It's your time now baby,
But it's gonna be mine
after awhile;
It's your time right now baby,
Lord, but it's gonna be mine after awhile.
You know you know if things don't change
I'm gonna move on down.
A couple of years ago I posted another blog called My Time After A While, which examined, after a fashion, the life of career of the 20th century French painter Jean Hélion, who has for a long time been a great favorite of mine. I know more about painting than a lot of people, but until I read about a Hélion retrospective exhibition being held at the Pace Gallery on East 57th Street sometime in the mid-1970s, I wasn’t aware of his work. The person writing about the show in the Village Voice (at that time a fine, highly individual newspaper and go-to source for New York culture and politics) was so enthusiastic, and the art illustrating the article, paintings in Hélion’s “comic book” style, was so arresting that I rushed to see the exhibition as quickly as possible. The works displayed really were masterpieces – both the figurative and the earlier abstract paintings – and had the "reconciling contraries” quality undergirding most art I like. I aspire to that kind of energy balance in my own life, but instead of achieving a Charles Atlas-like dynamic tension, I tend either to flail around unattractively and ineffectively or seem utterly inert and dispirited. I tell myself that I am sincere, however; I am not counterfeiting anything, and there’s nowhere to go but up. The Buddy Guy song that titles the two posts is a masterpiece also.
My Time After A While (Blog Link)
Curtis,
ReplyDeleteTotally and a bit uncomfortably believe I know what you mean about the dynamic tension loss and the flailing. Yegads. But those are inspirational sentences, dadgummit. Your sincerity and your refusal to counterfeit suggest the existence of a moral universe. It will be your time after a while. And here it is Sunday morning, grey, no longer summer. The steep steps, the balance issues. Best tarry within.
(Buddy Guy, a god.)
Thanks. I'm trying. It is no longer summer here either. As the movie title said, It Happened One Night. Buddy Guy is something else. I wander away from him for a while because standing too close is kind of blinding, but every time I come back I wonder why I go anywhere else. I don't know whether you've seen what's become of the Village Voice, but it's past heartbreaking, just in terms of the fact that it was once such a thick publication (it doesn't matter that the content varied in quality -- there was a lot of it) and now it mostly exists for the porn/personal ads, which were always a feature but they really don't serve to carry a newspaper. Anyway, I really liked that Jean Helion show way back when. It was one of those exhibitions that was fresh, exciting and made you think a little differently than you did before you walked in the room. Curtis
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