The KU Spencer Art Museum has posted this prose poem and a reproduction of one of their Paul Hotvedt paintings in their elevator! Please do look for it if you are visiting the museum.
Paul's paintings are online at http://paulhotvedt.com/cgi-bin/p/w42p-home.cgi?d=paul-hotvedt . He has a sublime relationship with the color blue.
Another keen exhibit is Stanley Herd's and Leslie Evans' documentation of the Haskell Medicine Wheel, created in 1992. See more of Stan's work at http://www.stanherdart.com/ and his site features the Medicine Wheel: http://www.stanherdart.com/WIP_medwheel.htm
Congratulations to the Spencer on its ongoing connections to community.
BLUE. VAN GOGH
by Denise Low
The horizon line disappears, and I am lost in the sky after the bough breaks. I remember the startle gesture of my babies—their reflexive flailing of arms and legs as they tried to regain a secure hold. In this landscape, I cannot find the door. Any set of lines will help me: branches, leaf veins, a peripheral blur of field.
The painter finds a quick translation: green means downward. So much depends on depth, width, length. How high the blue stretches, I cannot know. Onward moving clouds cannot hold one position. The painter must finish this picture before it rains, and so he rushes and only suggests compass points. More than a painter, he is a dancer.
But finally, the painter succumbs to sky. He inverts himself, like the man in the tarot card “The Fool.” Blood rushes to his head and turns blue. Leaves open pores to sun and absorb its hue. The painter’s eyes turn the color of heaven, and everything he touches is blue. He is a Midas turning the world blue instead of gold. He is Rudolf Steiner, as he creates a theosophy within an indigo-blue prism.
Like Van Gogh, he finds background is twisting into the foreground. Past and future collapse. Blue veins leave his body and ascend. I can call them branches. I can call them pieces of sky.
