Glaring Contrast

Day before yesterday, Sunday, was a special day. I got into my little pickup and drove the 14 miles to the county library to check out Carla's show, at her invitation. I know her from our having been part of a two-county artist group, in the 1990's, and since then I had seen her a couple of times, working at the local polling place.

I didn't know that Carla thought so well of me till I saw how much attention she paid to me, despite the fact that others were always claiming her attention, and she kept telling people how proficient a painter I am, though she would also mention a glaring drawback -- my tendency never to want to let go of any of my products.

This praise mattered all the more because she does such exceptional work, and that means that her show was also exceptional. Carla works in such a wide variety of mediums that just a few words do not at all suffice to describe it, other than to say that it consists of a series of various kinds of constructions, and she succeeds at them all. She obviously hates to repeat herself, and her constant creativity extends to the titles of each work and even to the paper that she used for her sign-in book, which appeared to be handmade. And while I was signing, she attacked the way that everybody was writing in the book in straight lines. "Use circles, squares, anything instead," she instructed me. But somebody distracted her before I could say that her suggestion would probably result in big wastes of space.

Her show was well-attended, mostly by women, as is always the case, and I assumed that the scattering of men all consisted of dutiful husbands. I was disappointed, however, in the near absence of local artists, especially members of that artists group of old, that I could recognize through the scrims that aging drops over people. The only one I saw was the inestimable C. K-J, a close friend and neighbor right up the road, wife of G.

Briefly I regretted that I hadn't thought seriously of trying to hitch a ride with her to the show, because I had spent a lot of time dreading making this trip, as I always do for any excursion beyond my driveway. But then I realized how it had all worked out for the best, in a number of ways.

One of those was the experience of piloting my pickup through a day that was so intensely summer that it seemed to be almost a caricature, an exaggeration of summer, and I felt like a character in one of those Japanese post-war movies of the 1950's, in which the black and white outdoors scenes are so glaringly bright that it is possible to feel the extreme heat coming off the screen and to which I could also personally attest, having spent all the summer of 1959 walking through it, over there.

And then there was the spectacle of seeing all those ladies at the show, and noting the air of eternal calm and elegance that they radiated -- so different from the scenes all over the country this month and possibly in store for an auditorium just a short distance from that show in a few days, in which right wing cretins have been yowling and howling and displaying Nazi symbols, in their nationwide attempts to destroy any effort to discuss the features of badly needed health care reform in a rational, orderly, and courteous manner -- disruptions that could be foreshadowing much, much worse to come soon in this country.

An image that I have long wanted to put into paint on one of my masonite panels consists of an Earth that is only a perfectly smooth, checkered sphere, devoid of all mountains, oceans, deserts, rivers, and the like, so that there are absolutely no barriers except time and distance to prevent an extremely ravenous, unthinking monster that inhabits that globe from eventually reaching and devouring all the more benign and enlightened beings that it can find.

I think that that would be an accurate artistic rendering of the state of human affairs most of the time, despite that other real-life picture of a group of pleasant ladies and somewhat dazed men sipping little cups of iced tea at an art show.