“Painting as Relief” 
You put the album “Memoryhouse” or “Songs from Before” by Max Richter on your
stereo. Lie back in your favorite armchair like a bed. Perhaps it is night, quiet, perhaps there is rain.
Close your eyes.
Suddenly you are seven, nine, or twelve years old again. Headphones strung from your yellow water-resistant
Walkman to the sides of your head. You’re in the rear of the car, perhaps even facing the sky from a bucket seat
in the tail of a giant station wagon, an LTD. There are stars. Duffel bags, hard suitcases, fishing rods and shoes
surround you. Maybe you remembered a pillow.
The vehicle also carries others, persons who will come to mean nearly
everything for who you become. Who will wound and anger you, who may save you from disaster a time or two and cause
some as well. Who may come to define you through misunderstandings, perhaps through love.
The hum and shimmy of
the car on asphalt vibrates you toward a state not unlike Zen meditation, not unlike daydreaming. From the corners of
your eyes telephone poles, brush grass, rock cutaways, buildings, cows, other cars and their lights, an occasional tree, perhaps
a horse become indistinguishable strokes of a hazy bluish gray’d light, darkness, running shadow. It’s stop
motion. Primordial moving pictures. The open language of Kansas like a canvas.
An oil derrick, rocking up
and down, becomes a still life in the landscape rushing past. An owl overhead, a fencepost after fencepost after fencepost.
Sometimes you cry in drowsy silence, an elsewhere-longing. Your head lolls to the side in ways that allow saliva eventually,
in slumbers, to dribble its way from your mouth, and your neck to wake in a sort of locked anguish.
There are loopholes,
risks, and freedoms in traveling an open landscape. You inhabit a barn you see, hardly protected during a bloody difficult
war, huddled in piles of hay. You take flight off of a flint hill cliff, circle slowly over this rambling car filled
by a sister or brother, perhaps a mother, a father.
You begin to be the people that live out there – isolate across
the expanse, a Christmas light nestled among a farmstead of trees, far out in the vast prairie. The horse under you
almost leaves the ground as you, breathless, flee the attacking tribe amongst whoops and shrieks.
Rolling, tumbling,
for hours, miles.
What is painting but relief? Structure and shadow, color and shape, layers and accumulation.
Blends of striations of strokes traveling at 75 mph. The moon somewhere, poles hidden under sunset and nightfall.
Every memory, every dream, every love and inquiry and thought…turned inside out, upside down, over and over…
The
world working its way through the world inside of you and back out again…
Magic…surprise…
Nathan
Filbert 3.31.2010
