The Inwardness of Nature...
To someone who has long
struggled with abstract art this collection came rather as a
revelation. The artist seems to hit the spot between
representation and abstraction, and open up to this viewer, and
reader, a genuinely new vision. Far more than usually, I felt I
was seeing something new through the artist's eyes and, more
important, feeling something new through his feelings. Now I
know that may be an illusion, at least partly, for it is
integral to art's mystery that the artist opens up individual
feelings, which may not be his or her own. Detouring round this
question of aesthetics, I can say quite honestly that many of
the pictures here left me feeling a bit like stout Cortez,
"silent upon a peak in Darien." I have never seen nature like
this, but the funny thing is that looking in a kind of quizzical
way at them, I had an overwhelming sense not of seeing nature
but of feeling it in a strange kind of active passivity. I mean
that some part of my mind was trying to interpret, but another
kind was simply accepting. At least, that's what I think I mean.
I can't recall any other book, or visit to a gallery, that has
had such a powerful effect. Made me rather speechless.
F.C. Parkinson
|
