Gus Blaisdell Collected

Original Face: Allan Graham’s Moon 2

∙ 161 ∙ original face Allan Graham’s Moon 2 ■ Ihave recently seen two black paintings by Allan Graham. They are the beginnings of work he calls simply Moon. Of the two I was overwhelmed by the second, Moon 2. The canvas is a large, irregular oval covered by palette knife in three layers of the same black pigment. The layers interpenetrate so that matte and gloss form a visual ground. At the far edges of the oval where the black has discovered its limits are two scimitar-shaped horns of raw canvas. On first seeing Moon 2 I instinctively remembered Coleridge’s epigraph to his “Dejection: an Ode,” lines as haunting as any I know. He quotes a stanza from the old ballad, “Sir Patrick Spence”: “Late, late yestereen I saw the new Moon, / With the old Moon in her arms,” and he goes on to develop and vary that wondrous image in his own first stanza. In Coleridge’s inflection, the new moon holds the old moon, not in her arms— the crescent with the black of the old above its horns—but in her lap, for his is a moon ringed round with light. When I began to try to remove my speechlessness and express the wonder of Moon 2, Coleridge’s great poem seemed to dominate what I wrote.When I visited the painting for a second time and talked about it for a while with Graham I understood that the whole painting was moon—that its crescent-tipped black oval absorbed both the image of the epigraph and the development of that image in the stanza; the new held the old; the old buried its head in the ring of the night. “When the artist moves to black,” Barnett Newman wrote in explanation of his Stations of the Cross series, “it is to clear the table for new hypotheses.” Speaking of his own use of unpainted canvas in that series he wrote of its white as specially significant:“not as color among colors, not as 162 ∙ on painting if it were paper against which I would make a graphic image, or as colored cloth—batik—but that I had to make the material itself into a true color—as white light—yellow light—black light—that was my ‘problem.’” I was on a tangent. I thought of the Zen koan called Original Face and began again. I felt myself shift toward the center of that great unbounded oval so simply, deceptively, called Moon 2. Before your mother and father were born what was your original face? Original Face permits us to think about Moon 2 by entirely removing the visual. Likeness, similarity, imitation, representation (based on likeness ), copying, and family resemblance—all are erased as the sword of the koan’s sense cuts through the Gordian grammars of the self. Taking to heart the sense of Original Face forcefully reminds us that most of the time, especially when awake, we are dark to ourselves. Once Original Face returns us to the dark of ourselves it demands of us that we express ourselves originally. I remember a fortune-telling globe that I saw as a child. About the size Allan Graham, Moon 2, 1986, oil on canvas, 83 in. × 91 in. Private collection. original face ∙ 163 of a baseball, it was the opposite of those globes that contain a little scene on which, when shaken or turned upside down, snow falls. The fortunetelling globe was as inky black as the unsounded deep spaces of an ancient fishpond. After silently addressing your question about the future to it, and turning it over in your hand, after a short wait an answer floated up out of the black depths. The fortune-telling globe was no crystal ball. You did not gaze in, reflecting. Instead you silently formulated your hope and looked at your own face reflected in the dark that would absorb it—a little handheld globe filled with all the vast emptiness of space, and a very few answers to all your questions (as I remember it now I think there were eight answers in all, printed on a little octagon, fortune’s answer to the color solid), answers that rose in the reflection of your face and that stopped for a moment its gravid absorption into darkness. What is seen in reflecting on an inky globe can’t be seen at all when trying to concentrate...