Impasto

Oct 28 2013

I move in closer.

Where the finished brush-stroke
slurring of colour
simulation of light
seem unrefined,
like a rough-and-ready

first draft.

The keen edge of the trowel,
its smooth flat surface
slashing/layering/patting paint,
makes the illusion even more uncanny
when I step back
and the work resolves.

I know nothing of method,

but the violence seems barely contained;
the intense passion

preserved in the lavish thwack of paint,

the canvas loaded

and cocked.

Behind everything, close up
is the fine-grained machinery
of real life,
down to molecules, and living cells.
While we dwell
here, on the pleasing surface,
the self-evident world
of home.

Like Oz, behind the curtain
a little bald man
is pulling levers
altering his voice.
And I am content
not to sweep it back,
the deception of distance
the witless suspension
of disbelief.

My willing surrender
to the magic

of landscape art.
The wilderness I inhabit
I may have imagined
as well.

A contemporary landscape artist named Kim Dorland was featured in the Arts section of the weekend paper. His work is reminiscent of the Group of Seven. The article featured a beautiful reproduction of one of his signature pieces, a triptych entitled French River. I know the place well, and loved it. I wanted to have one of his pieces on my wall. (As if!)

I also learned a new word -- impasto; which is the thick application of oil paint. (Untitled (Painter in a Canoe), which was featured not in the article but in an ad that accompanied it -- for his current exhibition at the McMichael Gallery -- illustrates this beautifully.) I've always been amazed and mystified at how visual artists create their 2-dimensional illusions. And when I looked close-up at the fine detail of his impasto, it reminded me of how reality -- not just art -- is mostly illusion: how we are unable to see the orders of magnitude beneath the surface of things; how even our own workings remain mysteries to most of us, from the molecular plumbing of the kidney to the conundrum of consciousness. But step back, and the world resolves into its familiar order.

Look too closely, and you may be surprised at how easily you're fooled. I intentionally use both "witless" and "willing", because the truth lies in this contradiction: between our inability to see, and our refusal to. The use of the word "imagined" in the 2nd last line is important as well, because reality is constructed mostly from the conflations and confabulations and denials of memory; and we all know (or should) how unreliable memory is.