INDIAN SUNRISE

On Saturday, July 4, 2015, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

Sharing some painterly details of an

‘Indian Sunrise.’ Painted in August 2003, completely from imagination and wholly without reservation.

 

The scene took on form by the same process as when feeling clothes itself in words that fit, and emerges incrementally as a poem.

Actually it emerged out of total destruction of an underlying painting that failed. So while you may take it to be representation, it’s really revelation, because it revealed itself.

I was living in a dark dungeon of a place, with no direct daylight and no window view but for high concrete walls. Heavy oil tankers, diggers, and noisy dump trucks would grind slowly up a narrow steep lane, passing within three feet of the window, more than filling the view, dominating the whole room.

Not knowing that when i took the place on, i’d set myself up for a ‘long dark night of the soul,’ and got stuck there for ten years of gloom, claustrophobia, and isolation without privacy.

We do unknowingly set ourselves tests sometimes, and in retrospect they could be seen as initiations. Despite the circumstance and conditions, i continued to paint, and meditate the whole way through.

Even did those pure brightly coloured sacred geometry paintings, some of which you can find here. Had exhibitions, even sold some, one large one for the highest price ever, and painstakingly illustrated a book of castles which was published.

Played ten years of improvised grand-piano music in a stately home, in public for free, with no repertoire or musical training. ( See you-tube videos, Martin Law in Bantry House.)

Yet, no words can convey experience itself, it was a labyrinthine experience. Fortunately, labyrinths have an exit, when the timing is appropriate. A redeeming feature of ‘the past’ is, that it’s not present anywhere.

So in 2003, an abstract painting i was trying to resolve, on the floor by a bare light bulb wasn’t going anywhere either.

It was to be called ‘A Source of Love’, having just successfully completed one called ‘Source of Light,’ always 13 letter titles.

You could say, the ‘i’ was feeling ‘blue’ and ‘browned off’, (colloquial terms). So the ‘i’ mixed those two colours together, knowing they’d express a deep darkness only short of black.

Proceeding to wreak a hopeless, wilful destruction on the image. As the ‘i’ didn’t want to just cease painting, and so, was painting without specific intent.

Sharp, dark pyramid shapes were what was occurring, so there was no sense that they might not be pyramids, and one eye was constantly on them.

So that as it slowly dawned they were tipis, the brown ground around them warmed, redolent of that rust colour so prominent in early paintings by European artists who lived and worked among the ‘Indians.’ As with when the sun is rising, there is no choice but to surrender to the process.

With that as the new found focus, and just as ‘the angel is in the detail’, and reveals itself as each portion is blended and attended to for its appropriate atmospheric authenticity and spatial cohesion.

The blue-grey naturally suggested itself as being the elemental counterbalance to the earthiness of brown, and infused its characteristic mutual relationship, evoking both air and water, with the sun’s warmth still to rise.

And still, the bold brush strokes piled layer upon layer, defining a grounded foundation. A marshy hillside slope of bracken, grass, and rushes.

A few figures commune to rekindle the embers of an early morning fire, as mist drifts and clears across the grey lake.

Brown is a colour suggestive of elemental age, being fundamental and low on the spectral level, as the timeless earth is to sky. The rust colour illuminates as the warmth touches rough tufted hummocks and bushy contours of trees in antiquity.

Broad swathes of morning mist still shroud the far forested horizon of distant mountain ranges on the furthest brink of rising light.

Hallucinatory details serendipitously suggested by the brush lightly crossing textures of the already dried painting layers underneath.

Distant magical places in there, changing as the focus is gently coaxed into clarity.

Pre-Whitmanesque vistas unfolding, the land long before Sitting Bull, before Teshunka Weet’ko,(Crazy Horse), before Hiawatha and Deganawidah.

As yet untouched by the prophesied approach of the people from the east, and ‘manifest destiny.’ With the land still populous with vast roving wild Buffalo herds.

You never know what might happen if you try to obliterate a source of love.

So take heed, with your eyes on those pyramids. You might find, as i did, that it transforms itself into an Indian Sunrise. 
 

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MARTIN RAINBOWMAKER

(Written, July 4^th. 2015.)