Shorter Posts – Page 16 – John Michael Keating

Ripley Moon

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It is nearly dark, a new moon barely risen. Perhaps a storm is coming; perhaps it has just passed. Lights along the shore suggest the presence of humans. What are those faint grayish shapes in the darkness of the trees? It’s nearly too dark to see. Houses, perhaps? Something else?

Like many artists, I feel frustrated by the surfaces of things. So I slow down, breathe deeply, pay attention to what I see. I draw and paint as realistically as I can because I feel that if the image is not realistic, people won’t believe it. But if the surfaces are too believable, it becomes difficult to suggest anything behind them—deeper strata of meaning, perhaps. How to paint an image that is a kind of door that opens into another, deeper world we sense is present, but that we can’t see? How, as Thomas Moore writes, to reveal the “inner realm of things without depriving them of their concreteness”?

A sense of the imminent power of Darkness is what I wanted in this painting. Rilke says it well in Das Stundenbuch: A Book For the Hours of Prayer, (translated by Robert Bly):

You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything:
Shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!—
powers and people—

and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.

Perhaps someday I’ll be able to paint an image that opens the door. Meanwhile . . .

Ruth

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Let’s say you’re walking down a street and you see a friend on the next corner. She’s too far away for you to see the color of her hair or any features of her face. How do you know, at such a distance, that it’s your friend and not someone else? The short answer is that you’re seeing her gestalt, her overall presence or body language: the way she walks, her height and weight, how she carries herself, the tilt of her head, the swing of her arms, and so forth.

I wanted to paint a portrait of Ruth because she is lovely. But I wanted to suggest more about her than beauty. She was indifferent to glamour, so her choice of an informal, white dress seemed perfect. As a dancer, her physical strength was a large part of her personality. She radiated the intelligence and self-confidence of a young woman living on her own in Spain, making friends, mastering a foreign language. Although she is a very direct and outgoing person, she can often be thoughtful and introspective. She was having to make some major decisions about the path her life was going to take, so I posed her on a threshold, not quite inside, not quite outside.

A portrait has always seemed to me to be more than just an accurate representation of a face. And painting a portrait is not just the work of an artist: it’s an act of collaboration, a partnership between artist and subject. I said that I posed her, but the truth is, by being herself, she posed herself. I paid close attention to her, to her presence. Which is another way of saying that we – together – made the portrait.

Near Oneonta

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It is November and snow will arrive before night falls. I draw the pond and the bleak field as quickly as I can, for as long as my fingers can withstand the wind.

Sometime later on, I don’t remember how long afterwards, in the warmth of my studio, I painted the scene from memory. The sky unfolded into the paper as one of those accidents that can happen when you abandon the urge to control things and just allow watercolor do what it wants to do.

The red canoe was an accident as well. It appeared out of nowhere in my empty mind as a beautiful vessel, broken apart by water, like a heart can break open in sadness, or joy, or in both at the same time.