The works of art, which are included
in this exhibition of "hEaVEN n eARTh", represent a long and arduous
journey for me. In a sense, the work is an artifact of that journey and, as
can be seen, this period has not exactly been a walk in the park. The residuals
of almost 7 years of my life, they reflect a sojourn into melancholy and despair,
to a more rounded and happier time for me now.
"Sisyphus'
Descendants" begins the show, and to me conveys how I, as a middle-aged
artist, had become sick and tired of playing 'career'. This seems ironic,
as I have been an artist who had always had a modicum of success since my
early twenties. Sisyphus shows how I felt about rolling that damn rock up
the hill, only to watch it roll down the other side again. I wondered if Sisyphus
ever enjoyed the view while he was up there, or could he only see the onerous
task ahead of him as that confounded rock rolled down again? Art for me started
to become nothing more than a series of well-orchestrated career moves showing
my cunning (which is what got Sisyphus in his predicament in the first place).
Was I now with the crowd under the umbrella or moniker of "kiss ass but
don't get brown lips?" I felt somehow that I was chasing after a fleeting
goal instead of what had motivated me as a fledgling artist, and I began my
search for integrity in art again. What I am not saying here is that my art
up until then was somehow lacking integrity: I had just finished my Red-Blue
Works (Red Blue Wheelchair & Crutches, etc.), which I felt, and still
feel, are some of the best pieces I have ever made. Rather, I had lost the
motivation to chase after the shows and career. In hindsight, maybe self-indulgently,
I wanted to pursue the ideals which first inspired me to become an artist.
Regrettably,
this work only drove me deeper into despair, manifesting itself in the work
of "Phaethon's Faux PaS". Phaethon's plight to me was not so much
his fall to death, but his sheer intoxication with power: the power in riding
his father Apollo's chariot across the sky. So too had I been given privilege,
and now I was also myopically on a crash course with the very thing which
sustained life itself. My religious beliefs began to come into scrutiny after
several bitter disappointments with the organized church. My links of support
started to feel like chains and, to paraphrase Bruce Cockburn, "Though
the chains are made of gold they are chains none the same." I became
more and more depressed and, like Phaethon in the River Po, sank deeper into
my own melancholy. The river I painted is filled with both the fire of the
chariot but also the vices and distractions of my own indulgences. These were
not happy times. Unbeknownst to me, I had such proximity to my own problems
that I was incapable of identifying my own dreadful situation and now required
an event like Jupiter striking me from the sky with a thunderbolt.
As
I look back today, these were the darkest years of my life and it seems fitting
to see that these works are painted as darkly as they are. I was not pretending
to make any kind of contemporary chic or cutting edge art with these paintings
but, contrarily, was groping at trying to find the source of what brought
me to art in the first place.
At this juncture I would like to say that making art costs something. Not
just the materials, but also each work takes a bit of me, and it is a bit
of me which hangs on the nails of the gallery with each work I create. The
cost is not only selfishly mine though! These dark years cost those who love
me also. My wife, Maria, and children, Joshua and Nicole, would be asked to
shoulder a portion of the burden of rolling that rock up the hill with me.
I can't express my sincere sense of gratitude to them enough but to say that
without them I would have surely perished like the nymph son of Apollo, Phaethon.
Also, my friends and those who have so feverishly supported me over the years
would watch me recluse myself into my studio. Depression is a peculiar ailment
because in many ways, like the falling figure of Phaethon, you are completely
out of control. In falling, we must assume that at a certain point in the
decline (not unlike drowning) we become cogent of what lies ahead and give
into it, we surrender. Or do we?
This
brings me to "The Saints", my grasping and thrashing to find meaning
in the despair of my own situation: to somehow, in that darkest hour, find
a glint of light and to chase it to redemption. These faces represent a grasping
to give pain and consternation meaning: the crosses we are all asked to bear
have significance in a seemingly uncaring world and universe, silent to the
travails of we mere mortals. Each Saint by virtue of their beatification is
screaming that misery has value. The process of catharsis and the tempests
of ill health give our lives not only meaning but in fact make us even more
complete human beings. Fuller, stronger and yet broken, a paradox of beauty.
This countervails all current common pop psychology and goes against the very
grain of what most think of as the full person. Somehow in understanding the
"human condition" we learn to understand the secret of being totally
human, and in such, even in our weakness one can attain sainthood. Heroes
have their gifts, like "Superman's strength", but the Saint must
make of weakness, humility, compassion and death, the super-human "cloak"
of humanity. This is what inspired these works: the hope that life's hardships,
or even the very ebbing of life itself, have such all-encompassing power that
we are capable of storing our treasures where they are not perishable.
Then
come the "Tongues of Fire". The test of fire, the very same fire
that may have consumed the Earth in the Phaethon myth, comes and cleanses
us to bring purity and fulfillment. In Pentecost the Spirit descends and fills
the hope of those in that room with the presence of God, love and life itself.
So too then do I have such a hope--the hope of healing, as in the Saints,
and the hope of fulfillment, as in the gift of the spirit and the tongue of
fire which burns above my own head. As a man of 45, I now realize that I could
never have come to this point in my own shallow and self-indulgent life, were
it not for the initial descent, the fall from grace and the eventual sustenance
of love and knowing that these events have meaning.
I am not pretending to know anything more than
when this sojourn began, nor am I trying to preach to anyone here. I am simply
sharing with you, through my work as an artist, an aspect of my own journey--a
sort of picture album of my trip through the soul. The privilege of being
an artist affords me only this! These are the small mercies, which we who
are creative have to share, in this I think I may have found the very thing,
which I had thought I had lost those many years ago…the reason why I
began and became an artist.
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Saint with Blind Cane
Portrait of the Artist
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Gerard Peter Pas
"hEaVEN n eARTh"
April 2001. London, Canada.
E-mail: gerardpas@gerardpas.com
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