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Epigraph
The things of this world
are as fragile
as dewdrops on a summer morning
... entrust yourself not to these things,
but to immeasurable life... our home ground.
~Taitetsu Unno
This March I was invited to exhibit in a New York show with an intriguing title Cosmic Storm (at Lichtundfire Gallery, New York, NY). I simply could not pass up such an enticing chance!.. I spring from a solid background of reading sci-fi and painting abstraction, a lifetime of looking up at the sky -- and encountering the Universe!
Back in 2015 I made and exhibited a painting that I considered a kind of an apotheosis, almost a summation of my denser mode of painting. Its title
arose, as if by itself: Universe in a Grain of Sand.
"Universe in a Grain of Sand", 20 x 30 in. (51 x 76 cm),
Oil stick, acrylic, pigment & mixed media on wood panel, 2015
Color abstraction, to me, always felt like having the strongest potential to be a universal language -- a domain of feeling, allusion & sensation, a multi
-dimensional experiment accommodating shades of meaning, and ranges of cultural & spiritual aspiration and expression. Add to it the potential for
subtlety, variability and capacity for change -- and you have a flexible mode of energetic communication, of entering a different space, where time
flows at a different rate, and the music of the spheres is audible to an unaided ear... .
A hundred years ago, helping to usher in 20c. abstraction somewhere between the twin empires of Germany and Russia, so asserted itinerant Kandinsky
in this immortal, exuberant analogy:
"Color is the keyboard, the eye is the hammer, the soul is a piano of
many strings. The artist is the hand that touches one key or another, to cause the human soul to vibrate."
At its best, color abstraction is about achieving a deeply satisfying dynamic balance -- in which color and structure are one. The Cosmic Storm, the subject of this new exhibition, presented a wonderful
chance for me to update this line of experimentation.
"The Impermanence Spiral", 36 x 36 in. (91 x 91 cm),
Oil stick & acrylic on wood panel, 2020
Moving deeper, into the eye of the storm, one finds the countervailing calm
, the ying & yang, right in the heart of it. Thus the exhibition features a number of more minimal works -- some bold...
"Different Strokes for Different Folks" 24 x 36 in. (61 x 91 cm),
Oil stick, acrylic, glass beads, & mixed media on wood panel, 2018
...some subtler...
"Those Were the Days", 30 x 24 in. (76 x 61 cm)
Acrylic & lacquer on wood panel, 2018
Surely, at least in Art, there is no Cosmic Storm without the Cosmic Balance!
Or, as T.S. Eliot once put it (in his 2nd Quartet):
Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
Installation shot, Lichtundfire Gallery.
At left: Philip Gerstein, "The Wind Carries the Scent", 30 x 40 in. (76 x 102 cm). Oil stick
, acrylic, glass beads, & mixed media on wood panel, 2016
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