Thresholds

To a large extent the problems of poets are the problems of painters.

—Wallace Stevens

At a chance meeting at a Gualala Arts Opening, painter, Mike Connor, & poet, John Allen Cann, intuited they already knew each other as if from another lifetime. Dialogues ensued about living on this stretch of coast, this threshold between earth & sea. Both felt kinship by being drawn to this specific locale; Connor describes it as his ‘thin place’—Cann as well experiences the spiritual presence & power where stone meets foam.

There have been many friendships between poets & painters—John Keats & Benjamin Robert Haydon, Guillaume Apollinaire & Pablo Picasso, Andre Breton & Marcel Duchamp, Frank O’Hara & Grace Hartigan, to mention a few—but seldom have such friendships engaged in a collaboration with their respective arts as this exhibit does.

Sparked by this stretch of coast, this exhibit with combine the work of both artists in an exploration of thresholds between what can be seen & what’s beyond sight, what can be said & what’s unsayable, through the agency of paint & word. Key will be the interplay of poems & paintings, & how they compel or invite us into invisible or inward dimensions.

We all move through thresholds of experience—from childhood on—thresholds are where experience of the Real opens into the unknown.

In this collaboration, painter & poet both engage the same problem, the problem of giving mystery a form while still keeping it a mystery, by intimating through their respective arts, what’s beyond the evidence of our senses.

Pencil & brush

are mad to befriend

  the unseen source.

This tercet is from the Underwords sequence, that will be included in the book of the paintings & poems that will be published in tandem with the exhibit (book cover below).

The poet will perform the Threshold poems early on during the Opening.