"Atlantic Room"

"Nocturne, 2009", Alice Dalton Brown, Oil on Canvas, 101, 6 x 160,2 cm, Fischbach Gallery, New York

If there is a way

I'll find it

and if I'll find it

I'll find my home

Ocean breeze at moonlight. Calm, soothing breeze. Darkness and light. Ripples across the water. Water, water, dots of white on colour. Blue, deep blue. Silence everywhere. Sometimes, the gentle rustling in the curtains. Shh, shh, shh. The house, floating on the waters. Another world, another time. Floating world, fleeting world. Ukiyo-e. House as a sanctuary, when everything else feels uncertain, when all the lights outside are gone. Nocturne.

 

In “Nocturne, 2009”, Realist painter Alice Dalton Brown demonstrates once again, her perfect skills in the delicate art of balancing reality with dream. “Nocturne, 2009”, belongs to the series of “Nocturnes and Diurnes” paintings, Alice Dalton Brown's twelfth exhibition at the Fischbach Gallery in New York. The artist's signature, seaviews from a window frame, with diaphanous curtains blowing in the wind, is a friendly invitation to find this inner peace that is so desperatly missing in our modern, busy lives. 

Although “Nocturne, 2009” has a strong, meticulously calculated composition, there is an element of randomness, a let-go feeling distilled into the pictorial space. Dual space. The outdoors: the tranquil ocean, with the shimmering light dancing on its surface, the shrub shadow behind the gently moving curtains. The sky, purplish, organic-like, somewhat ominous. The indoors: the wooden floor, with its puddle of moonlight on the left-hand side. The curtains, diaphanous, them too, almost organic. The breezy air lifts the gossamer curtains, as would the wind with a sailing ship. Air, water and light. Brown's painting is a subtle dialogue between the controlled, geometrical elements and that of the organic realm. A back and forth movement between the matter and the evanescence. The known and the unknown. 

Waking in the darkness

in the cool and salty air

rustle from the doorway

away, away

the faint echo

of chamber music

When looking at “Nocturne, 2009”, one can almost feel the tension between the natural and artificial world. Yet, the artist went beyond this apparent dualism by drawing our attention to the threshold of both realms, to the in-between space of her composition. There is something reticent in “Nocturne, 2009”, as one would be before entering in a seemingly deserted house. Empty house? Is “Nocturne, 2009” an empty house? The painter left visual clues – the curtains, the polished floor, the open doorway – of human presence. Perhaps, someone sitting or lying in the dark, just left the room and went out for a night swim? Atmosphere. The whole painting is atmosphere. Respiration. Ocean at night. Time and space, a pulsing lung in the cocoon of our dreams. House and heart on stilts. Ukiyo-e.

Shadow among shadows

nothing but seams

in the weave of time!

Do not move 

your dream is yet to pass

And the deep night

in bluish tinge

To whom do we paint

but for those

already in the darkness?

Image licensing, courtesy of Alice Dalton Brown and the Fischbach Gallery, New York, to whom I here express my gratitude for their kindness and trust.

"Eyes Wide Shut"

“We are an ocean

behind our eyes

But never will we know

the tide schedule”*

In the Ocean Gallery the people were gathered in clusters and individuals reading the empty labels beneath the empty frames. Ocean backwash. Soft late afternoon light and the silvery foam. Beyond the horizon, in the distance a serene music flowed up like a scent of nostalgia in the breeze. What paintings are those? Whose eyes once looking at things now long gone? It was the kind of afternoon Ray always liked. One with endless walks along the beach. A sense of fluidity he could not find anywhere else in the colony. What was it with him and the Gray Shadows? He was not a settler, nor was he a surveyor. Everything here bespoke of a time he knew he will never get to see.

“Eyes from beyond to walk in beauty

of endless wake along the sea”

Ray suddendly remembered. He remembered the first time he arrived at the Gray Shadows. It was the day after the storm that took away the Portrait Gallery. All those faces washed away by the sea and with them the pain of separation. The Elders called for a special gathering. They showed the settlers the new altered world and alluded to the sorrow shared by each generation. Bodies of water had created new realities and opened the doors to a new sense of space and time.

“ And all that quest for light and dust

will come at last with eyes wide shut”

In the long and faceless gallery, a windowpane slammed shut in the wind. The shore was now almost empty. A group of friends wandered idly, whispering names that passed slowly among them. It was like a recollection they did not know they had. Someone from afar uttered a strange word. The others became speechless and stood, bewildered. An evening chill moved through the group as they were trying to move forward. Fönster. Fönster. Fönster*. The voice said the word one last time and listened to the few ones who started echoing it. And suddenly, there were no more walls or frames or windows. No apartness from either side of the ocean. Everything for a brief moment just fell into place. The wind blew again, down the shore. Ocean up-rush. Eyes wide shut.

* Poem by Jean-Claude Tardiff, in "Nous, la multitude", Ed. Le Temps des Cerises, 2011

* Window, in Swedish

"Untitled, 1990", courtesy of Jerry Uelsmann to whom I here warmly express my gratitude for letting me use his artwork