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imbs
are more than the things from which fingers and toes depend. Arms are more than
a chorus for five ambitious soloists. Where a gesturing hand can tell us what
thought struck our subject a heartbeat before, as the eyes betray the instant,
the limbs relate to us what the narrative was two moments before or more. Limbs
are the residue of an earlier inclination.
The
place of Contra Posta is not simply to generate that sublime and almost always
better serpentine curve in the figure. That is to underutilize it grievously.
To leave all the limbs aligned with the eyes, the whole of the figure united in
a single activity, you reduce the figure to a single thought in the past as
well as the future. You remove all history of thought and thereby pull validity
from the argument that is being constructed. A figure is seated steady upon a
bench. Her arms cross her body to the left and at the end of them; her hands
fumble with a letter. The fingers talk of letting it fall. Her legs, in Contra
Posta, have their knees directed to the right with one leg marked as though to
rise but then, below, we see the toes on that poised foot curl in hesitation.
That foot could never support a rising action. Her head too must go some ways
to the right but her eyes are not straight to the front. Some fresh impulse has
overtaken her in the moment that we witness, some new realization since her
head was hurled right and parallel with her knee. In the center of the figure,
the knot in the twisted rag, the complex joint at the heart of some machine,
lies the torso that must perfectly describe the tension that the neck and the
limbs, the conflict of recent thoughts and actions, have inflicted upon the
homogeneity of the body.
The
morphology of the torso is such that it can range from a calm, smooth surface
to a boiling tempest of knotted muscles and twisted, stretched flesh. It is
wildly expressive but entirely dependent (more correctly, the reverse is true)
on the activity of the extremities. It is shaped by the pull and push of the
narrative and so it corresponds to the overarching theme of the work: the
spine, if you will. Through the use of Contra Posta, the artist though can
leave limbs in place that are utterly languid yet aligned such that their
arrangement lights up the torso with an energy because that core of the figure
must rationalize two (or more) conflicting, otherwise passive, ideas.
At
the fingertips of my mind, Werther adores his Charlotte. Dante is cupped in my
palms, Quixote rides my wrists and at the heart there is Lancelot. Long have
tales been told of heroes enamoured of forbidden women. With each legend, the
ancient story turns again.
I
had not, over these many years, been pursuing Beatrice. Instead, contrariwise,
I was acting as though my ambition was to put her on my trail. How great my
sense of success would have been had Beatrice ever once given thought to
searching for me and, in so doing, gaining access and insight into some flaked
off moment of my life made temporarily immortal by the magic of the internet.
Imagine my joy should she see in me some semblance of the man I wished I were.
Chivalry,
I was once taught, was a cynical scheme by some ancient King to stop his
warlords from being no better than barbarians. With a few crafted Romance
tales, the Royal Poets created an ideal warrior that their female audience
would desire and so demand in the men who sought to suit them.
The
cleverest bit of this intrigue was that it played upon what those males also
wished. The Boy's Big Book of Chivalry is not a primer on how to win the hand
of a lady to make her your wife but rather a guide for men and women on how to
inflame and maintain a love outside the bounds of matrimony. This was how the
King taught them to stop killing other warlords and stealing their wives but
instead how to make loving another man's wife be a thing that is honourable,
when, while doing so, the paramour does absolutely nothing about it.
There
is nothing romantic about loving the obtainable. Chivalry was a way to make
coveting thy neighbour's wife an admirable thing, only so long as you kept your
hands to yourself.
There are not, in this tale, any tilted
lances to win the love of any lady fair. Nor do I duel tenors to honour the
virtue of some destitute dear thing dying of consumption. In those days when I
did don plate armour and battle for a cause, it was the cross of St. Flynnian
that crested my shield. To die with our boots on was the extent of our
romanticism.
No
warlord, I never considered any notion
of carrying off Beatrice in a sack over my shoulder to take her back to my
small apartment for a ravishing. Other logistics aside, it had been overheard
at a concert once that my lady possessed the thighs of a bull. I'd have been
surely bested had I undertaken any pillaging.
Instead,
this knight put down his sword and took up his own quill. He crafted a tale of
High Romance where a certain Lady would need to be rescued from the Tedious
Tower by an aesthetic champion. While travelling to the castle, he encounters
the infamous Black Raphael upon a crossroads so that terrific battle follows.
They fight long past the dusk when the knight bests his foe and staggers on. In
this legend, his lady gives succour to the much-embattled hero, mopping his
brow with cool waters of inspiration and repairing his armour of confidence as
best she may. The love between these two cannot be spoken for she is given to
another. Nothing can be done but the two each make silent promises to live
their lives as nobly and goodly as the other would desire.
The
knight will awaken though and see that it was all a phantasm, sorceressly
summoned by the evil sister Katelyn. Beatrice did not exist and never did he
best Black Raphael in a contest. He casts off his armour and rails against the
evil fortunes. Dark melancholy threatens to overwhelm the knight. As the story
comes toward an end, our hero realizes that the heroine of his dreams does not
lose any perfection by her non-existence and nor does she deserve any less
devotion for her unreality. Be it resolved then that he shall continue to love this
conjuration and will indeed yet live his life exactly as she would have dreamed
him.
I
do not paint to please myself. I do not make to satisfy nameless waves of
faceless patrons. I do not paint to please any purchaser, real or potential.
When I step back from the canvas I ask, "What would Michelangelo
think?"
Were
she to read my life's tale, would the woman of my invention, my Beatrice, think
well of the life as led?