THE HABIT OF BEING | LOVE'S LYRIC | THE GRAY
THE HABIT OF BEING: A Portrait of Miss Mystery and Manners
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Hunsaker/Schlesinger Gallery, Santa Monica, CA -1997
Blackbridge Hall Gallery, Georgia College& State U., Milledgeville, GA - 2000
The works in this exhibit include a lovingly painted large-scale, "Portrait of Ms. O'Connor" and approximately twelve other works with images inspired by the authors fiction. In the portrait, Flannery O'Connor sits in a green rocking chair centered on a backwoods revivalist platform, holding a blue infant familiar to those who know the work of 15c painter, Geertgen tot Sint Jans. The compositions for four of the smaller works are inspired from the novella, The Violent Bear It Away bearing titles such as: "Tarwater's Seed-Like Eyes" and "The Dark Spot Between Two Chimney's". Other stories included in the suite of paintings are The Enduring Chill, Good Country People, and A Good Man is Hard to Find with the titles: "The Stain On The Ceiling", "Joy's Leg", and "Pity Sing".
Titles of works by Flannery O'Connor referenced in the exhibition:
The Violent Bear It Away
Greenleaf
The Lame Shall Enter First
Parker's Back
The River
The Temple Of The Holy Ghost
Good Country People
The Habit of Being
Mystery and Manners
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LOVE'S LYRIC
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The compositions in this suite of paintings came out of a lengthy study of the sacred poem, the Song of Songs. For about three years I studied different translations of the canticle along with numerous books of commentary.
The traditional Orthodox view is that the poem is an expression of God’s Love for the Jewish people and the land of Israel. Medieval times produced a flourish of elaborate allegorical interpretations on the poem. The most prolific of these writers was Saint Bernard of Clairvaux who wrote some seventy-nine sermons on the canticle. Most of the writers from this period interpret the poem’s detailed attention to the human body as an expression of the mystical marriage between the individual soul and divine love.
The authors who have written about the Song are diverse in scholarship and varied in interpretation. Some authors are religiously inspired by the poem, others interpret it culturally or sociologically, and there are those who analyze and comment on it purely as literature. Recent scholarship reveals that the poem’s origin is in a species of Middle Eastern nuptial songs.
In his book, which is a cultural and anthropological analysis of the poem, author Othmar Keel
makes full use of parallels both textural and iconographic from Palestine, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. It is through his scholarship that I learned the “Rose of Sharon” is actually a type of lotus.
In the 14 century the devout Jewish Philosopher and Physicist, Gersoinides explains
that the poem is a guide for the intellectually elite to achieve felicity or ultimate happiness through the study of Judaism and Aristotelian Metaphysics.
Two of the most recent publications of commentary are, The Song of Songs, Modern Critical Interpretations (edited by Harold Bloom) and The Feminist Companion to the Song of Songs (edited by Athalya Brenner). Both collections contain an essay by Phyllis Trible titled, Love’s Lyric Redeemed. This essay is the inspiration for the title of the exhibition and it has also influenced the compositions for a few of the individual paintings. In her essay, Ms. Trible theorizes that the Song of Songs is a poetic rendering of a restored Garden of Eden inhabited by Adam and Eve passionately in love with each other. The works in the exhibit that reference Ms. Trible’s essay are Billy and the Bather, Crystal Apple,and Tower of Lilies.
In Billy and the Bather an adolescent girl (from George Tooker’s, The Bathers) holds a crystal apple. The Bather is joined by Billy (my first boyfriend), whose sad and untimely death occurred a few years ago. It was from Billy that I received my first kiss. Together, Billy and the Bather return the apple to its original place on the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden.
In Tower of Lilies, five lilies (referencing the Pentateuch) are placed in a vase. The vessel has fired onto its belly a version of Thomas Cole’s painting, Paradise.
There are two pieces in this suite I would describe as iconology of the canticle to be understood as a call of Divine Love to an individual soul. The work titled The Bride, recalls Dante’s upward spiraling journey of the soul described in both The Divine Comedy and La Vita Nuova. And Beyond the Dull Voices references the end of the fourth chapter of James Joyce’s book, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It is in this section of the book that the young Stephen Dedalus has an epiphanic vision. The vision reveals to him that his souls genuine calling is to be a writer and not a priest. In his book, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos; The Middle Ages of James Joyce , Umberto Eco writes that after this event Stephen (Joyce) truly becomes “a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life”. In the Summer of 1998 (through a generous grant from Art Center College of Design) I took a trip to Israel which showed me first hand many of the places and things described in the poem.
