artbeat

Artbeat: Self Glare

“Small Tub” by Lindsay Breidenthal

By Lonnie Broadvalley

Human beings rely so much on the face to communicate, having to relate to each other with half our face covered has been interesting at best. The mask makes it even more challenging to connect and raises questions about how obscuring our features changes how others might read us. Because this is an art curious paper, and I am a painter, I can’t help but approach this collective experience in a way that relates to the creative process. Maybe we can find some beautiful, heart warming lesson...or maybe hard knocks just doubles down on our education? Either way, I realize we could spend years analyzing this subject only to end up right where we started - looking at ourselves.

I asked local portrait photographer extraordinaire, Siri Rose of Sunday Brunch Photography about working closely with her models and what influence this has on her creative approach. The identities of her models and the characters they embody tell a story. Each photo is the result of human chemistry and countless decisions about what to leave in & what to leave out. She says, “Being able to interact with your model and create a relationship relieves the tension that usually comes with the first quarter of the shoot. Nearly every model, whether you’re a newbie or seasoned professional, the first bit is always a learning experience. You’re learning about yourself, each other, and the atmosphere surrounding.”

Certainly some of the best works are influenced by the interaction between artist, model, and environment even when the interaction is happening subconsciously. Much of the art we call portraiture includes the figure and how the whole body is communicating.

It is at this point I’d like to pan out in order to take in our collective masking experience. While a portrait communicates a very deliberate version of someone’s identity, it is still frozen in time and silent, unable to dispel whatever misconceptions you might have about them. A picture may be worth a thousand words but it still can’t defend itself. Over the last year, our most familiar forms of communication - facial expression and speech have had to take a backseat (at least out in public) to our body language, and accept that the world is going to see what it wants to see. I find it a lot easier to control my voice than my body! How incredible would it be if everyone was quietly reflecting on their own reactions while we’re masked up and anonymous?

I’m sure we’ve all heard stories about seeing a nude model for the first time or hanging around the locker room after lap swim.

I love this memory Siri shares about pushing aside the shame that tends to accompany one raised in a sexually repressed culture, and recognizing it for what it is. She recalls, “I actually remember being about fifteen or sixteen years old and I had just made a new friend, like same day new friend, and we were putting makeup on in the bathroom. Just being girly teenagers, giggling about boys or something I’m sure, and she said she wanted to shower. I had started gathering up my things and getting ready to leave, and before I even noticed she was just butt nakey. No shame whatsoever. I remember being shocked, and then immediately asking myself why I was shocked. Ever since then I’ve strived to cancel the stigma behind the human form. We’ve all got one after all.”

This is awesome! Even at sixteen, this kid has the humility to ask herself WHY she was shocked. Any artist that is pushing boundaries hopes a viewer is doing the same within themselves - even after passing judgement about whether or not they ‘like’ it. I’ll try to remember to check in with my teenage self next time I need guidance.

I met a seer, Passing the hues and objects of the world, The fields of art and learning, pleasure, sense, To glean eidolons.

Put in thy chants said he, No more the puzzling hour nor day, nor segments, parts, put in, Put first before the rest as light for all and entrance-song of all, That of eidolons.

Ever the dim beginning, Ever the growth, the rounding of the circle, Ever the summit and the merge at last, (to surely start again,) Eidolons! eidolons!

Ever the mutable, Ever materials, changing, crumbling, re-cohering, Ever the ateliers, the factories divine, Issuing eidolons.

Lo, I or you, Or woman, man, or state, known or unknown, We seeming solid wealth, strength, beauty build, But really build eidolons.

The ostent evanescent, The substance of an artist’s mood or savan’s studies long, Or warrior’s, martyr’s, hero’s toils, To fashion his eidolon.

Of every human life, (The units gather’d, posted, not a thought, emotion, deed, left out,) The whole or large or small summ’d, added up, In its eidolon.

The old, old urge, Based on the ancient pinnacles, lo, newer, higher pinnacles, From science and the modern still impell’d, The old, old urge, eidolons.

