Fear in a Handful of Dust - February 29, 2008
Mixed media (pigment, marble dust, ash, paste, various glazes) on canvas, 48" x 24"
Located at: The Beaumont Studios.

This painting is inspired by the following series of lines, 19 to 30, from the first section, The Burial of the Dead. The biblical drama always appealed to me.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Classic mortality theme. Big tip, if you’re up to reading the whole poem: water = faith, but not necessarily religion – just faith (hope, willingness to live and carry on, and so on). Strangely, the poem does end on an upbeat note. One could also read a big carpe diem into it. Shantih.

The Awful Daring of A Moment's Surrender - May 17, 2008
Mixed media (pigment, marble and clay dust, paste, various glazes) on canvas, 48" x 24"
Located at: Private residence (JW).

This one is based on lines 401 to 409 from section V, What The Thunder Said:

Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms

The "Datta" allusion is to the Upanishad, where three groups each interpret God's utterance differently and take away three different meanings of life: generosity, self-control, and compassion. Datta is the first interpretation - generosity, or giving charitably.

I don't really get a sense of charity from the lines above. They have more to do with self-control than charity, I suspect. To me, the "awful daring" means making a momentary decision - even passively - that may change the trajectory of one's life. In a way, it's about taking risks and the sort of actions that result as a consequence.

The risks we take are ultimately what define us though not necessarily in a bad way. A big leitmotif theme in Eliot's work is regret from a life of inaction and dwelling on what one didn't do. What we leave behind should be memories of our best actions, not a dry catalogue of dates summed up by our obituaries, epitaphs, and wills.

Anyway, enough philosophy: so to my mind, an illustrative painting following this theme needed lots of texture, swirling red, maybe some suggested fossils or wings.

Each Confirms A Prison - August 3, 2008
Mixed media (pigment, marble and clay dust, paste, various glazes) on canvas, 48" x 24"
Located at: The Beaumont Studios.

This is the second "DA" in the closing of What The Thunder Said, lines 409 to 415. It's not my favorite passage, but I wanted to do all three of the DAs. The passage is:

DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

Dayadhvam means, roughly, "Sympathize." Compassion. In context with keys and prisons and nightfall and a broken Coriolanus, I take it to be about the sense of isolation we all feel sometimes, each in our own little prisons. Meanwhile, facism, war, extremism, (as represented by the Coriolanus imagery) and even terrorism have removed our sense of compassion for each other and our ability to unlock each others' doors.

With that in mind, I pictured… office buildings late at night with people still working in them (indeed, the prisons, though this may very well be a personal interpretation), slave to corporations and autocratic rule.

The Arid Plain - November, 2008
Mixed media (pigment, marble and clay dust, paste, various glazes) on canvas, 48" x 24"
Located at: The Beaumont Studios

This is the third "DA" in the closing of What The Thunder Said, lines 416 to 425. Again, it's not my favorite passage, but I wanted to complete the set. The passage in question is:

DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands
                 I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?

This last DA, Damyata, means control: self-control. With the first blast of thunder, Datta, Eliot wrote of "The awful daring of a moment's surrender/Which an age of prudence can never retract." One could read that as self-control in the face of temptation or of the blissful surrender to it, as, after all, "By this, and this only, we have existed."

I take this final DA to have two meanings: self control, and control of death. One inhibits, the other is impossible. The final line in the passage above - "Shall I at least set my lands in order?" - seems to be a line one would say when drawing one's will and accepting that such a thing needs to be in place since death is inevitable. The "lands" may also refer to the waste land itself, a metaphor for our internal state of spiritual aridity, hopelessness, and despair, which are now, finally, in order. In this passage, "the arid plain" is behind and there is water and ocean imagery: calm sea, a responsive boat. The ocean represents faith in Eliot's imagery. Thus, there appears to be love and faith restored. The speaker also seems to recognize inevitable death one day, and accepts it, though he may not surrender to it.

This painted version here represents the arid plain of burning, cracked shores in the distance blending into the calm sea water in the forefront.

