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The Sasse: Where love stories develop between art and viewer | ||||
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The Structure of the Delight |
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"Nobody sees a flower, really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time." — Georgia O'Keeffe O'Keeffe painted single flowers up to four feet tall. She did it so we could not walk past them. A bloom that size is no longer a flower you glance at. It is one you are made to stand inside. The garden gives its delight freely. It asks nothing. A gardener kneels in the dirt for the pleasure of the bloom, and the bloom arrives whether or not anyone is watching. This is the first gift. Nature does not perform. It simply is, and it is generous. But the artist takes a second step. The gardener grows the rose. The artist gives us the seeing of it. That is the difference between being near beauty and being changed by it. We live surrounded by gardens and notice almost none of it. The rose opens and closes in a week and we are busy. The artist stops. The artist looks long enough for the looking to become the subject. Here the rose is offered without its color. A Double Delight is named for its color, cream turned to red at the edge, and that is gone. What remains is what was always underneath. The turn of a petal into shadow. The light caught in the center where the flower folds into itself. Take away the color and you are left with the structure of the delight. The garden rewards this. Look closer than is comfortable, stay longer than is useful, and what comes back is not information. It is delight, which is its own reason. So inspiration is not the bolt it is made out to be. Not a visitation. Not a thing that strikes from outside. It is what remains after attention. You give the rose your time and it hands you something to make. The garden is not the subject the artist waits for. It is what produces the making. The garden has done this for every artist who ever knelt in it. Monet built one so he would never run out. O'Keeffe held a single blossom until it filled her whole field of view. by: Gene Sasse |
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