The present now and here, America’s busy, teeming, intricate whirl, Of aggregate and segregate for only thence releasing, To-day’s eidolons.

These with the past, Of vanish’d lands, of all the reigns of kings across the sea, Old conquerors, old campaigns, old sailors’ voyages, Joining eidolons.

Densities, growth, facades, Strata of mountains, soils, rocks, giant trees, Far-born, far-dying, living long, to leave, Eidolons everlasting. Exalte, rapt, ecstatic, The visible but their womb of birth, Of orbic tendencies to shape and shape and shape, The mighty earth-eidolon.

All space, all time, (The stars, the terrible perturbations of the suns, Swelling, collapsing, ending, serving their longer, shorter use,) Fill’d with eidolons only.

The noiseless myriads, The infinite oceans where the rivers empty, The separate countless free identities, like eyesight, The true realities, eidolons.

Not this the world, Nor these the universes, they the universes, Purport and end, ever the permanent life of life, Eidolons, eidolons.

Beyond thy lectures learn’d professor, Beyond thy telescope or spectroscope observer keen, beyond all mathematics, Beyond the doctor’s surgery, anatomy, beyond the chemist with his chemistry, The entities of entities, eidolons.

Unfix’d yet fix’d, Ever shall be, ever have been and are, Sweeping the present to the infinite future, Eidolons, eidolons, eidolons.

The prophet and the bard, Shall yet maintain themselves, in higher stages yet, Shall mediate to the Modern, to Democracy, interpret yet to them, God and eidolons.

And thee my soul, Joys, ceaseless exercises, exaltations, Thy yearning amply fed at last, prepared to meet, Thy mates, eidolons. Thy body permanent, The body lurking there within thy body, The only purport of the form thou art, the real I myself, An image, an eidolon.

Thy very songs not in thy songs, No special strains to sing, none for itself, But from the whole resulting, rising at last and floating, A round full-orb’d eidolon.

THREE POEMS BY WALT WHITMAN

One Hour to Madness and Joy

THREE POEMS BY WALT WHITMAN

O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man! O savage and tender achings! (I bequeath them to you my children, I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.)

O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me in defiance of the world! O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine! O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of a determin’d man.

O the puzzle, the thrice-tied knot, the deep and dark pool, all untied and illumin’d! O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last! To be absolv’d from previous ties and conventions, I from mine and you from yours! To find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of Nature! To have the gag remov’d from one’s mouth! To have the feeling to-day or any day I am sufficient as I am.

O something unprov’d! something in a trance! To escape utterly from others’ anchors and holds! To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous! To court destruction with taunts, with invitations! To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me! To rise thither with my inebriate soul! To be lost if it must be so! To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom! With one brief hour of madness and joy.

Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams, I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands, Even now your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you, Your true soul and body appear before me. They stand forth out of affairs, out of commerce, shops, work, farms, clothes, the house, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem, I whisper with my lips close to your ear. I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.

O I have been dilatory and dumb, I should have made my way straight to you long ago, I should have blabb’d nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you.

I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you, None has understood you, but I understand you, None has done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself, None but has found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you, None but would subordinate you, I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you, I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.

Painters have painted their swarming groups and the centre-figure of all, From the head of the centre-figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color’d light, But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color’d light, From my hand from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever.

O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you! You have not known what you are, you have slumber’d upon yourself all your life, Your eyelids have been the same as closed most of the time, What you have done returns already in mockeries, (Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return?)

The mockeries are not you, Underneath them and within them I see you lurk, I pursue you where none else has pursued you, Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustom’d routine, if these conceal you from others or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me, The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these balk others they do not balk me, The pert apparel, the deform’d attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside.

There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you, There is no virtue, no beauty in man or woman, but as good is in you, No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you, No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you.

As for me, I give nothing to any one except I give the like carefully to you, I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you.

Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard! These shows of the East and West are tame compared to you, These immense meadows, these interminable rivers, you are immense and interminable as they, These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution, you are he or she who is master or mistress over them, Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution.

The hopples fall from your ankles, you find an unfailing sufficiency, Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulges itself, Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted, Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.