Understanding an artist's mind isn't easy. And it shouldn't be. We look to artists to think the unthought, see the unseen, and shine a light in places we didn't know were dark.
Or, as Confucius put it, "Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it."
Case in point: the Patnodes.
You may know of Mark Patnode. For many years he's been painting warm, shimmering images of buildings in New London and landscapes along the Connecticut coast. His scenes are within a hundred feet of sea level.
Last year, Mark married Zhai Yujuan, an artist from a Himalayan region twice the altitude of Denver. No mysterious artistic musing behind that decision. Altitude had nothing to do with it. She's as sweet and pleasant as the month of June, the month when spring meets summer, the basis of her adopted name, Juner. Mark could not resist. He didn't even try.
Now Mark and Juner share an apartment on Granite Street, a studio on Washington Street, and a vision which, like beauty itself, transcends place.
He paints on canvas, oils of classically Western scenes: brick buildings, sea marshes, meadows edged by maple and oak.
She paints on rice paper and silk, watercolors of distinctly Eastern beauty: flowers, butterflies, blossomed branches, the occasional portrait.
Boy meets girl. East meets West. Spring meets summer, and sea level meets altitude. Contrary to the conflicts rending the world, these opposites are coming together in a mutual vision of beauty.
The artists have an idea. It involves beauty meeting philosophy.
As part of his training back in art school, Mark drew nudes. He had to. It was required. It wasn't a bad way to spend an academic afternoon, certainly better than, say, cramming for an exam in organic chemistry.
Still, his artistic muse led him into landscapes and urban scenes. But recently he's had nudes in mind again. He's thinking about a side of nudes rarely depicted: their backs, a Confucian beauty that not everyone sees.
Mark's idea became Juner's idea, a shared idea for a shared project. They are going to draw, paint, and possibly photograph the backs of nudes. They want to demonstrate, through artistic interpretation, how the Western eye and the Eastern eye interpret the same conceptual subject.
The subjects — the models — will be from different parts of the world. For this project to come together, the artists will need backs from not only the West and the East but from the Northern and Southern hemispheres. They want East and West to meet North and South.
Can these disparate regions and cultures, these opposites, get along in a world cleaved by passionate differences?
Juner and Mark (and Confucius) think so. They think they can take the unseen side of people, the side without a face, the side free from prejudice and attitude — their backs — and make those backs the side people see. Through the minds and visions of two artists, backs become fronts.
Boy meets girl. East meets West. North meets South. Front meets back. See?
It takes the mind of an artist — or in this case, two artists — to unify such ideas and render them as visual images. The opposites meet in beauty rather than conflict, in light where it might otherwise be dark.
"Back to Front" is the working title of the Patnode project. What forms it will take, how it will unfold, what it will look like, they do not yet know. But they have begun. They will see where their art takes them.
That's how art works. It's a light exploring the dark. It's the search for the beauty in everything. It's bringing everything together in beauty, because in beauty, everything gets along.
Glenn Cheney is a writer, translator, and managing editor of New London Librarium, which published a book of Mark Patnode's work, "Cultivating Illuminations." He can be reached at glenn@nllibrarium.com.
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August 18, 2020 at 10:02PM
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What The...: Boy meets girl, east meets west, front meets back - theday.com
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