30 X 30

An Art Post

I remember a time in Comp for the College Bound when I was leading my kids through the old hammer in a frame gimmick in order for them to come up with some sort of appreciation of aesthetic distance.  I pointed out two drawings on the wall given to me by past students.  One, a rather rough hewn painting of what Bourani must have looked like to Nicholas in THE MAGUS, the other, a finely wrought drawing of an oriental princess surrounded by a flowering garden.  Insofar as the Bourani painting was playing with textures and shades of color and perspective, I thought it was what we might call "Art," while the exquisite drawing, even though it was given to me by a sweetheart of a girl from Laos who did everything I asked of her, wasn't art so much as decoration.  Between you and me, I think drawing such a distinction is pointless at best and downright mean spirited at worst, but it is always guaranteed to get a rise out of high school seniors.  Besides, defining art is one of my favorite pastimes.  I mean I could reread--I have reread--the aesthetics discussion in PORTRAIT dozens of times and always find something new to think about.

I'm talking about this because my son Christian gave me a magnificent oil painting of a barn by Richard Harrington.  When we go to Jenny Lake every year we always stop by the Rare Gallery in Jackson.  The last few years we have found ourselves admiring the collection of barns Harrington was showing at the gallery.  By the way, if you're ever in Jackson, go to this gallery.  It has one of the most varied and interesting collections I've ever seen.

Well, Christian, bless his heart, wanted to do something special for my sixty-fifth and he commissioned Harrington to paint me a barn, so to speak.  When he gave it to me on Christmas night, he didn't look convinced about the wonder of Harrington's work.  He finally asked me why I thought it was good.  What made it art?

If I let myself relax and, like William Hurt in THE BIG CHILL, "just let art flow over" me, the answer to such a question is simple.  It's wonderful because I love it.  It jumps off the wall at me.  It's cool.  But then I have to start thinking about the whole thing.  That night I gave Chris what I thought, him being a musician and all, was an insightful explanation.  "It's like listening to jazz," I said.  "The barn is like an improvisation on a theme.  It's like listening to Coleman Hawkins play 'I'm Beginning To See The Light.'  You can still hear snatches of the melody as he dives and soars all around it.  It gives you something to think about."

But I want to be more thorough here.

Harrington's painting--it has no title so I've decided to name it "30 X 30" after its dimensions--is quite simply a stylized barn in blues and whites and shades of green sitting in the middle of a field with a forest in the background leading up to a broad blue sky flecked with those same whites, blues, and greens.

It is, of course, more than that.  A straight black line defines the main floor of the barn and sits at an angle to the grassy field sloping down from right to left.  The floor of the barn also sets off the bottom third of the work which is comprised completely of the predominately grass green field textured with flecks of all the other colors in the painting.  As the painting rises, the shades of green go from light to dark and back again with the floor of the barn accented by the teal-green foundation.  Then the green of the foreground becomes almost black as the forest looms behind.  But the darkness of the deep forest gives way to the lighter green of the treetops and finally the splotchy blue of the sky.

The barn sits in the middle, resting on the downslope with zig zagging swatches of color running up and down the facade.  The first dominant color is the purplish blue sitting in triangular shapes between the green of the field and the blue of the sky.  But then there is an equally angular collection of mottled white that matches and adds to the triangularity of the blue.  The frame of the barn is clearly there in the background with its Mormon Barn roof jutting up into the sky, but that jutting shape is taken up by the whites and blues until it becomes unclear which is in the foreground, which is the outside and which the inside, the white or the blue?  The roof brings it all together by incorporating all the colors of the work into one almost pointillistic whole.  All of this is awash in the pinks and ambers that light the meadows and forests of the Tetons at sunset.  It is more than field and sky and barn.  It's how Jenny Lake and its environs feel at dusk.

But mostly, "30 X 30" is really cool.