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Gauguin's Wood Carvings
Stone Riley
Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 20 inches.
Many say his carvings far surpass his paintings, great though they are, as evocations of the universal force of life. But, sadly, it seems to me now -- looking at it hung up on the wall beside my stairs -- that this picture owes far more to William Blake than Paul Gauguin.
Oh well. You see, I had just viewed some photographs of Gauguin's paintings and was carried off at once into a memory of some photos of some of his carvings I had seen before, the wooden boards worked in relief that he once mounted round his bedroom door. Alas, it seems that memory can fail.
But still, now comparing it with photos of those threshold boards, it can be said the same curves are there. The same relationship of dark and light is surely there. The same mystery of tumultuous but ever-yearning life perhaps is there as well though differently expressed.
And, after all, all that exists is one, awareness is the same thing as existence, so all thought is one. Two lives could scarcely seem more different than Gauguin and Blake: The wandering seaman with all those hired wives; the hiker round the countryside who lifelong went home to one smiling soulmate in one narrow bed. But nonetheless, though worked in wood instead of words, those threshold boards are really quite the same as Blake's "Songs of Innocence and of Experience".
Here's a little writing about Matisse, on page 32: www.stoneriley.com/CFTB_GO.html
Or here's one about Van Gogh: http://www.stoneriley.com/TOMW/Sunflowers.html
Or here's a collection of short writings: www.stoneriley.com/TOMW.html
Or the home website: www.stoneriley.com
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