Dear Friends,
Lately, I’ve been overcome with eye-hunger, a desire to re-find myself in the act of seeing.
After weeks of writing from news and social media, I decided to turn towards art for a while. I thought I’d be able to make an easy trade: from fresh hells to fresh heavens.
I find images from daily feeds of art in the public domain, then I try to let them do something to me.
Heaven is, fittingly, more difficult than hell. I am not as good at it, I’m awkward and wooden. Yet that awkwardness and lack of practice is all the more reason to plunge into the exercise and try.
— Sal
What Fresh Heaven?
A Painting with a Spring Frost
First of all, there is too much light. As if light requires that you only see light. A man says, I am waiting for you. Five minutes ago, ten minutes ago, as if there is nothing but waiting. I’ll admit each cow is perfectly in its own time, whether its head is lifting, or neutral, or reaching for the grass. The farmer is only there to represent satisfaction and dissatisfaction. I am here to marry it all in one body.
A Painting with a Signal
Twenty-one hours ago, a woman looked to the left. She was unfortunately pixilated, skin mottled with compression artifacts. She sat perched on a balustrade—it could have been California, it could have been Italy, it could have been Greece. Like her garment, I am caught in the eye. The centuries are rosy and confused. All I want is a tall tree to define the world.
A Photograph of Victory
Here is the place where buildings and bombs met each other, an ordinary ruin where the surface of the emulsion is broken in lines and scratches. The sun is made whole by shadow. Where there were windows are mouths; where I am standing, you were standing. I cannot loosen my mind from this. There were heaps of apples, there were leeks and potatoes and cabbages, all now become the damaged blue-green sky.
A Painting of a Park
I wonder if we are meant to live in the sky, on the water, or among the grazing cows. The clouds and the trees mimic one another, but one is loss and one is gain. In one version everything is gold with regret, in another it is green and blue with stillness. Somewhere nearby the world is changing, the world has already changed.
A Painting of a Cicada
Which do you care most for, the leaf or the trunk? Many are the leaves: green, ribbed, serrated, fading at the edges, sawing at the white air. It is 1930, and we know we are meant to see what is small but meticulous, but only the leaves spread, only the leaves console.
Which do you desire, heaven or hell? What are you looking at these days?
If you prefer hell…
Further adventures and new ways of seeing can be found in my book, The Uses of Art.
Artist Sal Randolph’s THE USES OF ART is a memoir of transformative encounters with works of art, inviting readers into new methods of looking that are both liberating and emboldening.
Dazzlingly original, ferociously intelligent.
— Michael Cunningham
A joyful, dazzling treasure-box of a book.
— Bonnie Friedman
Here’s a guide, to waking up, over and over again.
— Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara