We should be grateful to the Spanish painter Salvador Dalí, (1904-1989), not only for hundreds of his incomparable visions, but also for the dozens of the prescient, and usually witty, remarks he uttered during his time with us on earth. Probably the most well-known is: “I don’t take drugs. I am drugs.”
My favorite quote, however, is this one: “So little that can happen does…. For instance, when you order lobster in a restaurant, why don’t you get instead a telephone book on fire?”
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It seems natural that visual artists, painters, film makers and photographers, would be most interested in painting or photographing what they can see. In other words, revealing what’s “real.
However, many artists are intrigued by what we can’t see, by what is hidden from our sight. We’re aware of the presence of something– in ourselves or out-there somewhere– but we can’t see it. How do we then give it a form; how do we reveal it so that other people can be as aware of its presence as we are?
Here’s a poem by the Nobel prize-winning Spanaird, Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958) that points to the heart of the matter (translated by Robert Bly):
I am not I.
I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
who remains calm and silent while I talk,
and forgives, gently, when I hate,
who walks where I am not,
who will remain standing when I die.
The first response of many of us is to demand answers: what in the world is he talking about? The spirit? Life after death? The soul? Reincarnation? Where do Jesus, or Buddha fit into all of this?
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No, this post does not refer to the dreams of a monk, but rather to the dreams of one of my favorite artists, Thelonious Sphere Monk. By any measure, he is a giant of American music, but many listeners found his music dissonant and hard to listen to. Lorraine Gordon, his friend, and owner of the Village Vanguard, wrote of the disinterest she encountered when she took his music to record stores in Harlem. “He can’t play, lady,” one of the owners advised her, “the guy has two left hands.” Noted poet and critic Philip Larkin called him “the elephant on the keyboard.”
Monk’s music can sound discordant, as if he kept hitting the wrong notes. This is because he was dreaming. A piano has only 88 keys, but there are more than 88 sounds possible in the world; in fact, sounds are infinite. So how does one get around the limitation of only 88 sounds? One of Monk’s dreams was to catch sounds in-between the notes, often by playing two ajacent keys at the same time.
In many of my works, I try to paint the edges between the worlds we live in. We live our so-called “normal” daily waking routines of jobs and family. But we also live in other worlds: our daydreams, our imaginations and especially the worlds we live in while we sleep. Is it possible to paint the worlds between those worlds? The Threshold is one of my attempts to do this.
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