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)
