Summer Vision
The blue, blue house craves to be the sky.
Its petite windows let in strands of light
to limn the dark, reshape what is hidden.
Azure-on-white clouds muscle their way toward
an unseen sun. It blanches their bulk.
The heft of rain beckons, a promissory note no one dares cash.
They fear a deluge will wash away the color-wheel
yellow drenching fields, lawns, and my rising spirit.
White begets whitecaps, froth from the sheer delight
of movement. I vow this bright tableau will never change.
The promise that something must happen is worth
the drama of primal storms. Fire consumes all things,
blows on its own flames, eyes what does not
deserve to stand. Beauty is its target. I paint over
the bulls-eye on the back of the house. Nothing
will take aim at it save my hunger for the perfection
of this summer vision of a blue, blue house.
Painting by Juan Brufal.
(C) 2024 Arlice W. Davenport
The Taste
of the Sky
And so I became a tree,
subterranean roots snaking
through the dark toward a living
patch of rain. How I plunged
my body into it, wrapping
cells in sandy soil.
I dreamt of one thing only:
the taste of the sky,
its azure
mantle tempting me
to soar
above saplings who ridicule
my Old World ways. But old
is new, new is old. Buds burst into view
along the breadth of my branches.
I will break into blossom,
I said, drinking the poet's dictum
to embrace the sun, marry the moon,
make my home-stead among the birds, whose songs wake
the dawn in blessed cacoph-any.
Like them,
I am
an expres-sionist, emotions
dry in my bark, scars
crown my brown-green
color fields. Nothing grows
but love
for what is.
I laugh and taste
the sky.
It is salty and sweet,
just as my Father promised.
(c) 2024 Arlice W. Davenport
Enigma
of the Past
1.
Stubborn as a mule, the past
demands keepsakes
from my memory, tiny jewels
encrusted on velvet pillows,
too precious to be worn,
too bright to be seen.
I wear only one ring: gold, scarred
by duels at twenty paces. Behold:
the resurrected husband.
2.
I have jettisoned my past as flotsam,
but it returns, an insidious intruder,
like the hidden moon pushing high tide.
I have sailed after Neptune,
his trident flashing, his mane flowing,
steeled to fight his foes from Olympus.
Seawater leaves a sticky brine.
Bathe in it and you are never clean.
Your faults will glisten like gold.
3.
Or so I remember.... The past keeps
insisting. It wrangles my mind, forcing
me to flee this search for lost time.
(c) 2024 Arlice W. Davenport
What at first may seem to be a reduction
in painting – no longer depicting natural or familiar objects, and thereby restricting the viewer’s visual field – is in fact an expansion.
Abstract or nonobjective painting is about something more than merely representing the world of the senses on canvas
or paper.
It has become self-conscious, making itself the focus of its “representation.”
By that, I mean that the Abstract Expressionists shaped this new, elemental style of painting into
a tour de force of innovation,
passion, and extraordinary
use of color.
From Paint It Blue, at right
Song of the Sublime
Cattle saunter the stony slopes
barn doors gape
as burgeoning
piles of grain
shape ad hoc pyramids
no royal jewels inside
autumn breezes
blow from the chilly north greens of summer
turn orange and red
no one walks these paths
without spotting
a riot of hues hammered
into the earth
another step and sacred crimson shines through
another and devil's black swallows the light
I have walked these shortened days into the shadows
of mountains beneath the cover of rocky plateaus
here stone rules as emperor
of the rarefied air flush with possibilities to tear up terrain
I gingerly step into angled
hoof prints
slip-sliding on turf picking pebbles from my boots
no signposts
point the way
no guide at work
now the milk cows have
come home
restless and ready to bellow their song of the sublime
(c) 2024 Arlice W. Davenport
THE SELF AND
THE WORLD
On Norman Carr’s Haven
of Nonobjective Painting
BY ARLICE W. DAVENPORT
BLINDINGLY BRIGHT LIGHTS. Strange creatures wearing head gear and masks. High-decibel voices barking out commands, enforcing procedures, laying down rules. Behind, a mother cries, weeping in exhaustion, or calling out, “Where is my baby? I must see my baby!”
And so we are born. Once out of the womb, we undergo the primal encounter that sets in motion our initial glimmer of self-awareness: not with a sterile hospital room, but with our nascent self’s confronting the world, to which it will remain forever bound.
