An artist’s reality

As the Philosopher says,
He who contemplates a statue
Shares the thought of the artist;
The statue itself does not.
As the soul contemplates nature,
The spirit the light, and the mind
The stars, every eye sees into
The matrix from which it was born.

Kenneth Rexroth

Wild Roaring Beach faces south towards the great Southern Ocean. If one walks north over the sand dunes and forested hills, one drops down about five miles later to the northern side of the Tasman Peninsula and the serene waters of Norfolk Bay. Surfers find this calm section of the peninsula dead boring, but kayaking across these waters over to the Forestier Peninsula is a sublime experience. Once there, it is only a couple of miles overland to the home of Jerzy Michalski, a painter of extraordinary skill and depth whose urban existential motifs contrast sharply with his studio nestled into the natural landscape.

Sally took one of her mandala paintings over to Jerry this past Sunday for some technical advice and, while seeing the two of them converse over some of the alchemical processes of painting, I was struck by the power of Jerry’s paintings—seen strewn about the walls of his studio in the above photo—to convey the utter desperate quality of the human experience when it is confined to the urban prison edifices of corporate temples of power. 

The matrix from which I was born allows me to empathise with the desperateness of Jerzy’s solitary male figures. This very personal matrix of mine, however, also allows me an “exit strategy”, so to speak, down the fire escape, out onto the road, out of the city and into the very real healing community of wild nature. From this vantage point, I am more likely to achieve a more capable compassion and touch the outskirts, at least, of poet Kenneth Rexroth’s other words:

Ultimately the fulfillment
Of reality demands that
Each person in the universe
Realize every one of the
Others in the fullness of love.

Both above quotes excerpted from the epic poem, The Dragon and the Unicorn.