Dennis Hollingsworth

50 Years Ago

It was 1969, I was 13 years old.

My family was traveling to Australia at the time, taking space available embassy flights chain connecting US Airbases along the way via Europe, the MidEast, India, Thailand and the Philippines. It was an adventure to be sure, but also it was par for the course. My life story is as convoluted as diverse, hard to recount simultaneously fully and succinctly. Pardon me if I demur today in this post. Maybe an 11th hour memoir can do the job someday?

One of the links on the chain was Madrid. I was born there, and the capital city always had a special aura in my imagination. I was drawing and thinking about art since before kindergarten. One of my early memories was the allure of grandma's box of Ticonderoga pencils tucked in her cabinet drawers. I remember the power of the smell of wood and eraser, the marvel of crumbling lead, the mysteries of sharpening. In the years in between, I matriculated the challenges of art (self) education, until the years just before the trip to Australia when I was reading texts on art history (it could have been Helen Gardner's famous book, I don't exactly remember) and copying the illustrations in the margins. Just before we left CONUS on that trip, I had just finished reading Irving Stone's "Agony and the Ecstasy". Every page was a jewel.

So it was when my parents dropped me off at the Prado like a day care center. Later that week, I took a bus to Toledo to see El Greco (by myself as memory serves, a personal growth milestone at the time), where I learned of the liberties that could be taken with the rendition of the anatomical human figure, the awareness of rule and how to break and recreate them dawned on me then. But it was a specific moment of my experience in the Prado, after the sequence of the galleries of Bosch, Dürer, Velasquez, Ribera... that I came upon Goya: his cartoons for the tapestries, his court paintings and then his Black Paintings.

Goya's Black Paintings.

I was standing in front of the famous Saturn. My sense is that it wasn't as famous then as it is now. That's my impression, but I might be mistaken. I was standing in front of "Saturn..." and Goya's world of paint telescoped into my eyes and mind. Everything and everyone around me disappeared and the only things that existed for that long, super-saturated moment was this painting and me. I don't know exactly how long that moment lasted. It could have been forever, or it could have been only a minute, or it could have been both. And as the ordinary world returned to my senses, a resolution grew within me to become an artist, to become a painter, to return and remain in that realm so saturated with paint and churning with arts' urgent impulse.

This is what paintings #'s 572-576 and 578-582 are all about.