Dance With an Angel

I look at paintings and I am in good company. Always. American art places me so. A bevy of geniuses whom we produce in this generation, the last, and the one before that one also. Unfailingly. It is a Fitz Hugh Lane and an early view of Boston's harbor, shining today with a glow of love at the museum. I go and look at it, or it is a Florine Stettheimer in a wash of color that dazzles you so, your eye gets confused in the surfeit. Oh, how can I ever tell this story? It is too hard.
Stan fits into the matter at hand. Stan Chilson, my pal from Franklin. I just hope I can continue to marvel and appreciate the new footage from Franklin I am just now incorporating into my psyche and dreamlife. Oh, Stan, you are such a card! His Franklin bounces, sways, flits, beeps and bounces a little more. For me, to tell me how America was just a short spell back. It is such a pretty picture. A souvenir of America, as the painter Stuart Davis would say of his own fine work.
It is a matter of dance ultimately. All my art takes legs and shows itself to move , to sway and talk to me. It is really that magical a thing. Art communicates so much, so fully, so vividly. To all us sentient beings who care. Who love fully and completely with no reservations. With no preconditions, no codicils, fears. No sense of markets, of any markets.
For art coddles us, gets us to stop being scared for a minute, as we stand in awe of God's trees, of women and men. It is the miracle of the moment, when we can see humans in pictures as special, as something more than pedestrians. When we see the world as it wants us to see it.
Stan is a bottle we fill, a window we open, a face to admire, to know, a chair to sit on. He joins me daily in my life. He is a piece of me and an extension of my thought and feeling. I think art, real art is such a friend. A great movie I see, a picture at the museum, an ad in a magazine, a line of print that makes me think. A photograph I see or take. Art accompanies me to the job, as I speak and am spoke to. It is in my mind when I drive the car or get the supper on the table. It is a companion, humble and docile, to expand my joy and sense of the world around me.
Art is job one. Stan's on duty to joy and to cajole. To sustain and surprise, to educate. Emerson says, "Nothing astonishes me so much as commonsense and plain dealing. All great actions have been simple.... Beauty... will come, as always unannounced."
So it happens that Stan fits. He joins people with steps, cars, trees, steeples, storefronts, to form a story of daily life. It regales with its charm and sensibility. I think it makes one feel happy to be alive.
Perhaps the trait that joins my artists is the lifelong drive to keep learning. They learn from what they see. Insistent objects are things in the daily existence that we live among and don't really notice much. An artist like cartoonist R. Crumb or one like Reg Marsh can draw the most amazing telephone poles or signs or lamposts. They are but insistent objects and need to get our attention, as we meander and ponder. The wonderful daily ocean we swim in. Artists just see stuff that we don't, really. They have a sight that is deeper than average. The usual person knows these objects are there but lets it go at that. Stan doesn't, as he caresses a view of Franklin and remembers that some inanimate giants among the human denizens of the town also have a claim to immortality and belong in his record of Main Street. Telephone poles, signs, flag poles, steeples. The silent giants that watch over us along with trees. Stan knows to care and record all things in his diurama, not just the two-legs in uniform. Stan seems to know that everything matters, not the human alone, but the structures around the human. From stairs, to buildings, lamposts.
Reg Marsh does signs, the El, and its massive structures, Stella does bridges, as does Charlie Burchfield. The good ones don't neglect the view of the daily world that joins humans in the pursuit of life and liberty. That view is full of sights and signs and activity that cries for expression and permanence. It is why I love Revere so much with its signs, action, color, and people. Stan gives us the little town, scurrying around being a little town in the thirties and forties and it seems such a fine and fun place to be, is all. I like being with him as he pushes on down the main street. I always feel I am along for the ride when I see a good photographer like Plowden, or Evans, or a painter like Hockney or George Bellows. That is it. I am with them as they tour me over their chosen, cherished terrain. I am so damn lucky, and all I have to do is stay quiet and be a bit appreciative and it is all just handed to me. A kid in a candy store, a fool at a circus. The stuff is free. You don't have to be rich to get art delivered to your eyes. Just careful and willing to take the time to see, to go to the library or the museum, to really enjoy the picture or the movie at your very disposal. Insistent objects just fill out the picture, give it class and grandeur. Substance.
