I don’t know all that much about art, as the saying goes, but I know a little, and want to know more. I took an Art History 100 course in uni. It was a three hour lecture held on a Monday night in a large, warm auditorium in a frozen, windy city. The professor had a deeply soothing voice and an endless series of slides. As such, I slept though the Classical Greeks and Romans, nodded through the Renaissance, snored out loud through Romanticism, and woke with a start to Contemporary Art. I can tell a Manet (naked ladies) from a Monet (lily pads). The Impressionists impress, Munch is a scream, and when it comes to pointillism, que Seurat Seurat. No, but really. I am moved to stillness by Edward Hopper. That light. I love the dreamy surprise of Surrealism: Dali, of course, and Magritte’s self-portrait in a bowler hat with a green apple covering his face. I’ve visited many important museums and galleries, and no, not just the gift shops. I can’t draw or paint if I had a gun to my head, and while I hope this situation never comes to pass, I do have a deep appreciation for those who can paint, draw, or just create, with or without a gun to their head. I don’t have the budget or the eye to be a true patron of the arts, but I like to think of myself as a supporter. I’m a booster of the arts.
A while ago, when we were somewhat flush, John and I started to buy a little original art, often as gifts for each other on special occasions. I prefer paintings to jewelry. John still prefers power tools but whatever. We started small, both in scale and in provenance. We also inherited a few dusty canvases. John’s great great Aunt Josie was Josephine H.J. White, a 19th century painter of some renown, whose rural scenes in gilt frames were displayed in bank halls and such before they found their way to us. They are very old-fashioned, but I have come to love them. The rest of our collection remains relatively modest and eclectic, mostly landscapes, dramatic ones, both figurative and abstract. Very Canadian, although not necessarily nor intentionally so.
The first time I laid eyes on The Rock was across the hall at Art Toronto at the Metro Convention Centre. You would be hard put NOT to see it, as it was the star attraction of the gallery booth near the main entrance. It was a big canvas, and even from far away you could sense the water rushing towards you, wild, exhilarating, threatening even. As you approached, the thickness of the paint became apparent: impasto, as the technique is called, but laid on so heavily it was sculptural. It thrilled me, and I kept returning to it. When John arrived to join me, he too was enthralled, and he asked the gallerist for the price. A side note: John never balks at asking anyone the price, be it at a silent auction or a stall in the Marrakesh souk. Nor does he hesitate to bargain like a Phoenician. I, on the other hand, have a horror of appearing crass and bourgeoise in front of all these uber cool gallery people, in their black outfits and architectural eyeglasses. I don’t fully understand the art market - does anyone? As such, I assume anything I really like is out of my reach.
Surprisingly, and amazingly, The Rock was not. Furthermore, we had the wall space for it. This is a real concern. It’s a big canvas, so it needs its own wall. We decided to hang it adjacent to the family room in a half stairwell that would allow you to view it from at a distance, albeit outside the house, as in the backyard. The gallery offered its congratulations, and arranged to have it delivered and hung. We prepared. I was ecstatic. Even the kids were excited. We displayed au naturel for a bit, then eventually had it framed, and installed proper lighting. I gaze at it every day, and it continues to intrigue me with its beauty, its energy and yes, its sense of foreboding. It reminds us of a set of rapids not far from our cottage, on the Magnetawan River, but there’s more to it than that. There’s a bleakness to it, a marker of the Anthropocene, or is it post-apocalyptic? Most of our visitors just say hey, is that Burnt Chutes? Cool.
Recently, I was asked if I wanted to meet the artist, Matt Bahen. I did, and we sat down for a rather bracing talk about his work. Matt, not surprisingly, is as intense as his paintings. After a few innocuous questions on my part, such as the price of paint (“$25 a tube!” he said, with understandable dismay, as he goes through hundreds of them with each painting), we plunged in. He paints heavy, as he puts it, in every sense. His paintings are de-populated and almost claustrophobic, mythological landscapes leading into darkness. The strangeness of climate change is apparent, and his work is no less moving and beautiful for all of that. Matt’s literary influences are equally portentious: Joseph Conrad, certainly, Joseph Campbell, Cormac McCarthy and the Romantic poet William Blake, all of whom can send you down a rabbit hole of intertextual investigation. Matt also references the unsettling portraits of Lucian Freud, whose work, he says, owes much of its psychological impact to the fact that Freud does not let your eye linger where it wants to. You don’t, however, have to do the research to enjoy the work; sometimes, as Freud’s grandfather Sigmund was said to have said, a cigar is just a cigar.
We saw each other out of the gallery where we’d spoken. As I started to leave, Matt suddenly said “You know why your painting is called The Rock?. “No,” I said, biting back to urge to say something about Newfoundland , or Dwayne Johnson. “Nina Simone”, he said. “Sinnerman”. The song. Oh. Yes, of course. Of course.
Oh, sinnerman, where you gonna run to? Sinnerman where you gonna run to? Where you gonna run to? All on that day We got to run to the rock Please hide me, I run to the rock Please hide me, run to the rock Please hide here All on that day But the rock cried out I can't hide you, the rock cried out I can't hide you, the rock cried out I ain't gonna hide you there All on that day I said rock What's the matter with you rock? Don't you see I need you, rock? Good Lord, Lord All on that day So I run to the river It was bleedin', I run to the sea It was bleedin', I run to the sea It was bleedin', all on that day So I run to the river It was boilin', I run to the sea It was boilin', I run to the sea It was boilin', all on that day
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture is like singing about painting: difficult, if not futile, despite their interconnection. I went home and put on Nina Simone, recalling that Sinnerman is played throughout in The Thomas Crown Affair - the remake, a stylish late nineties art heist film, with Pierce Brosnan and Renee Russo. The key scene features Crown, a bored billionaire, stealing (or actually returning) a Monet taken from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To create a diversion, he blends into the crowd along with several lookalikes, all wearing bowler hats inspired by Magritte’s Son of Man, of which the artist himself wrote:
Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in the which is hidden and which the visible does not show us.
Songs within stories, worlds within worlds.
See for yourself: Matt Bahen’s new exhibition Was Once Only Imagined is on until March 28th at the Nicholas Metivier Gallery in Toronto. Another exhibition of new paintings, Coming Down the Mountain, will be on view as of April 1st at the Macintosh Gallery at Western University.
Beautifully written! What a beautiful piece!