Dennis Hollingsworth

Ahora

Tacking is a term I use to describe my usual shift away from whatever direction I've been headed in a painting. I have tended to regard definitive objectives (spelling out just what the purpose and meaning of the art I am making) as something to be avoided. I anticipate that by doing so might foreclose (I'm groping for a name) surprise, epiphany, something that I am not yet capable of realizing but what I will be able to realize as I grow...

...the possibilities of Dennis at (t+1).

I've gyrated grand ellipticals and moved in oblique ways all my life. Take my education for example. Long before I had heard the Hubert Dreyfus lecture in Existentialism (iTunes podcast, "'Fear and Trembling' - Preamble from Heart II" at t=1:02:40 "...eternity in time... ...a defining commitment...") I stood in front of Goya's Saturn at the Prado when I was thirteen with the knots of paint of Saturn's face dilating in my head and I knew I had to become an artist, a painter. Before then, I was already copying the illustrations in the margins of art history books, I remember thrilling to the smell of "Pink Pearl" erasers and "Ticonderoga" pencils in grandma's house when I was of preschool age. Maybe it was the fact that there was no one else in my family who knew of the art world and that my father was career military and to plot my way to where I am now I had to matriculate through military service. But it is certainly because I was a kind of autodidact and it is probably because I read about Michaelangelo ("Agony and Ecstasy") when I was twelve that I crafted a kind of monumental education that incorporated an architecture degree and license at its pyramidal base. Once I slid the block of a secondary degree in art in place, I was 35 years old.

So as I tacked away from the horizonless landscapes of the first and seventh paintings of this group of eight paintings bound for Barcelona, and with the last painting I moved toward the pictorial structure of the portrait with the dominance of the color red, thinking of the sixth green near monochrome. Normal stuff, I've done this for a while now. What I didn't anticipate was a telephone call heralding dark news of trouble in my family.

Again.

And this is where I must tack away from the ill winds that plague my Hollingsworth/Garcia clan. A subject best left for memoirs in later years.. ...what were Tolstoy's opening words in Anna Karenina?

?All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.?

Posted by Dennis at September 7, 2006 7:17 PM