I cannot understand the alienation people feel, the drugs or alcohol they need, the persistent habit of shopping 'til they drop. I just don't see it. Give me a Bellows, an early Hopper magazine illustration, a look at an NC Wyeth at the Needham library, a Helen Torr amid her husband's work, Arthur Dove's, at the museum, and I just fly. I must be on the wings of an angel. Helen Torr's, two little works at the museum left me confused and dazzled, worried that I might not survive their impact. Art is just that way. An experience unlike any other perhaps, because it joins generations, makes the dead live and breathe in you. Torr is dead. So is Stan, I keep reminding myself, but they live as I live and breathe with me and go down the main street of Waltham with me, and that of Norwood, Dover, Needham, as I go about my daily living.
Art lives and never dies. We live and never die as long as we pull hard on the string of imagination and care about what is delicate and beautiful. To remember is all. To care is the need. To celebrate is the task.
And the insistent objects live in the painting or the photo or moving picture. Their bulk and beauty call us to attention. They say, notice what my value is and appreciate me. Like the great oak in Dover talks to me when I go by, the street light in town does the same as the tree. It craves attention and it gets its due, as a beautific piece of my daily life.
It is obvious to me signs have character, personality, breath if you get close to them. They have a heartbeat too. Signs live, is all. The things of the universe have meaning because the artist sees them and gives it to them so we will educate our eye and care to notice what is around us. God, how could you ever explain a fire truck to someone? You just marvel at the damn thing and notice what is around us, in addition. Signs, posts, benches, phones, flowers, trees, cars, buildings, but that firetruck is kinda special isn't it? How wonderful that we have trains, tracks, railroad signs, boats, planes, trucks. Oh, don't forget trucks or cars. Things looking pretty. Objects sculptured in space. Free for the sight and touch.
In short we face an avalanche of sensation every time we step out the door and the artist notes it. Stan does and that is all you can ask of him.
All I know is to say it is there. To be enjoyed. The sign up on Squire Road across from the Burger King that I love so. The flash of Sozio's and Dunkin Donuts and on and on. The queer world we live in and must acknowledge, so life will stay rich and meaningful. Full of meaning, full of love and wonder. Like good art, the daily life must be rich and be appreciated, as a cousin to art. We need educate ourselves as the artists have taught us to do, as Stan has taught me. Or any of the stable I follow for erudition, education and pleasure. My life mates who are ever with me as I hit the pavements to see a thing or two, most of the days of my life.
Here's Charles. Charles Burchfield of upstate NY and Ohio. Painted wallpaper designs to get by and care for the family. Wept inside for years as he sought a groove that would sustain his spirit. "Stating it as simply as I can, I am one who finds himself in an incredibly interesting world, and my chief concern is to record as many of my impressions as possible, in the simplest and most forthright manner. In short, life, with all that the word implies, is of first importance to me."
It all gets confusing to me. I want to praise my neighbor, Stan Chilson and I talk about Charlie Burchfield. You see the latter produced a large body of written words about his inner thoughts and feelings. Stan to my knowledge did not. So I guess to me Burchfield is any artist. Me or Stan. Atget or Stettheimer. Any artist. Baigell, the biographer, speaks of Burchfield. That he could barely support his family during the Depression. That he was "loath to reveal the amount and quality of emotion that lay dormant and beneath the surface of his pleasant smile..."
He linked greatness with spiritual solitude. That idea suffuses his words, we can see. Alone, like Stan, like you and me, he turns to the inner light and finds company in it. I can see him looking at the flower. I can go nowhere without thinking how he sees a thing and how I must. In the parking lot of the Waltham office I work in. I go past the legions of cars to the greenery that skirts the asphalt and there is a sea of berry, flower, leaf, tree, lush green. Burchfield teaches to see it anew in all the seasons. I do. I bend and pick a thing I take in doors, a weed called loose strife, purple, a shaft of color and offer it to my daughter who works with me. It will sit days in the vase on her desk and I thank Charles Burchfield for teaching me the meaning of nature in its simple tastes. He stands at a slight tilt to the universe, lost in thought and worship. He said, "God's greatest gift to me.... is to be astonished by the almost incredible beauty of a dandelion plant in full bloom."
Run with the artists, hang with the angels. It is one and the same thing.