Monet's home is beautiful, special, and surprisingly familiar. Having looked at his work for decades, it was striking to see just how close it actually was. In fact, the thought crossed my mind that maybe Monet was more of a copyist than an artist. Later I read that Manet had similar thoughts about Monet's painting; the two of them were dear enough friends. Anyway, for me, it was a little too much; like accidentally glimpsing how the sausage is made. It affected me.
When I arrived at Ted and Pantelis' place, I went out into the field near the cottage with a pencil and paper, and did what one does in those situations: nothing. I just lay there on the grass with squinted eyes. Patches of yellows and streaks of reds and greens: a thing one sees a million times, just without the squinted eyes. What seems like a single patch of dandelions is, in fact, many things at once. It was a world. A complete one. Time to work. The first piece I made was with colored pencils on black paper. Ted and Pantelis wanted it immediately, which made me happy; as a guest, I had to accept. In any case, leaving that piece behind only made it clear that there were more to be made. When I returned to New York, the work continued. And continues ever since.
Aside from their visual complexity, dandelions (lion's teeth) are also remarkably useful, cultivated through the ages. People have used them to clean their livers, get drunk, make nutritious tea, even toast the roots as a coffee replacement (and it actually tastes kind of like coffee). The benefits of dandelions are so vast that it almost seems like a conspiracy to have weedified it, like other weeds we have turned into villains. Anyway, not to be conspiratorial, let's just say that a dandelion field is infinitely more beautiful and useful than a lawn. And the leaves make a delicious salad. In other words, they contribute. And yet, like many things that contribute, they are often treated as a problem: labeled weeds, removed, managed, controlled. Which, depending on how you look at it, feels like a familiar pattern.
And somewhere in all of this, they can begin to teach me something about my own work: that I don’t fully understand it. And, as Socrates might point out, that is not the worst place to be.
Recently I delivered one of these paintings to a new collector in Switzerland. But when I handed her the rolled canvas, I could see immediately that it meant something to her. A kind of quiet, slightly melancholic look of joy was in her eye. My favorite kind of look.
As we sat and had dinner, she told me what she had seen in the painting. She noticed that all the forms of the dandelion (yellow buds, flowers, white puffs of tendrils) looked completely different from each other, and yet they came from the same plant, the same flower. She said that, if you didn't know, you might think them entirely unrelated. For her, it reflected something about a recent transformation in her life, and maybe how different phases can appear disconnected even though they belong to the same life. That was a better understanding than anything I thought I was doing. Anyway, as Aristotle tells us, catharsis is the purpose of art. It isn't entirely clear who has this catharsis, whether the observer or the artist. In this case, it seems fair to say: both.