The Blue Melon

The Image as Subject: Image as 'the call'

Recently, I visited a little known but rapidly growing artist community in the Sonoran Southwest. I usually try to do this once a year and I usualy show up in the barrio life there during fiesta or festival weekend. Not only are the gallery doors open and the major artists available to talk with, but the wannabee's are usually at work off the beaten track and lots of additional artists show up in tents to market their arts and crafts. I look forward to this festival, mostly because I can never predict what it will be like from year to year. This year I experienced what I think may be the premier watercolour artist in the southwest today.

While I was passing through the gallery providing her a studio workspace, she just happen to be at work. The owner of the gallery had interrupted this work and the two were chatting briefly about a particular work-in-progress. Just as I passed in front I heard this artist say, "The most important part about this is that I can never predict what the paint will do when I apply various washes. No matter how familiar I am with the paint and technique, no matter how many times I do this, I am always surprised to see what happens. I have to pay attention to what happens and very quickly, I have to respond to how what appears here wants to be here." It seemed pretty tricky to me.

I couldn't help thinking about David Miller's "bricoleur" after that. According to David, a bricoleur is an ordinary person doing the best they can with what is on hand. Now I'm looking at an artist at work --and not just any artist, the best I've seen in the genre of watercolour and southwest workmanship. Truly, she can't be all that ordinary! Then I remembered. What is at work works through her from other eyes, the ones that awaken in SURPRISE! And what has awakened those eyes and made them attentive to dimensions of tonality, color and hue that suddenly appear on the surfaces of the work before the artist, is artistic, too, tempermental and archetypal beyond the work-in-progress. This other one reminds her that the image before her is the larger life and subject in the work at work. She can't become sidelined here. She, too, must be in the work and responsive to the medium's way of working. And so, she works it, if what I saw and heard that day is any clue to how her ordinary workday goes, like an ordinary person will work caught in an unanticipated and surprising thing. She will use all of her knowledges about texture and color, paint and process while staying open to the mysterious way the whole thing 'works' itself.

In David's essay he shares three images Levi-Strauss notes are belonging-together in those making-references for creative movements at work: a ball redounding, a dog straying, a horse swerving off-course to avoid collision. David also mentions a fourth usage, one more modern in meaning. Bricoleurs work a trick at work beyond the eye of images. The work tricks the eye, opens it in a new way. The eye learns the trick and plays it all the way through the subjective nature of the mental image coming into being. The medium the artist is in is not inside the artist in this moment. The artist's mind has become transparent to something the image itself overcame in appearance. There's no obstruction between what gets seen and what gets recognize beyond understanding. It is a fortunate rhythm. And, the artist dreams with the image in the dream from the deep in-sides within the performing masterpiece on hand.

I often have surprising experiences working poetic images, too. The bleu-melon image above is created by taking a photo of a muskmelon (Cucumis melo Reticulatis) that has been halved to expose its insides. The image is negativized until it takes on the blue hue. Eventually, a distortion is applied to the image canvas to create the current reflection of a split and its opening severed mid way. Imaginally, the play suggests to me a feminine dichotomy of organic and motile ground expressing curvy overtures in play.

Also, note the movement of the center to an off-centering. The melon-seeded center exposes itself as if it were a "rip" in the pictoral fabric, itself be/coming moved! It is like a bricoleur making out of hand within the established field of motility. This distortion creates a new center emanating now from a dark encirlcling and a grey bell-like flow emerges while it takes on an hourglass-like appearance and leaks along the central margin until it begins to overtake the edges of the blue melon's bleu-melon circumference.

The vertical arise of the chaliced apparition and this fluidity as a flowing center appear at once and as one alluding both to something solid and something numinous operating behind the mythopoeic manipulation. It surprised me when I first saw it happening. It was like a sexy psychedelics at work. It made the aging taste of rock'n roll taste blue and feel new. Like Galatea turned the polyphemic eye toward something other and largely ignored, it served like a call to call me to attend my own blue world.