A Confessional Bent

2012_1_11 A Confessional bent

Listen, I really appreciate your letter and I only wish some of my other old friends and associates would have read the book with emotion and with the thoughtfulness you gave to it. You didn’t pull any punches (“a very warped mind’) and had your reservations about my openness of mind, yet at the same time you were generous of spirit and affirmative in many of your comments about my intentions and talents.

Early in my academic career openness wasn’t a priority for me because I was an abstract painter; but for a number of different reasons I went through a profound transformation while teaching at UNLV that brought about a radical sea change to my life, necessitating a recalibration of philosophy and creative intentions. I dropped painting and began to draw in pen and ink, my favorite medium, and instead of abstractions I started turning out satirical drawings of political figures and other public personages. To my surprise I had a flair for such things. By the time I got to Tucson I was a believer in Heraclites’ credo: I SEARCH MYSELF. Or as James Joyce put it, “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” So from 1974 onward my ship has sailed in an inward direction.

One of the not-so-hidden traits of my openness of mind and heart was, to state the obvious, a confessional bent or inclination, derived no doubt from my experience as a catholic youngster in Wisconsin. I always like the feeling of dispensing with my sins and moral missteps, of shedding sins like shedding sickness, of becoming clean again, of getting another chance, and of the forgiveness of sins as the major virtue of Christianity. I always felt like a cork bobbing up out of dirty water.

Aye, from my mid thirties on experience weighed on me like sin used to and being an artist provided me with a vehicle for externalization of the assimilated material that had been “forged in the smithy of my soul.” I could wring myself out and afterwards make room for more experience that later would be ready to be poured out into an endless river of images and insights that ultimately took the shape of a circle. Eventually I developed a stable of motifs and symbols that became my visual signature. And at the center of this circle was a commitment to openness and I have long been willing to accept the risks involved with openness. I believe it was T.S, Eliot who said, Humankind cannot stand too much reality. That would be more in keeping with your stance toward your burden of experience.

Till another time,

Ciao,

Jerry P