These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruins - December, 2008
Mixed media (pigment, Sculpie, concrete, marble and clay dust, paste, various glazes) on canvas, 48" x 24"
Located at: Private Collection (SOLD)

Third Prize Winner in the FCA's annual abstract show.

This is the last of the TS Eliot Waste Land series, based on the final stanza of the poem, lines 426 to 433:

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon - O swallow swallow
Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
         Shantih shantih shantih

The stanza opens with four random quotations: a nursery rhyme about destruction and resurrection; a line from Dante's Purgatorio, Canto XXVI in Italian, about purifying fire; a reference from a Latin poem about yearning for flight, creativity; and a line from Nerval's El Desdichado, about a prince in an abandoned tower. In isolation, they seem like the ramblings of a madman, but the source references mirror the main themes and four parts of the Waste Land: destruction and resurrection, purification - razing something to the ground - by fire, lost creativity or flight, and abandonment or alienation. The line that seemed significant, to me, was the one that followed the quotes: These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

Whether Eliot references the quotes themselves or the knowledge gained from learning, these "fragments" of quotations or snippets of truth gained from them are what keeps the narrator going. Then there is a reference to Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (in which someone feigns madness), a reiteration of the three DA utterances, and lastly, the repetition of "Shantih". 'The Peace which passeth understanding' is how the Shantih repetition is usually translated. I take that to mean: We think we know, so we are at peace - however tenuous that peace is.

My visual illustration of the final stanza is a contrast of mostly serene sky-blue above a wave of cracking texture and dark corruption. There's a sense of water crashing and red magma rising to the surface from within the fissures and cracks.

Ultimately, the tenuous conclusions that one draws following a breakdown - the fragments that one shores against one's ruins - may give one a temporary peace. Nonetheless, this self-constructed reality is fragile and uncertain because it may not match the rest of the world's reality.

Shantih.

Till Human Voices Wake Us - October, 2009
Mixed Media (pigment, marble and clay dust, paste, glazes) on canvas, 48" x 24"
Located at: The Beaumont Studios

T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was the poem that made me decide to become an English Major.

J. Alfred Prufrock is characterized as a nebbish man who despairs his aging and his inability to act on his desires. His social and sexual anxieties paralyze him at the point of romantic connection. He fears being laughed at or, worse yet, being misunderstood.

The poem is a long, winding stream-of-consciousness monologue where Prufrock talks himself out of taking a risk. The painting is based on the final lines:

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Moving from black and white waves down to the "chambers of the sea" describes a vertical descent into a Dantesque hell of alienation. The world is curiously silent underwater. It is a very isolating experience, though peaceful for some.

As Sartre, said: "Hell is other people." We are only in pain at our loneliness inasmuch as we are aware of how much we want other people.

The painting is reminiscent of a fireplace, with suggested red and brown swirls to indicate seaweed or mermaid tresses. The lighting is the sort of luminescent lighting one sees when underwater. It's peaceful… and yet not.

The Way The World Ends - November, 2009
Mixed Media (pigment, marble and clay dust, paste, glazes) on canvas, 48" x 24"
Located at: The Beaumont Studios

T.S. Eliot's poem The Hollow Men has been described as a condensed version of The Waste Land. It explores similar themes in a similar order. The cadence and structure is more reminiscent of The Lord's Prayer, and can be read as sort of prayer to understand the all-too brief middle that exists between a beginning and an ending. It feels pretentious to sum up the poem's message as the quest to understand the meaning of life, but isn't that what all poetry and art is about?

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The stuttering repetition in the final lines brings to mind the last gasp before death. I always figure that's when the Meaning of Life will be revealed, in that last second of consciousness before we die.

Maybe the meaning is as Monty Python said: "Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations." Perhaps it's simply a random number like 42. Or perhaps it's something private that differs for everyone.

The painting, then, depicts a swirling sky, or water, in which a rocky organic shape - a leaf, a skull, a continent - seems to be dissolving. The shape is surrounded by air or wavy motion lines. It's not static but it is not dynamic because the blues are soothing, not jarring. There's a sense of day to night transition and a very gentle explosion, frozen in place and time.