The 11:20 Freight Train

I must get my love of trains from my father of blessed memory. In old age, he would stop what he was doing until a train disappeared from sight. Our family entertainment was often to “see the train.” This painting is about the loneliness of a night train going through a small town late at night, its wails and the fixed gaze of the men on board. Some trainmen get off, now home from their journey, and with their bulky suitcases, they disappear in the night. As a child watching the freight trains, I saw men running to jump on them or furtively jumping off, the poor of the land looking for opportunities, for sustenance. One could learn about the world just from watching trains. The whole world passed through them. In the distance, a wail sounded. Suddenly they appear, smoking and spitting fire. Still, for a while, they preen in their power, like Leviathan. Then, the green lantern waves; the monster flexes its great muscles, coughs, and heaves forward. Its mighty steps increase to a gallop. Then they are gone, tiny and wailing in the distance and with them went those days. What I miss most is the caboose. They should never have changed that. A good train is like a good story. It has a beginning, middle and end.

Hagbah

Hagbah, the raising of the Torah after the reading service is part of the Bar Mitzvah Series, a group of paintings encompassing the Sabbath synagogue rituals. It was inspired by my son, Joshua’s bar mitzvah. He’s pictured here helping with the silver finials that will go on top of the Torah. As the outspread Torah is raised on high, everyone rises and the prayer is chanted, “This is the Torah that G-d gave to Moses and Moses gave to the Children of Israel.” It is the public display of the teaching, the divine heritage of Israel. It was during this period of my son’s preparation for his bar mitzvah at B’Nai Israel Synagogue, under the dedicated tutelage of Cantor Bernard Kane, that I, myself, began to deeply appreciate the ancient echoes and shadows that flashed unremarked through the nuanced gestures of synagogue ritual. 

Here is a less than a minute long symbolic reenactment of Israel’s receiving the Torah at Mt. Sinai. It is symbolic too of the wanderings in the desert whenever the Tabernacle was taken down or put together, and the Ark was removed and put back. It was then that the sacred Tablets were raised up in the sight of all Israel. A flash and an echo from the very birth of Israel’s eternal nationhood, covenant, and divinely ordained teaching is encapsulated in this momentary sequence. Moses is once again coming down from the mountain that is “all on smoke” with thick darkness, flashing light and hail as the public reading of the Torah has come down to us is from that day to this.

Koffee Kup

Koffee Kup was a cozy little restaurant square in the center of downtown Kingsville, a door or two down from the J.C. Penny store, now the Bryant Gallery. Look closely at the window and you can still see the name, Koffee Kup, etched in the glass like a translucent fingerprint.  I think the courthouse lawyers favored this place. They liked to meet here with their colleagues and clients. I remember hearing laments once at the courthouse when this little coffee shop closed down. Something about its long, narrow space and dim light gave it a quiet atmosphere where people talked in low tones. Sad to confess, I never once went in. My interest was strictly painterly. The dark space inside gave the large glass window a dark blue tinge when the sunlight struck it at mid-morning, coffee-break time.  Koffee Kup was painted in bright red letters forming an arch across this glass. The effect was like giant rubies set in sapphire. Looking close through the glass, you saw the people sitting in a graded perspective of colors. Often a patch of bright-colored clothing or part of a face shone back at me through the glass. But always, that pane of glass dominated all the colors shining through it from the inside. It was an invisible wall between two worlds. One was encased in the hot brass-colored light outside, the elements of concrete street, sidewalk, and parking meters and some elderly old-time Kingsville guys chatting away under the circle of shade provided by their old straw hats. The second space was marked by that vertical pane of glass which, like the surface of a clear pond, one could look through to the coolness of another world, to strange creatures floating and feeding and every now and then catching a piece of sunlight.  This wonderment when different kinds of spaces meet and interact is a fascination that goes very far back in my life, to childhood. I have long thought that the mirror, the reflective surface was the first painter and perhaps the ultimate painter, reproducing not just color and shape, but space itself. What is the thickness of a reflection? How deep into the surface of a pond does a refection go? What is the weight of a shadow? The philosophic ruminations of a painter are of no practical value whatever, but they can transform the mundane into all kinds of mental excitement.  I never met these old men. I just saw them talking there, their straw hats transforming sunlight into raindrops of light dancing on their cheeks and shoulders. Two worlds here, the outdoor and the man-made indoor, hopefully brought to a single unity.

Man and Woman and Bowl of Fruit

This early work of a man and a woman in dark clothes seated in a deeply colored red space was inspired by watching people in our family’s clothing store. It dates from my undergraduate days at University of Texas at Austin. It was done on the first linen canvas that I stretched, sized, and primed myself. Its mystically dark background was mostly accidental, the result of a deep purple mixed with cadmium orange. These two complimentaries produced a unique variation of red brown that was beautiful in itself but seemed inhospitable to any other color but black. It sucked in and drai tints of any color laid into it or over it, making it a difficult background for adding variations of color. I remember the painting being a struggle for me and, while I liked the result, I never again used the orange-purple combination for a background. It was too much the result of accident and dictated more than I wanted in the final result of the painting.      

