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Collaborations Tower of Words Catalog text (poem) for James Nares Schwindler Gallery Stockholm 2006 See large image |
A Tower of Words for James Nares.
Nares the trapeze artist flies back and forth above the single long stroke that flexes and shifts its shape like water cut by an oar. He is sailing to Byzantium in a harness of his own design. The invention, patent pending, on which he kneels, a heathen praying Druidic to the sun, is his gun carriage, undercarriage, royal carriage, rolling in four directions on custom ball bearings, Krupp steel put for once to loving use. Assisting the free flight of pure thought. Behind pale blue English eyes a volatile inner life, like the underside (the god side) of a cloud might be a seething mass of angels fighting among themselves to be at the center of the head of the pin. “One is too many,” the biggest angel says.
“More Hindu than Zen,” Tip Dunham said. Kali with her garland of skulls waves from the wall, Ganesh’s golden trunk writhes octopal, and yet the soundtrack for this picture is Japanese, the clash of steel on steel, what a cut to the bone reveals, the screams of horses and armor as a thousand samurai collide on a dusty plain. This is the movie now playing in a brain that knows the sensation of being seated on a throne of blood.
One September afternoon a meteor, fluorescent green, passed over Sagaponack Beach. The first of several signs and portents for that year. While Kasmin slept in the sand Nares swam too hard in the ocean and almost went out with the tide. Two days later he was Wilfred Owen ninety years on, a grenade exploded inside his head. In Southampton Marvin Pontiac raved at the doctors and their exquisite hands saved him. Four days after that airplanes pierced the Towers like javelins. Those years have passed. Nares has returned from electric ladyland. He is in a time like now.
These beautiful things he will show you. Paintings like rivers, the Amazon, the Rio Negro, black and gold, paintings like shooting stars breaking away into new constellations, paintings like streaks of blood, tongues of flame, medieval tapestries spun with golden thread, dancers fighting snakes, isthmus and archipelago viewed from space, banners unfurling at pagan rituals, blood sports at the Coliseum, David Rattray peerless in feathery mask, smeared imprint of the delicate cloven feet of the muse, long body stepping from a shower fresh as cut flowers, her breath still resonates in the stroked, stoked paint.
Paintings as delicate as a leaf, simple like Blake’s songs of innocence are simple, the beauty and the violence contained, reined in, under Nares’ hand, tuned like a Stratocaster, spearing our eager eyes with bright Buddhist colors, like forest fires or prayer flags fluttering on Tibetan mountains, the blue flame and the green flame and the red. Flames of plum wood and ancient lilac, distant perfume, a fragrance that lingers, burning with a fierce conviction that this single stroke is the right stroke.
Consider these lilies struck by cannonfire, the fury of Spring, the green fuze that pumps life into the flower, a coney pursued by a boy and his dog through Sussex fields, lurcher striding ahead through a canopy of tall elms colonized by rooks, somewhere in the vicinity of T. E. Shaw’s garden shed. Mist drifts over October fields, splash of bright blood when the rabbit is struck by a load of twenty gauge shot. Nares used the fur for brushes, which he still fashions by hand, like the fisherman makes flies, from feathers, Vaseline, lightning, phyloporous plants, skunk tails, the “dark fur from a hare’s ear”, pinion feathers of a condor, dried mandrake and John the Conqueroot, autumn leaves still damp from forest floor, weapons-grade nylon handtooled in Japan, maidenhair of badger and bear. A wall of voodoo in the night studio.
“In the gloom the gold gathers light about it.”
In the silence of the night the paintings glisten like sweat on skin, luminous, as smooth on the eye as a stone on the tongue . Glimpsed like the tribal tattoos that are only revealed in the heat of summer, shimmering sinuous under New York City street light, unraveling like a tourniquet, spinning like a lark lure, emitting tiny flashes like sunlight on water seen from the stratosphere, those riverine spaces the brush flew over but did not touch, “flying white” the Chinese call it, the artist in furious flight above the canvas, kamikaze carving out the line, muscular liquid spin, one hand gripping the steel rail, paint gushing from North to South, East to West.
The cranial gates slide open like lock gates on an English canal, a long liquid tumbling descent of wild ideas, Swahili coladas, savage, unprincipled, princely, sublime. The compass spins, the brush kisses the stretched skin, the heart breaks out of its cage and sails. Out the window.
