Passages: Toward Order/ Bipolar

redtreetimes

Jul 9

GC Myers-- Passages: Toward Order 2023 — **Passages: Toward Order** -- Part of the West End Gallery Exhibit

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites-opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity-where energies flow smoothly in one direction-there will be much doing but no music.

--Eric Hoffer, Between the Devil and the Dragon

As I am in the final days of prep work for my solo show, Eye in the Sky, which opens on Friday, July 21 at the West End Gallery, I am seeing the whole of the exhibit in one place for the first time. It reminds me of how someone could use an artist's work as a roadmap or schematic of their mind and thought process, even though the artist might want to disguise and mask it.

It can uncover things that the artist doesn't even know they are revealing at first. A body of work can often show all the facets of the artist's personality prism. Flaws and strengths. Loves and desires, worries and fears. Highs and lows.

Art does that. And like the self-taught philosopher Eric Hoffer points out above, the music that makes up all art often comes when the artist is stretched and in tension between these polar oppositions.

That makes sense to me. The life of an artist is a very bipolar one, at least in my experience over the past quarter century. You're always bouncing between polar opposites, all the time trying to find some sort of balance.

For instance, there is the desire to be isolated in privacy yet one's livelihood is dependent on sharing your work-- and by extension, yourself-- in a very public way. And artists are often very sensitive to the criticism and judgement of others yet work in a field that is almost solely based on the judgement of others. This, of course, leads to cycles of acceptance and rejection. Overoptimism and excessive pessimism. Periods of highs where the artist overestimates their abilities and value and lows where they question why they even try. Periods when your work is in sync with the times and highly sought-- the flavor of the month-- followed by times when you are a bit overlooked and out of favor.

Then there is the most obvious comparison to bipolarism, the exuberance of those highly productive periods of creativity followed by the times when the artist has a creative block, leaving them feeling uninspired and in despair.

For some, it's too much of a burden. I understand why someone would question putting themselves through that kind of stress and perpetual imbalance. It is certainly not for everybody. For me, it a way of living that makes sense since it mirrors what I would be going through in any other field in which I might be employed. In art, these tendencies have a place and even a purpose-- if you can come to see and accept it in that way.

And I guess it's evident at this point that I have. Maybe you can see it in the work from this show. Maybe not. The control in creating the work versus the lack of control n how it is received is yet another part of the bipolarism of the artist.

On that note, let's get to this week's Sunday Morning Music. It's a cover of Nirvana's Lithium. See the connection? This cover is from back in 2009 by a group from Texas that I was not familiar with, Polyphonic Spree. They are a group that gives the choral treatment to rock songs. This is a fun and highly exuberant cover of the song. Kind of takes you to the high end of the polarity. Not a bad way to get your Sunday charged up.