Yet many are intrigued by its mysterious space and compelling presence. Of course, I am pleased with their excitement and like the painting very much also, but the doubt always lingers. How much of it was really done by me as opposed to the colors I just happened to be fiddling with? I think every painter has several works in this unexplainable genre. 

Mariachis

I have loved mariachi music from childhood and that love is undiminished. It enters the ear as a burst of energy, a thunderclap, a magnetic force pulling out one’s breath, one’s soul. The costumes of the musicians, the sunburst of massive sombreros when accompanied by dancers becomes most glorious. It is, outside of opera, the most open-mouthed of singing, and of all folk music, the most classical. I use the term again, operatic. There is also something martial in the precision of its harmonies and the unwavering lineup of the uniformed musicians. 

I once saw a television program where a mariachi band played together with a klezmer band (Jewish folk music). The two could not be more different. The klezmer is more like jazz with actively moving musicians, each “davening” (Hebrew for chanting prayers) his own take on what the others do. Only in energy are they alike, in exuberance of sound and spirit. Surprisingly, they harmonized beautifully. What made it work? I have no technical expertise in music but in both of these traditions, there seems to be no disconnect between the art and the audience. They are extremely direct, crying on your shoulder as it were. And yet we can hear in them distant voices of ancient melodic lines, traditions, inflections, and phrasings that have a long pedigree. They are not just surface gusto, but full of ancient and universal longings expressed through brilliantly colored veils of melody. I have always wished I could play an instrument. I finally bought me one of those beautifully shaped, large wooden palettes about the size of a guitar precisely because it suggested a musical instrument. With my easel for a music stand and an empty canvas supported on it like a sheet of music, at last, I too can play.

Mexican Madonna (Rebozo, Mother and Child)

It was in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico I saw this mother and child closely wrapped around each other in a dark rebozo. She was white haired and elderly, but moved strongly. This was a scene I saw repeatedly. It seems that almost every culture, every religion has its iconic emblem; some are symbolic evocation that speak silently of all its history and special hardship. The Crucifixion is the most well known of such iconic imagery, but in some respects this living mother and child of Mexico is almost a living reincarnation of what I encountered in Mexico so many times.

Compact as a stone, her feet are rooted on the ground heavy as pillars. She waits, but she will not be moved.

Midnight Harvest

There is something spectral, mystical about these machines crunching across a cotton field under a South Texas moonlit sky like giant bugs. I could never get time to study these scenes. A late night alternator problem got me the time. I had an hour before the tow truck arrived. Walking the perimeter of the fields, I studied the harvesters from the side and then frontally with them coming right at me. The huge machines swayed gently as they rolled past herd-like. They became living beings trundling through the full moon’s night. Their bright lights became eyes burning through the dark. They moved knowingly, in concert to their destination, their great maws swallowing up the cotton like whales feeding beneath the sea.  The translucence of such a night evokes the sea. First its surface and then its underneath, its nether dimensions of cool colors is penetrated by light; the watery element is crisscrossed by the movements of innumerable creatures both scaled and slithery. In such a scene, one feels immersed, no longer on earth beneath heaven, but afloat between the deep and its surface.

Nature's Funeral

I saw this driving through Hebbronville on my way back to Kingsville from Laredo. It was a spring morning and the trees and grasses were a lush green but something bright, brilliant and large caught the corner of my eye. I slowed to a stop. Getting out of the car, I said to myself, “I have got to see this!” It was a compelling silent command even before I got close to the scene.  read more

Tree Trimmer (Autumn Palm)

Mercurio is in this tree, though you may not see him at first glance. As he trims off the dead fronds, he becomes at one with the palm tree world, its shelter and collected dust, its whispery sounds as the breeze sifts through its leaves, a sound somewhat like the crinoline in petticoats or ocean waves in the distance. Most of all, it is the dappled sunlight that speaks to the painter. It filters through the brown dun-colored leaves in lines and dots endlessly shifting and flashing as if they were daytime lightening bugs. They land on and filter through Mercurio’s straw hat and come to rest on his khaki colored clothes. Yes, Mercurio and his palm tree are one and, by this time, I too had become the friend and admirer of the palm tree. As much as any tree, it changes with the seasons. In spring, it is resplendent, “like an athlete stepping forth to run the race, like a bridegroom stepping forth from his chamber.” Thus does David’s psalm describe the sunrise. But in the autumn season, the palm wears a dun colored cape, the dusty robe of the wanderer. It takes on the aspect of a stranger rather than the admired native. This trimming of its fronds takes place near the holiday of Succot, the harvest of pilgrimage of the Jewish people, from hence comes our own American Thanksgiving. The fronds make excellent covering for the booths we build during the festival week.

This biblical holiday was established immediately upon the Exodus from Egypt when we are reminded to be kind to the stranger, “for you were strangers in a strange land.”