NATHANIEL ROGERS AT DAVIDSON COLLEGE

I like narrative paintings, pictures (usually realistically painted) that include clues and insider jokes that lead through a maze of story telling. Sometimes the story is easy to follow and the clues are trite and I’m left thinking, “this artist is really an illustrator. Get a job with LIFE Magazine! Oh wait! Norman Rockwell already did that!”

Often the story is embarrassingly revelatory and since all good art is somewhat biographical, I applaud the bravery of the artist allowing the rest of us to enter the realm of his or her psychosis even when it makes me squirm a little. After all, I don’t need to know all those fears and shortcomings unless of course, I share them. Then the artist has become EVERYMAN, holding up the anima/animas to the rest of us blind troglodytes.

Sometimes the lines squiggle, fade and disappear and the painted objects make no sense at all and one is left wondering, “what in the world is inside that painter’s mind?” “What was he smoking that day?” “Did she go off her meds or something?”

Or equally unenlightened thoughts. These works are perhaps the most fun of all. At the very least, they convince the rest of us that artists truly are different, marching to the beat of some weird interior voices, just baring it all, gritting their teeth, hunkering down to do the hard work. Then they hang that painting up and take whatever comes after. I do so like those people!

This is all preamble to report that Nathaniel Rogers, a young artist who graduated from Davidson College mere minutes ago (actually in 2002) is back in town, teaching this year at his alma mater and he is sharing his own narrative paintings in a one-man show at Belk Art Center. The exhibit is titled “Secret Things, Tiny Rituals.”

I insist that everyone make a habit of stopping in the art center to see ALL the exhibitions – the place is an absolute treasure! This show is a romp.

Sometimes Mr. Rogers (no cardigan sweater in evidence) takes himself a little too seriously and begins edging awfully close to the land of illustration (“Trapped” is simply too easy. I mean, the overwhelmed young mother and all that Cinderella stuff? Shame on you, Nate.) A few of these images suggest a less than wholesome all-American attitude to such things as generational reverence. But by and large, the paintings are wonderfully executed, hysterically funny and the best ones show the viewers an honest glimpse into the interior life of a young adult who does NOT yet have all the answers, is largely flummoxed by modern life and while the rest of the world burns, he is still trying to figure out how to transition from the “cared for” into the “care taker.”

And that’s a pretty scary journey. So laugh a little along the way.

No Title Today

“To pay attention – this is our endless and proper work.”

This is the last line from Mary Oliver’s poem “Yes. No.”

The first line reads “How necessary it is to have opinions.”

If ever I can write my own epitaph, there! Either line. Or both.

She has done the work for me.

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Photographs above illustrate paintings by Altoon Sultan. She paints with egg tempera on wool and linen or on calfskin stretched over board. She is a painter who - judging by images of her earlier landscape work – decided one day to ditch a comfortable art language that she knew well.

I admire her courage and like her work the better for it.

I have nothing against landscapes – I’ve even met one or two that I quite liked although I can’t say I’ve ever owned one. But I would add “Pump Arm” to my art collection wall in a nano-second.

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I am reading THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES written by British ceramist Edmund de Waal. Barely past the prologue, I am hooked by the poetry of this writing.

The book deals with a collection of Japanese netsuke, small marble sized sculptures carved from stone, bone or wood meant to tuck into obis or to be used as toggles to close bags or simply to be cocooned in wool batting, then nestled in a beautiful box wrapped in exquisitely embroidered silk and tied ingeniously with narrow strips of reed for later discovery. How very un-Western! How very feminine!

(deWaal writes about his great-grandfather, Charles, who amassed this collection of over 200 netsukes in the late 1800s “He has a mistress. And he has started to collect Japanese art. These two things, sex and Japanese art, are intertwined.” Think about that for a while!)

Sigh! I am in think! What better place to be?