INSIGHTS

THE PAINTING was a large, gray water scene, more sky than water, divided by two dark, humped islands. The water was painted in smooth, parallel strokes while the sky was misty and swirling. The light that was breaking through the grayness was beige.

Upon the promise of $125, the painter let me take it to the two rooms 1 rented at the top of an old house in a graduate student slum on the west bank of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. I put it on a blank, white wall near the sofa bed, sat down in a hand-stained rocker from an unfinished furniture store, and watched the light fall through the room’s single window onto the painting.

It was late afternoon in a muddy Minnesota spring. The light fell golden and horizontal upon the painting. For a long time, I sipped a glass of whiskey and watched the painting change with the waning light. It seemed as though a sun within the painting were setting in various shades of gold and gray, the colors deepening and shifting in the fading light.

I was trying to change my life.

From a six-month job that paid little more than teaching two sections of freshman English, I had saved enough money to buy the couch and the chair and had built some bookcases. I was writing poetry then, and the late afternoon was my favorite time of day.

The landscape was a good place for my mind and eyes to wander. I could get close to my loneliness, and in a peculiar way, get rid of it by being closer to it.

Years later, I learned that art historians could fix the moment, sometime in the 19th century, when an artist dared to paint a landscape completely empty of people or of any signs of people. Until then, landscapes had always had at least a tiny human figure, a house, or perhaps a shepherd’s crook. But once the landscape was emptied of all human trappings, it was offered up to the mind. It became psychological.

My particular landscape offered an image of the human mind, with the more elaborate and better-known clouds of consciousness, and beneath it, the placid, unexplored water of the unconscious.

In the 19th century, people came to live more and more in cities, and feel more and more the need for a space of sky and land in which consciousness could roam; and in the 19th century, psychology was developed. Americans were among the first to take to the new study of the mind, and of course, landscapes were America’s greatest wealth, becoming the subject of its writers and painters, as well as places to inhabit and develop. The European landscape painting required a peasant, a distant house, or a ruined castle to represent the great distance between human achievement and the immortality of nature.

Lacking Europe’s ruined castles, American landscape painters sometimes put a lightening-blasted tree in the foreground instead. This convention can be seen in Frederic Church’s The Icebergs at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. In the foreground lies the shattered mast and shredded sail of a failed polar expedition, surrounded by the overpowering mass and fantastic colors of the icebergs. Church carefully studied icebergs during a voyage, and especially liked the low rays of the setting sun, which throw a golden light on the water in The Icebergs.

Like Church’s paintings of Niagara Falls and the Andes Mountains, The Icebergs created a sensation in its day, both in America and England, where it was exhibited to long lines of paying customers. But it was overshadowed by the Civil War. An Englishman bought it, and The Icebergs simply disappeared from view and memory until its rediscovery in 1979 in an English boarding school.

The scholar of Church’s painting, Gerald L. Carr, does not speculate upon why a painting so famous and which inspired artists later in the century, was almost completely forgotten. The last century, like ours, probably forgot how to look at the painting, because it was too distracted by other images. It was preoccupied with “getting and spending,” to use Word-worth’s words.

As our age becomes distracted and amazed by aviation and photography, we see more and more -the rings of Saturn, the gestation of a fetus. But in this abundance of images, we lose the place in which to dream, in which to live the secrets of our emotions. Images contain the secrets of our emotional life. We may hear words in dreams, but we dream in pictures.

And of course, we are deceived by pictures. With the development of psychology came the advent of advertising. Advertising creates a hunger and an expectation that may have little to do with reality. What chance would a naturally yellow orange with greenish tints have in the marketplace of dyed-orange oranges? Market researchers tell us we expect to see orange oranges and will not buy them otherwise. It is hard not to think that the people who study our tastes are actually the tyrants of it.

Looking at paintings helps undo this tyranny. The Kimbell Art Museum became a favorite place of mine, when, for a short while, I was the arts writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Looking at paintings day after day altered my sense of reality. My perception of the sky and the trees, particularly, was affected by this. On the long drive between my home in Dallas and my job in Forth Worth, I dreamed paintings and watched the landscape slowly devoured by housing developments and condominiums. The daily drive was a time to meditate through the frame of the moving windshield. Colors seemed more intense, trees more painterly. Their shapes almost abstracted themselves. They began to have an emotional life independent of my deadlines and ambitions. They stopped marking the way.

One twilit evening years ago in Minneapolis, I stepped into such a painting. Iwas going to my office to grade some papers when I noticed the drama professor ashe was taking a break from a play rehearsal. He was leaning against a door next to alilac bush that was bursting with purpleblossoms. He was in pure repose, driftingand silent, and I had a secret, happyknowledge that there would never be anything more to life than this.