Max Blagg
Nares the trapeze artist flies back and forth above the single long stroke that flexes and shifts its shape like water cut by an oar. He is sailing to Byzantium in a harness of his own design. The invention, patent pending, on which he kneels, a heathen praying Druidic to the sun, is his gun carriage, undercarriage, royal carriage, rolling in four directions on custom ball bearings, Krupp steel put for once to loving use. Assisting the free flight of pure thought. Behind pale blue English eyes a volatile inner life, like the underside (the god side) of a cloud might be a seething mass of angels fighting among themselves to be at the center of the head of the pin. “One is too many,” the biggest angel says.
“More Hindu than Zen,” Tip Dunham said. Kali with her garland of skulls waves from the wall, Ganesh’s golden trunk writhes octopal, and yet the soundtrack for this picture is Japanese, the clash of steel on steel, what a cut to the bone reveals, the screams of horses and armor as a thousand samurai collide on a dusty plain. This is the movie now playing in a brain that knows the sensation of being seated on a throne of blood.
One September afternoon a meteor, fluorescent green, passed over Sagaponack Beach. The first of several signs and portents for that year. While Kasmin slept in the sand Nares swam too hard in the ocean and almost went out with the tide. Two days later he was Wilfred Owen ninety years on, a grenade exploded inside his head. In Southampton Marvin Pontiac raved at the doctors and their exquisite hands saved him. Four days after that airplanes pierced the Towers like javelins. Those years have passed. Nares has returned from electric ladyland. He is in a time like now.
These beautiful things he will show you. Paintings like rivers, the Amazon, the Rio Negro, black and gold, paintings like shooting stars breaking away into new constellations, paintings like streaks of blood, tongues of flame, medieval tapestries spun with golden thread, dancers fighting snakes, isthmus and archipelago viewed from space, banners unfurling at pagan rituals, blood sports at the Coliseum, David Rattray peerless in feathery mask, smeared imprint of the delicate cloven feet of the muse, long body stepping from a shower fresh as cut flowers, her breath still resonates in the stroked, stoked paint.
Paintings as delicate as a leaf, simple like Blake’s songs of innocence are simple, the beauty and the violence contained, reined in, under Nares’ hand, tuned like a Stratocaster, spearing our eager eyes with bright Buddhist colors, like forest fires or prayer flags fluttering on Tibetan mountains, the blue flame and the green flame and the red. Flames of plum wood and ancient lilac, distant perfume, a fragrance that lingers, burning with a fierce conviction that this single stroke is the right stroke.
Consider these lilies struck by cannonfire, the fury of Spring, the green fuze that pumps life into the flower, a coney pursued by a boy and his dog through Sussex fields, lurcher striding ahead through a canopy of tall elms colonized by rooks, somewhere in the vicinity of T. E. Shaw’s garden shed. Mist drifts over October fields, splash of bright blood when the rabbit is struck by a load of twenty gauge shot. Nares used the fur for brushes, which he still fashions by hand, like the fisherman makes flies, from feathers, Vaseline, lightning, phyloporous plants, skunk tails, the “dark fur from a hare’s ear”, pinion feathers of a condor, dried mandrake and John the Conqueroot, autumn leaves still damp from forest floor, weapons-grade nylon handtooled in Japan, maidenhair of badger and bear. A wall of voodoo in the night studio.
“In the gloom the gold gathers light about it.”
In the silence of the night the paintings glisten like sweat on skin, luminous, as smooth on the eye as a stone on the tongue . Glimpsed like the tribal tattoos that are only revealed in the heat of summer, shimmering sinuous under New York City street light, unraveling like a tourniquet, spinning like a lark lure, emitting tiny flashes like sunlight on water seen from the stratosphere, those riverine spaces the brush flew over but did not touch, “flying white” the Chinese call it, the artist in furious flight above the canvas, kamikaze carving out the line, muscular liquid spin, one hand gripping the steel rail, paint gushing from North to South, East to West.
The cranial gates slide open like lock gates on an English canal, a long liquid tumbling descent of wild ideas, Swahili coladas, savage, unprincipled, princely, sublime. The compass spins, the brush kisses the stretched skin, the heart breaks out of its cage and sails. Out the window.
Max Blagg