In the Summer of 1998 (through a generous grant from Art Center College of Design) I took a trip to Israel which showed me first hand many of the places and things described in the poem.
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THE GRAY
Et lux in tenebris lucet.
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"There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness, and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we are ourselves incredibly real and sometimes almost incredulously real."
g.k. chesterton
Very simply, the paintings and drawings in this exhibit represent a journey through a gray region where faith or at best faulty intuition is the only tool of navigation. Be it a region created by the dark of war or mourning after a great loss.
SAINT THESRESE, "Pray for Us!"
A large-scale portrait of Saint Therese (the Little Flower) is the cornerstone of thirty-three other works.
AFTER A GREAT PAIN
This painting of a snowflake going through a process of transfiguration is inspired by a poem by Emily Dickinson.
After great pain, a formal feeling comes
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone
This is the Hour of Lead
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow -
First – Chill - then Stupor - then the letting go -
PSALM CYCLE
This suite of seven paintings are each on an arch shaped panel and named for the seven times during the day Benedictine monks are called to prayer: Vigils, Lauds, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline. The background colors shift according to the time of day. On each panel rendered in white oil paint is a different lace doily. This piece is dedicated to my cousin (once removed) Father James O’Connor and his Benedictine brothers at the New Melleray Abbey in Peosta Iowa. Father Jim was a fighter pilot in WWII. He said that during the war he had seen so much death and devastation, so many young men killed, his own brother (also a pilot) was shot down and never found. When the war ended, he determined to do some good by praying for the world for rest of his life. He joined the monastery at the age of 24. He has been praying for our world and us for over fifty five years.
TUPELO, "Let me go there!” He said combines the lyrics of a Nick Cave song about a torrent of black rain with a poem by Episcopalian priest, R.S. Thomas. The paintings’ image contains two fragile and barren trees making contact with a dark intense downpour from above.
LORD STANLEY portrays British painter Stanley Spencer reading love letters to his dead wife Hilda.
THE GRAY is a triptych depicting the movement of prismatic rain filled clouds across a gray sky.
WILL SEEN, WILL SAID is a triptych that plays on the title and content of the story ILL SEEN, ILL
SAID, by Samuel Beckett.
MITTEN TREE and THE FAIRY TREE
The paintings of the Twin Trees came soon after I learned about the death of my half sister in the summer of 2002. She was killed in a lightening storm while on holiday in France. She was out taking photographs when a tree was struck by lightening and fell on her. It was three years before her body was finally discovered. In a state of grieving, the image of a tree with branches spiraling outward like a circular saw blade ornamented by gray mittens came to mind.
These paintings were just completed when by chance Bob Drovdal’s wife Sharon asked if I had ever read St. Joan of Arc, by Mark Twain? "No" being my answer she kindly sent me the book as a gift. Imagine my bewilderment when I read the following passage.
The Fairy Tree of Domremy
I know that when the Children of the Tree die in a far land, then - if they be at peace with God - they turn their longing eyes toward home, and there, far-shining, as through a rift in a cloud that curtains heaven, they see the soft picture of the Fairy Tree, clothed in a dream of golden light; and they see the bloomy mead sloping away to the river, and to their perishing nostrils is blown faint and sweet the fragrance of the flowers of home. And then the vision fades and passes - but they know, they know! and by their transfigured faces you know also, you who stand looking on; yes, you know the message that has come, and that it has come from heaven.
Saint Joan of Arc
by Mark Twain.
Other titles in the exhibit include: HUMMINGBIRDS, BONNETS & WATERFALL, APPLE, PEONIE, PRAYER CARD, TWO SHAKER CHAIRS, and three individual paintings of Shaker bonnets titled, THREE BONNETS.
There are three graphite renderings of lace doilies titled, ALENCON LACE. The maker of this lace was particularly skilled in the art of making the connections between the various stitches invisible. Saint Therese’s mother was known to be particularly gifted in this special art form.
The image of lace throughout the show metaphorically illustrates the fragility of bonds to our fellows and to faith itself. The negative space representing Absence - the threads and knots Presence - which together create a pattern that weaves experiences of joy and suffering into something hopefully beautiful.
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