The decisive component in this encounter is the self, of course, yet to be fully formed, yet to be focused, but already tucked away in a hermitage of inwardness. There, we reside. There, we huddle against the noise and pain and cacophony of voices that serenade our path to the future. In hiding, we remain untouchable, free to flourish and thrive.
This circuitous line of reasoning has dominated my musings since my great friend and award-winning nonobjective painter, Norman Carr, created dynamic covers for two of my most recent books of poems, Kind of Blue and In Search of the Sublime. The link between poetry and painting is well established, wrapped in the term “ekphrasis,” what I call the poem’s attempt to recreate the essence of a painting in words. It is a risky business, because abstraction, non-representation jettisons our reliance on natural or familiar objects, instead using only color, line, and form to “write” its message of the self’s rising toward a spiritual beauty.
For decades, I have been an aficionado of the titans of American painting: the abstract expressionists of the 1940s and ’50s, who raised the United States to a position of artistic pre-eminence that usurped Paris’ reign as the grand training ground of serious artists. What these abstract painters – Rothko, Pollock, Motherwell, and others – did was to herald the importance of the hermetic self, at home in the heart of nonobjective art, art that no longer strives to represent objects of perception but plumbs the depths of inwardness.
Carr, in following these great trailblazers, has refined their visual tropes by rooting his hard-edged, brightly colored, and visually complex paintings in the interiority of the artist’s and viewer’s protected selves. Here, geometry replaces nature as inspiration and instrumentation of replicating what Carr encounters with the blank canvas, or paper, or rough-shod wooden panel. His is far from the naive style of self-assertion, of defining a practical way to guide his art. No, what is expressed in his paintings is a vision of the haven of the modern self. And that haven lies at the core of his nonobjective pursuits.
I make this claim primarily because I resonate inwardly with the visual waves emanating from Carr’s paintings. Take his symphony of blues in the work that adorns the cover of my third book, Kind of Blue. With this painting, titled Midnight Melody, Carr establishes a visual pattern of light in a field of deep, dark blue, replicated like DNA in a genome. This paradigm sets a tone of regularity, but also of subtle differences, a type of soft mutation that points to the possibility of the birth of new signs in a saturated field of blue hues, forever fixed and solid, but perennially open to the possibility of new birth, of a genuinely original manifestation of color, line, and form. To call this technique cellular is to embellish the primal regularity of Carr’s forms, a raw repetition of the building blocks of his expression: the elements of form as content, content as form.
This chain reaction of blues on blue not only illuminates the words of my poems -- an homage to the 1958 jazz masterpiece by trumpeter Miles Davis -- but spawns newer angles of approach to Carr’s field of color and light. What I find is blue modulating blue, drawing out the depths of cyan, dappling it with azure and white, and raising the expectation of meaning to contemplative heights. Midnight Melody bears repeated encounters, the regular calling forth of the spontaneous and new through the sheer force of replication and repetition.
In this dramatic push forward to a new revelation of color, line, and form, of like birthing like, all three are unified in Carr’s intent to map the self’s safe hiding place, energized by its interactions, blossoming in its reproduction, growing from its generative seeds.
Although I may claim this painting as “mine” because of its intent as a type of reverse ekphrasis, bringing the essence of my poems to painterly light, I know it belongs only to the next viewer, who out of his or her own subjectivity, fashions a meaning both personal and universal. Here looms a painting of and for the human self, safe in its haven, protected from the elements, but still vulnerable to the passions of color, line, and form, combining and recombining as errant cells bouncing off fluid walls that separate them from the world and the forces of pressure and change, the slings and arrows of sui generis misfortune. In other words, of the great blooming, buzzing world that American philosopher William James christened for us at the start of the last century. We can abide in this encounter with the world, born so beautifully in Norman Carr’s nonobjective art, rising to the realm of spirit on the wings of his passionate symphony of painting.
__________________
Arlice W. Davenport is the author of four full-length books of poetry and two chapbooks. All have been published by Meadowlark Press or Meadowlark Poetry Press in Emporia, Kansas. His academic background includes degrees in philosophy, literature, French,
and religious studies, along with
a concentration of work in art history. He and Norman Carr have been friends for more than 40 years, traveling internationally, along with Davenport’s wife, Laura. He lives in Wichita, Kansas.
