Meridian
portfolio of paintings with poems by Gregory Orr, 2000
Keeping Time: Lyric Fusions in the Paintings of Trisha Orr and the Poems of Gregory Orr In this ravishing collaboration, notions of Paradise are rivaled and revised by the eye's desire. Pre-lapsarian containment and wholeness collide with the shatteringly somatic and terrifyingly broken beauty of the fallen world we must inhabit; the result is a lyricism both bodily ("Pleasure space crammed/ with flowers, fountains,/ and cool shade—/ all the joys/ earth affords" in "Paradise Corner") and mysterious ("One step beyond/ intensity—/ what world is that?" in "Too Bright"). In the painting "This Dazzling," a mythical village of Edenic bowls and vases holds and refracts through prismatic water a sumptuously chaotic, steeply pitched terrain of striped, patterned, and textured kimonos, quilts, silks, laces. Cast in scroll-like verticality from a slightly elevated god- or bird's-eye point-of-view, the painting reveals its worlds through a spidery, helixical scrim of bent stems and heavy, pendant blossoms. The vivid, temporal forays of these paths and houses are cut off from linear progression, creating instead an atemporal, unhierarchical realm not unlike the narrative fusions of Giotto or Sassetta, in which past, present, and future are co-present and seem to turn into one another everywhere. Midway up the canvas, on a snowy precipice of lace, a warrior/pilgrim perches on the inner, curved and lens-thin border of Paradise, gazing open-eyed at the "dazzling labyrinth" below and above. Is he fleeing? banished? returning, backwards? A blood-red river of kimono surges beside his fragile sanctuary, alive with piercing, open, peacock-feather eyes that mimic and quote his own terror—while, in the lushly midnight-blue context above, an oblivious flock of fabric cranes departs in white, amazed rush of fanned wings. Bravely confronting and transforming human time, these poems and paintings create a lyric grammar, a condition simultaneously domestic and exotic, lost and redeemed, sated and stricken. Their vertically additive, layered progressions defy the consecutive, and instead create out of our mortal predicament a daring, urgent, fleeting unity—a kind of unmediated dream speech. In "Too Bright," Gregory Orr asks: "Light shining/ at the furthest rim/ of the visible—/ Does it rise/ or fall there?/ Is that where/ it lives, or dies?" The intrepid surrender and Keatsian "negative capability" of such questions shimmer at the crux of this stunning conspiracy of paint and language. —Lisa Russ Spaar |
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Paradise Corner Persian word meaning "walled garden" |
Pleasure space crammed with flowers, fountains, and cool shade- all the joys earth affords hidden behind high walls. Crack, lightning zap I press my eye against— glimpse of paradise that makes me long for more. |
This Dazzling | Was it only a moment ago I was lifted up? Slipped free of this shroud that veils my eyes and weights my limbs? And saw below me the pattern, clear at last: dazzling labyrinth? |
Blue Peninsula | Lightning crack of ravish- to rip the sky then vanish. Tatterflag I raise- shredded blue above dazed battlements. |
Too Bright | One step beyond intensity— what world is that? Light shining at the furthest rim of the visible- Does it rise or fall there? Is that where it lives, or dies? |
Schoolroom of the Sky | Fullness-the overmuch- ripe teetering on the brink of rot. Light so bright eyes squeezed tight can't shut it out. Again and again the edge is struck- cymbal that shivers with the overflow of sight. |
Floating World | One and by one Sky and earth It's possible But also the flowers- |
Yes | Yes Burden and blessing- To be so lost |
Zip Zap | The lightning stroke- All this you see- |