I went to a gallery opening last night and had the most terrific time.
The artist is Dan Bruggeman of St. Paul. I've known Dan for several years. We play poker and console one another for the unremunerated life of the artist. He is from Nebraska, and likes listening to Lefty Frizzell.
But Dan is having so much fun, and his pictures are a delight to the mind. A typical one, titled "Graft: The Riddle of Migrating Birds," is of an empty birdcage tied by rope to the stump of a fresh-cut tree.
I am able to pry Dan away from his admirers and advance a theory. "You should call the exhibit 'Magritte Does Nebraska'," I tell him. And I practically accuse the picture of being an allegory.
Now, no artist worth his salt will admit to being allegorical, but in his cheerful, starry-eyed way, Dan informs me it's a picture of an amputation.
The tree has been sawed off at the trunk, and its function as "an abode for birds" has been restored via the rope and birdcage.
"It's a graft," he explained, "the kind gardeners have been doing since ancient times." Only instead of grafting apple to apple, his painting grafts apple and orange - tying human consciousness to mute nature.
It was funny, provocative, pretty in an odd way (Dan is an excellent painter), but a little disturbing, too. I remember an old Velvet Undergound lyric that seems to apply: "In spite of the amputations, you can just dance to the rock and roll station."
A few people have come up to Dan and said how sad everything is. If you have monitored this space, you know I like sad (a lot!) so I stood up for the pictures. "They're not sad," I tell him, "they're about making adaptations. They're about tender mercies."
Further, it seems to me, there is joy in the colors and textures. The skin of the birch, for instance, remains shimmeringly beautiful - right up to the saw line. Yes, we get sawed down, but there is always another landscape waiting behind us.
Two other small pictures grab me. One ("A Memory of Weather") is of a giant tree trunk blocking a rosy red sunset. But there's a catch - someone has sawn two thirds of the way through the trunk, so the viewer can see through the trunk to the sunset! Weirdly, the tree stands erect with this terrible wound in its abdomen as if it had no wound -- wood mind over wood matter.
And - this observation of mine ruined the picture for two people watching with me - if you think of the trunk as a face, the saw-cut constitutes a stupid-looking smile. Once you see it that way, it's hard to reel your mind back in.
Next to that is what would have been a lovely Impressionist painting ("Stand IV") on a tin plate, of a birch grove - only the trees have all been chopped down. The beautiful but butchered birch trunks look up into a pink and amethyst sky that is peachy postcard beautiful. And there are rivets in the postcard sky!
I don't know what it means, but it makes me laugh with pleasure.
"So what do you hope for?" I ask Dan, as all the people mingle and mill around us.
Dan smiles. "I hope I sell a big one," he says, "so I can pay for the framing."
I will describe one final work that is so wonderful I almost cried. It is a big grid, covering much of one wall. At first glance, it looks like a picture of flowers on a black background. But then you look closer.
The grid turns out to be made of the blackened pages of some kind of book. When you look close, you realize that the book features raised letters. A sign invites you to touch the letters and feel them.
When you read the pages, you realize it is a book about the beauty of flowers and gardens. It was obviously written in another time, and probably for children. Each sentence is about the joy of the color and form of flowers. And down each panel in the grid, Dan has painted a tumbling garland of different flowers.
Then, you figure the painting out. The book was a real book published in the 1860s for blind children. The raised letters were an early form of Braille. This book had the cruel ambition of telling blind people how beautiful a flower garden was, and what they were missing.
Then you understand the cascading flowers. They are what the blind reader "sees" as the finger slowly passes over the raised sentences, and the color and twisting form comes finally into view. The name of the picture: "The Garden Unseen."
It was such a jolt to penetrate to the meaning of the painting - the sadness of pondering the dark lives of the blind children of another time, but the compensating kindness of the red and blue and white images spiraling into life and blossoming in the mind.
This isn't negative - it's life going on, despite all the amputations.