PAINT IT BLUE
The Emotional Force
of Norman Carr’s
Use of Color
BY ARLICE W. DAVENPORT
What I call “pure painting”
is a concept that has prevailed
in American aesthetics since at least the 1940s. Most prominent among its practitioners are the Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell. Their work, in all its high-intensity variety, displays the purity of modern painting: its exclusive reliance on the elements of form, line, and color.
What at first may seem to be a reduction in painting – no longer depicting natural or familiar objects, and thereby restricting the viewer’s visual field – is in fact an expansion. Abstract or nonobjective painting is about something more than merely representing the world of the senses on canvas or paper. It has become self-conscious, making itself the focus of its “representation.” By that, I mean that the Abstract Expressionists shaped this new, elemental style of painting into a tour de force of innovation, passion, and extraordinary use of color.
Norman Carr, an award-winning nonobjective painter from Wichita, Kansas, is an expert in each of these fields; indeed, his abstract oeuvre has lifted them to an almost transcendent level. Much more could be said about his hard-edged geometric forms or the precision of his lines. But I am interested in the emotional impact of his colors, in which he follows the lead of his ghostly mentor, the late Wassily Kandinsky.
I hit upon the controlling idea of this essay after admiring one of Carr’s recent paintings, Shape Symposium No. 5 (2022), which graces the front cover of my fourth full-length book of poems, In Search of the Sublime (Meadowlark Poetry Press, 2023). At first, I faced a well-worn conundrum: how to assess the ongoing impact of a nonobjective painting, after the shock of the new has worn off. The answer, it turns out, is clear and simple in Carr’s case: The emotional power of color fuels the strength of his works.
Now, emotion can easily be deemed the only lasting value of all the arts, especially music. Rooted in inwardness, our experience of great music transmutes sounds into a distinct perception of time, which flows from the progression of musical notes and the composer’s signature movements. But one pioneering abstract painter discovered that music does much more. For Kandinsky, the Russian maestro of nonobjective painting in the early to mid-20th century, music also expresses colors in all their visual intensity.
Hearing Music
and Seeing Colors
The most famous incident of this type of “mystical” effect of music on its listeners happened the night Kandinsky attended a concert of Wagner’s Lohengrin at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre. Not only was the music forceful, as expected, but it caused Kandinsky to see the color of each note in this new work.
Biographers, art critics, and aficionados of painting continue to debate whether Kandinsky’s identification of music and colors was caused by synesthesia, a neurological condition in which one sense, in this case, hearing, stimulates another, sight. Synesthesia certainly is the most direct and obvious diagnosis of what occurred to Kandinsky that night. But for me, that “spell” is better understood as an intuition of the underlying unity of all artistic expression. Musical notes can also be colors because both elements share the same emotional foundation.
I have undertaken this lengthy diversion to make a singular point: Norman Carr’s oeuvre of nonobjective paintings displays an identical passion to Kandinsky’s synesthesia: the perception of a unifying, emotional bond that joins disparate aesthetic elements. In this framework, music and painting become one because they share the same telos: to leave a lasting emotional impression on the listener or viewer.
How does this follow? If we admit that emotion is the final value of nonobjective painting, then we must also recognize that emotion – like all perceptions – is never objective, but intrinsically subjective. The viewer must inwardly appropriate her visual experience: Whatever is seen must first be intended by the viewer, then interpreted by her.
The Primacy of Spirit Over Matter
Here is the epistemological foundation of modern painting that Kandinsky intuited, and Carr builds on: No quality of a painting exists independently or objectively. It must be affirmed subjectively, finding its place in the perceptual field of the viewer. Why? Because the immateriality of human experience requires it. This immateriality – as the philosopher George Lowell Tollefson demonstrates in his recent book The Immaterial Structure of Human Experience (Palo Flechado Press, 2019) – manifests the primacy of spirit over matter, not only in our knowledge of the world and each other, but also in our perception of truth, beauty, and goodness.
