0.2 Introduction: living with the living: entering and exiting  (Page 4/6)

through gate return

yet to be born,

flowering light

in silence beyond,

the meadow below,

under which dwells

empty sign,

laughter of lover,

lurking in touch,

approaching retreat,

fragment unbroken,

echo of word

never once spoken,

yearning to hold

what must be scattered,

naked in body,

fully attired

With their evanescent play of presences and absences, Wolfson’s paintings and poems do not emanate, either formally or philosophically, from a traditional humanist framework. Moreover, just as the images are neither conventionally representational nor iconographically driven, Wolfson’s artwork does not lean on the inherited templates of an art school background. Rather, his artistic training is largely autodidactic. Growing up in New York City, he was fortunate to be surrounded by some of the world’s great museums, which he began to visit on a regular basis during his high-school years. He vividly recalls the many hours spent at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In these galleries, he found himself especially drawn to the paintings of the French Impressionists, Van Gogh, Matisse, Chagall, and Klee. He also studied the mysterious illumination of Edward Hopper’s scene paintings, and the dramatic chiaroscuro displayed throughout Rembrandt’s self-portraits and history paintings. As he notes of his early encounters with these artworks, “I connected with the medium well before I started painting.” Elliot R. Wolfson, in conversation with the author, June 30, 2008. The details concerning Wolfson’s artistic background stem from this interview.

Wolfson also recalls that he experienced his first real impulse to paint while he was a graduate student at Brandeis University during the early nineteen eighties, and that he sold books in order to buy painting materials. When asked about what originally motivated his painting, he responded, “I can’t explain the genealogy of the urge, except to try to translate what I was thinking and feeling into visual form.” He initially produced a few canvases, let them go, and a couple of years later he painted a few additional works, which survive to this day. One such early canvas appears on the cover of Footdreams&Treetales . Nearly twenty years passed until, during the spring of 2003, a visitor asked him what was lying in storage bags in his office. He recalls that, from that point onward, he felt encouraged to explore painting in a way that he had never done before.

As an author, poet, and visual artist, Wolfson attempts to articulate a vision through complementary media. Not only are pronounced thematic resonances readily discernible between his poetic and scholarly texts, but the titles of Wolfson’s paintings can be seen as closely related paratextual presences. Moreover, Wolfson himself has identified an important similarity between his academic and his artistic work, as both provide “recourse to another way of seeing” and access to other states of consciousness. Elliot R. Wolfson, in conversation with the author, June 30, 2008. All turn on a similar dynamic of collapsing seemingly stable or discrete boundaries between time and space, presence and absence. Wolfson emphasizes that the mysteriously decomposing and emergent forms appearing throughout his canvases emanate from affective states without premeditated intentionality. Instead, a feeling moves him to work on the canvas, “and in the absence of the feeling, the artwork wouldn’t happen.” His verse unfolds in a similar manner, as “a word will come to mind and germinate into a poem with very little effort.” In this way, “the decomposed presences become clothed or vested in the words,” just as the paintings represent a similar “attempt at crossing boundaries and bringing the formless into form through color.” Elliot R. Wolfson, in conversation with the author, June 30, 2008.