underestimated - it’s is a vital cog in our way of life.
Breaking it down a little, paintings initially are an engagement of the eyes. As such the image becomes the liminal spaces through which we internally metamorphose what we see, into what we feel, as we begin to grasp the ineffable. Therefore, the importance of painting is the journey the image takes you on, which is paradoxically both deeply personal, and socially symbiotic.
In the past I have often argued with myself that there isn’t any critical verbiage that can be applied to a work that can elicit this unique experience, unless it is told as a story. Terms like the picture plane or trompe l'oeil (French: to deceive the eye) can be interesting up to a point, but unless there is a story behind it - well really, who cares?
Recently I was at the Chicago Institute of Art and found myself standing in front of a Max Beckmann self-portrait. I marveled at the colors, the technique, his expression, the hands.
Max Beckmann self-portrait 1937
However, it wasn’t until I read the curators short biography, really the fledgling beginnings of a story, and began to meditate on part of Beckmann’s history that I went through the portal experience. I knew he was a German Expressionist, and part of Hitler’s Degenerate Art Exhibition, but something else triggered me.
“This self-portrait was perhaps the last painting the artist completed in Berlin before he and his wife fled to the Netherlands on July 20, 1937. Their flight occurred just two days after Adolf Hitler delivered a speech condemning modern art and one day after the opening of the exhibition Degenerate Art, the Nazis’ official denigration of the avant-garde, which included twenty-two of Beckmann’s works. The artist departed Germany just in time: in 1937 more than five hundred of his works were confiscated from public collections”.
Yes, it most likely was the last painting he did before he and his family fled Germany. I began to look at the painting differently, and felt something shift in me. The power of an image in the context of a story.
Nicholas Emery, acrylic on canvas, 2020, Moffat pack in a wolf moon lunar eclipse
My first painting of 2020 was in response to a very recent story I read, sent by an ecologist who has followed my work, particularly my ‘black wolf returns series’ of which I have previously blogged. This particular story was about the first wolf pack to reemerge in Colorado since their extermination in the 1940’s by Federal and State authorities.
Yes, the wolves have found their way back moving south on their own from Wyoming: wild animals will do that - no damn respect for borders - and are making a go of it in Moffat county in the northwestern part of Colorado.
The first full moon of the year is called a wolf moon, and well, you can begin to fill in the rest of this story yourself…
More next month
Nicholas Emery
January 19th, 2020