That said, let us turn to a closer analysis of Shape Symposium No. 5. We can immediately see the dominance of yellow in the top portion of this large detail of the painting. And with even greater intensity, we perceive the cluster of blue forms, varied in their hues, in the lower section. Though these “pieces” of blue are not all connected, they collectively beam brightly, creating an anchor in a sea of intriguing shapes and other, darker, earthier colors. Once we have surveyed their range, we can immediately perceive them as one extended image whose cumulative revelation of blue stands in opposition to the yellows above. What began as formally complementary colors on the artist’s traditional color wheel becomes antagonistic: Each swath of yellow and blue vies for dominance in the viewer’s vision.
To help decipher the emotional force of these colors, we will turn to Kandinsky’s assessment of each. His thoughts will deepen our experience of the colors and provide a continuum from Kandinsky to nonobjective painting in the 21st century, which Carr so successfully draws on.
For Kandinsky, yellow and blue are the quintessential warm and cool colors, primed to produce “spiritual vibrations” in the viewer. (All color definitions that follow are presented in an online essay by Ekaterina Smirnova titled “Basic Color Theory by Kandinsky.”)
Yellow is variously “warm, cheeky and exciting, disturbing for people,” and associated with “attack and madness.” Blue, on the other hand, is “peaceful, supernatural, deep, the typical heavenly color. The lighter it is, the more calming it is. When in the end it becomes white, it reaches absolute calmness.”
If we turn to the lower portion of Shape Symposium No. 5, we cannot miss the eccentric contours of a large container of black. We saw that for Kandinsky, yellow was ambiguous: cheeky and exciting and simultaneously reflective of madness. Black follows suit: It is “extinguished, immovable. Not without possibility . . . like an eternal silence, without future and hope. While the white expresses joy and spotless cleanliness, the black is the color of great grief.”
Color Is the Chief Element
in Nonobjective Painting
Kandinsky’s emphasis here is on color as a conveyer or container of strong emotion. Not only does color set the mood of a painting, but it communes with the artist’s and viewer’s spirits to generate the "meaning” of the work. What we learn from this is that the emotion expressed by color is the chief, longest-lasting element in the aesthetic experience of the viewer.
Nevertheless, in many nonobjective paintings, the emotional impact of color is often sensed only subconsciously. We “feel” the colors’ expressing one duality after another: intensity or serenity, anger or love, action or introspection. So how does the subconscious rise to the level of the conscious? By approaching a painting, I suggest, in the way an audience experienced a classic Greek drama – particularly how spectators of tragedies viewed what happened on stage.
In his Poetics, Aristotle wrote of the catharsis that theater-goers experience while watching a tragedy: through intense feelings of pity and fear. I think much the same happens with Carr’s painting. His foundational use of color in Shape Symposium No. 5 is not tragic, per se, but it does create a tension between yellow and blue (what he calls “The Gospel of Tension”) – and is paired with the enigmatic presence of black, which threatens to swallow all in its path.
Although we may not at first articulate our experience of this painting in precisely these terms, the outlook becomes clearer – and more of a release – once Carr achieves a harmony between the agonist colors. This feeling of emotional balance, of a light, cool release from dread, turns our attention to the values in the yellows spread throughout, creating a more dominant cast to the top of the painting, and softening the conflict in the bottom half. Once this type of reconciliation is set in motion, blue moves closer to becoming an oasis of calm and retreat.
The Dialectic of Tension
and Release
Even a casual observer notices how Carr’s use of color guides the viewer’s gaze and creates focal points in his nonobjective paintings. The process of layering also helps him create depth, complexity, and movement. Carr adds to this litany of effects with his individual dialectic of tension and release, issuing in a soothing harmony that draws the viewer further into the painting. What I feel as I survey the pairings of warm and cool, light and dark, depth and surface, transports me beyond the strictly visual into a realm of vitality, discovery, solitude, and hope.
And I leave my viewing of Norman Carr’s masterful painting as the audience left the Greek theater: feeling cleansed and uplifted, with a deeper understanding of the ways of gods and men. Indeed, I leave having had the purest aesthetic pleasure from an expert of the latest manifestation of pure painting.
__________________
Arlice W. Davenport is the author of four full-length books of poetry and two chapbooks. All have been published by Meadowlark Press or Meadowlark Poetry Press in Emporia, Kansas. His academic background includes degrees in philosophy, literature, French, and religious studies, along with a concentration of work in art history. He and Norman Carr have been friends for more than 40 years, traveling internationally, along with Davenport’s wife, Laura. He lives in Wichita, Kansas.
(c) 2024 Arlice W. Davenport