Today, I Stood

Today, I stood and stared, as I often have, at Gene Davis' "Sky Wagon," a painting  from 1969 measuring nine feet and ten and 3/4 inches tall and 54 feet and 5 and 1/2 inches wide. The painting is too wide to appreciate in full in one eyegulp, and it doesn't work that way anyway. It is still beautiful, straight after straight vertical line of acrylic five storeys recumbent. In such a view, you see the colors as they change, you see the bundles of light colors struck through with a discordant line of color, but you don't live within the painting.



I work in a building that is home to a museum, though I do not work in a museum, but this is a museum focused on the historical, both human and natural, rather than art. To experience an art museum, I have to leave the Cultural Education Center in Albany, New York, and travel underground into the Concourse beneath the Empire State Plaza, which ties ten state government buildings together, so that we need not venture outside in the winter. And this space is decorated with some of the consists of the "92 paintings, sculptures, and tapestries that are sited in the Empire State Plaza concourse, buildings, and outdoor areas."


The art collection, the brainchild of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, himself an art collector, is an
interesting collection of art, with a number of great pieces and quite a few (particularly in that main Concourse) that are barely worth a look. But it is "Sky Wagon" that holds my attention. Part of the reason is its size. Another might be its extravagant use of color, often strange mixed shades. In the end, the reason is because this painting is essentially a piece of op art, a style generally of little interest to me, but one that comes to some kind of peak in this painting. And, I imagine, other such paintings by Davis, he of the Washington (D.C.) Color School.


The painting works, it does what it needs to do, only when you decide to live within it, only when you decide to look at it intently. Only when you give in. Although I've stared at every inch of this canvas (actually canvases, and quite awkwardly stitched together), my primary pattern of viewing is to go to the canvas, as close as I can, right up to the stretched line protecting the painting from viewers, and to look closely at a single dark line within strands of light colors or to look at a single bright line among the dark.


What occurs is a shimmering. The lines of the painting, so straight and prim, begin to shimmer as the multitudinous colors attack the eye at once. The combination of so many colors in such rigid arrangement cause this remarkable shimmering in the eye, nothing but an optical illusion. So it is like vision of any kind, but the shimmering and more-than-wide-angle-vision-wide width of the canvas pull me into the painting. I am not separate from the painting, as in every other painting I've seen in person; I am a part of it (not apart), I am awake in a dreaming and swimming through color, I am meditating and calm, I am one and me, rather than multiple and no-one, I am alive in the moment.

And I do not hear the state workers and visitors behind me shuffling back and forth that long corridor leading to the State Capitol and back. There is no government, no governor, no floor, no ceiling. No world save the deep and entrancing world of this color I can never want to escape. Though escape I must, and do.

ecr. l'inf.