File talk:ASHES IN THE WIND 1996.jpg
Painting gives the human capacity for empathy a place to settle, find coherence, and recharge one's very humanity. One naturally slows down, enters the receptive mode, and hears the voice of silence. It has become a forgotten talent - this quiet listening with one's eyes.
In painting there are no jokes or punch lines; that would only break the moment. Where there is sexual attributes, it is only the baggage that every soul must carry. Don't misplace emphasis on why we commune with images. The density in intimate quiet is what holds us suspended. The lure of painting is this silent offering.
The aesthetic cannot separate from the empathetic, or its purpose disinterested, otherwise it's just design. The empathetic response dictates what the image conveys. Compassion attracts us. Without compassion we loose sight of the significance of our condition - our mortality.
As that must guide all our actions; so need it be reflected in images of ourselves. All else pales. All our lives touch upon tragedy. As such, there is no image free of that consciousness. The portrait always carries with it the consciousness of time. We are all bound by its limitations. Even in the most sublime moments there haunts what is approaching.
Then how do we look upon the suffering of others as not our own, or view aesthetically the image of others' suffering without that specter following us. If there is beauty in the horror, it is our horror as well.1
So do we, as some insist, forbid the icon of sorrow? Does any representation of the lost soul become an abuse if it? For if we forbid a meaningful death so as to inscribe upon its shadow the impossibility to arrive at normalcy; does that then absolutely forbid the image of suffering?
Or to whom is this icon addressed? For if one renounces the possibility of a meaningful death; then one subscribes to the impossibility of recourse to mourning and to forgiveness so that there be no possibility to forgetting. So that this icon is less for the surviving generations than for the future that there be no possibility of their forgetting, no possibility of abolishing the representation from the ashes; that apparition and torment not be torn from the body of memory.
Though to image the unfathomable be unforgivable; far better that to suspend it in the aporia of reckening what is beyond representation. For it is all we have or risk paralysis. To refuse the lesser infidelity is the greater betrayal. Without images the dead have no presence among us.
That then must be the principal occupation of the artist - to mark our passages. Otherwise the visual submits to being silenced by literary censure - a revenge that has made irony sovereign at the loss of meaning.2
-Richard Rappaport
1, Richard Rappaport, The Empathetic in the Aesthetic, 'Ashes in the Wind', "Portraits & Passages", Chapter 27, www.richard-rappaport.net.
2, Richard Rappaort, The Imaging of Sorrow - In Defense of Representation, 'Ashes in the Wind', "Portraits & Passages", Chapter 27, www.richard-rappaport.net.
