Eye To Eye: Painting White Whale: Moby Dick I

A R T I S T S ’ F O R U M lowing the example of Melville, is double-natured, too: my plates, representing the magical pictures of the narrative, have another aim, too: to reflect this atrocious depth where the Truth is hidden. (See Plate 1.) I greatly regret that I am not among you in New York to attend this great Conference, which John Bryant has directed with so much love. But, believe me,John, I am not absent. We see each other not by our eyes, but by our minds, where there are no eyes. If you close your eyes, you can see me inside your mind, only me, not Bob, Beth, or Sandy who are really before your eyes. They are absent and only I am that you see beneath your closed eyes. And then I begin to open the very bottom of my soul and say to you: Dear John, do not mourn your dead: “it’sa wicked world in all meridians. Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Dealh. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul,”my iizdestructible shadow that speuks you now, ‘yovehimself cannot.”John, forgive me. Eye To Eye Painting White Whale: Moby Dick I AILEEN CALLAHAN isualizing the whale, Moby Dick, is like visualizing the sea, his element . He is present but elusive, massive yet dissolving figureless into passing motion, weighted yet suspended by a fierce buoyancy. The white whale of Melville inhabits the mystery of scale where imagination and physical reality ignite each other. As a painter, this whale compels me. Encountering it in the process of painting is a wrestling with a mythic form capable of “holding” vast space and meaning. Painting Moby Dick is a search process not only to move the viewer into the language of this silent art, but also into the language of an image which Melville places in both the natural world and the world of sign. This whale signifies an open symbol able to contain contradictions and expand ambiguity. The whale is never fixed, and therefore one is painting a reality conditioned by constant motion, changing shape and light within the fixed area of the canvas. In the early part of the twentieth century, the futurists in Italy wished to paint motion, and arrived at a kaleidoscope of sections painted 5 2 L E V I A T H A S A R T I S T S ’ F O R U M next to each other on the surface of a canvas to be read as one continuum. They were fascinated by motion as an icon of progress, of beauty and of anarchy . My experience in painting the work White Whale: Moby Dick I (see Plate 2 ) was one of moving deliberately between the reality of “seeing” the whale and “sensing” the whale-the whale as visual phenomenon and the whale as being. In presenting effects of motion and change, I wished to hold an event before the viewer in such a way that the work “acts upon itself.” Many angles of vision would be subtlety present at the same time. A loosened rendering of the contour of the whale through gestural strokes would open and activate the edge of the whale shape for connections to the sea, to flotation, to Ishmael’s seeing of him, to our own realizing that he is there. He would also elude the definition of outline. Melville changes the views of Moby Dick from near and far. This effectivelyjostles the reader’s sense of where he himself is at any time. Melville also surrounds Moby Dick with elements of “visual removal” in the act of being seen. He is partially viewed by the sailors, his breaching breaks even a verticality ; the sea hides him and leaves a “white spot”within the transparencies of water depth. Where is the position of the whale to oneself and...