Town Square (Part 2 of 2)

I walk among the stylish suburbanites. One man is drawn to a print in one of the photography booths.  It’s beautifully done, stylized by some kind of software and printed onto heavy gauge paper that may be canvas.  It’s lovely, yet lacking passion.  “I like this one.  What do you think?” he asks a woman through whose jeans can be seen panty lines biting into a butt fighting middle age. 

“It’s pretty.  Won’t work with the sofa, though” she dismisses him and moves to the next booth. 

There are artists that work in clay or metal or glass or stone, from granite to semi-precious stones, watercolor or oil or even paper.  More than a few seem spectacularly talented.

I move into a booth that’s hung both with realistic yet highly stylized sketches as well as stunning acrylics on canvas.  They are striking.  I study a cityscape that begins at the bottom in buildings of sandy hues and reaches upward past almost imagined windows through rooftops of antennae and into a sky that bursts from orange to a cloudlike feel.  Its texture and progression seem to reach upward beyond the canvas. 

   The artist wanders from behind the booth and introduces himself as Saidi.  He speaks in an accent that’s somewhere between French and Arab.  He’s smoking a cigarette that’s down to the filter.  I tell him that this piece feels ancient and modern all pushed together.  It seems to rise above the confines of the canvas.  He looks at it and tells me that it’s Tunisia, where he’s from and that there’s a lot of smog there.   

I move to the next canvas.  It’s a beach scene.  The waves breaking from the right move from greens to blues to foamy misting caps.  I feel the spray in the textures.  On the left is the beach with pools of seawater collecting on the sand.  There is a group of young ladies in the center.  They are wearing bikinis, gathered into a group and seem to want to be noticed in that way young girls have when they act like that’s not what they’re doing.  Saidi tells me of the horizontal lay of nature and the verticality of humans in the piece.  I see that the girls’ faces are indistinct and this seems to elevate their bodies to primacy.  I tell him so and ask if this is also from his home.  He tells me that he’s lived in Tunisia, Paris and a few other places I don’t catch and that beaches are about the same everywhere that he’s been.  This one’s Myrtle Beach.  We both grin at this. 

I ask how he ended up here and simply points to a sketch of a beautiful young woman in the corner of his booth.  We grin again.

Another painting catches my eye.  It’s a night scene of a group of people moving away from the artist in an alleyway.  Light comes from windows above and around and from where the alley appears to empty into a cross street.  The colors in this painting are again, striking.  Blues, purples, oranges, yellows, reds, a little girl in a pink skirt all pull at the eye.  The overall effect is the excitement of a city night fused with a solitary melancholy.

Saidi excuses himself to speak with a couple that’s come to pick up a charcoal that he’s done from a photograph they’d left earlier in the day.

I stand looking at this painting for a few more minutes and wander off.  I find a retaining wall where I sit to sip bottled water and contemplate what I’ve just seen.  I know as little about painting as I do about ballet, but read once that the purpose of art is to capture the fleeting. 

We tend to discount feelings these days.  They’ve become something to hide, minimize, ignore, or overcome- anything but express.  Perhaps that’s because we’ve reached some collective decision that feelings are temporary things- they simply don’t last and are therefore of no consequence.

But some, like this man, know how untrue that can be.  His work takes a moment and wrenches from it not the scene, but the experience.  It shows more than what is seen.  In the blurred details one is left only with an impression.  And impression is by definition both highly personal and based on emotion.  He’s taken what we call fleeting and captured it, given it permanence.  And in giving emotion permanence, he validates it.  This, I think, is why we have always valued our poets, writers, sculptors, painters and artists in general.  We know that someone somewhere is on some level capturing our most personal aspects.  In a world where we can’t do it publicly, they validate our emotions.  They validate us.

I end this reverie and reach for my bottle of water.  It’s not there so I look over and see that a female police officer has taken a seat beside me.  She’s sipping bottled water.  My water.  I look away from her.  Did a cop really just steal my water?  Obviously, she did.  So what now?  I look back and think she’s looking at me but can’t tell because of her mirrored cop shades.  Her uniform is dark blue and crisp with shiny buttons and badges.  She wears a black leather utility belt from which hang handcuffs, pepper spray, a retractable baton and, of course, a gun.  I find her dark skin and strong jaw line quite lovely, but then I’ve always been uncomfortably attracted to women that scare me and I see nothing remotely good coming from challenging her.  I look away for a moment and she gets up and wanders off, leaving the empty bottle.

I’ve only a moment to ponder what just happened when a woman in her seventies approaches and asks me what I’m doing.  I tell her I don’t understand and she tells me that she’s seen me here for hours scribbling in that notebook.  I tell her that I’m just capturing my impressions of the festival.  She says that she was just wondering whether or not she needed to be worried about me.  Cautiouned by the duplicity of her stated concern, I tell her that she need not worry.  I’m just fine.  She asks my name and I instinctively lie and give my asshole neighbor’s name.  Seeming satisfied, she walks over to a bench full of other seniors and is immediately the center of inquiry. 

I decide that this part of suburbia is getting too creepy so I grab my water bottle and toss it into a recycle bin.  I walk out through the main pavilion in front of the stage where I spot a group of the dancers, now in street clothes.  I want to see if the one that danced to “Paradise” can possibly be as beautiful when stationary as she was while dancing.  I see her talking with a group of friends.  And while she is indeed a lovely creature with pale blue eyes and high cheekbones, without the flowing surrender to movement, the spell is broken.  She’s just another beautiful young woman. 

I continue on and see another dancer leaning on her elbows onto a waist high cocktail table.  She’s the fierce simmering attacker of the music.  She looks me straight in the eye as I walk along, locking her eyes onto mine.  Is this a challenge?  Is this disdain for what must seem to her an old man?  Is she simply testing her newly realized feminine powers?  I smile, nod and keep walking.  As I pass behind her she keeps her gaze steadily upon me until she’s looking over her shoulder.  Then she smiles lightly and wiggles an ass that’s barely covered by her cotton sundress.  I pretend not to notice, look the other way smiling and mutter my thanks heavenward. 

It was, I think, a good day in Duluth.      

Check out Chouaieb Saidi's work, most amazing artist I've ever met:

http://www.artabus.com/saidi/?pic=-1