Thursday, July 4, 2024

Analysis of Painting which, through analysis, reveals itself to be concerned mainly with Ghosts

This painting exists at Brisas Del Mar Spanish Restaurant at Rockaway beach in Queens, NY:


 I am struck by the depiction of the roadways. A confusing scale, and its lines are more suggestions than depictions of familiar symbols. These roads are unimportant, and can be streaked and lazy, as long as they communicate their being. A horse is a horse, with small legs. One driver asleep or inanimate, the other a ghost. And even more ghostly, the greenish glow, or being, separating upper and lower, or Heaven and Earth. In Heaven there is tower, radiant and illogical, like all heavenly things. Atop rests the figure of a man, but a man devoid of feature and agency, purely symbolic, like the industrial world created beneath him, because of him. He did not mean to do this, and he does not know that it's ugly. But the trees! The trees are not ugly, though formulaic and calculated. Fundamentally opposed, however, to the man-made roads in their kind of calculation. Nature's calculation breeds beauty, while man's calculation breeds only embarrassment; the silliness of resting, naked and featureless, on a glorious pillar. The pillar is glorious because it is framed to be, but the framer's perspective reveals itself to be just as fallible and cringe as the golden tower and the man upon it. 
Most mysteriously, rests our subtle, true focal point: the red and white swath. A child's dress, a suggestion of a plastic bed of roses, this can only be created by God, beyond Heaven, helping us along by confronting us with that which we do not and cannot understand. In the face of this false picture of industrial certainty and illusory heavenly bliss, He saves us. After the initial humiliation, there remains only faith, which blows through the curtains of our tower, like a Ghost. 

 

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