So I look across the way and become obsessed with an abstract painting, brilliant colors dripped down on the page, a ridge of green across the top that appears to me to be a line of trees -- in abstract, of course. I spend a great deal of the workshop staring at the painting, I cannot remove my eyes from the significance it seems to have for me. Visual art can speak for us when words cannot. I know that already. It's happening again.
I write in my notebook:
There is a painting across the way that is abstract paint drips. It appears to me that at the top there is a tree, and all the colors -- yellow, red, purple, and lime green drips are the roots, tangled and alive and thin and fat and forever under the ground doing their thing.
The workshop ends with the usual stories from childhood prompt (yawn), and I move across the hardwood floor of the gallery with my cell phone to get a picture of the painting.
And I discover it isn't at all what it appeared to be.
As I write this blog this morning, I realize I did not even bother to get the name of the painting or the artist. I had noted that it won a prize -- Best in Show. I will take another look today for pertinent information as I have committed myself to three workshops in the gallery. It is a must. It is the art space that is calling me and challenging me to find words. My tangled and alive and thin and fat and chaotic commotion deep inside needs examination.
Things may not be what they seem. I must allow that. Today I dig for the roots.
(The painting is called "Still from Cities of Inextricable Velocities" by Ryota Matsumoto.)
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