STORMS WIIL COME
August 17 - November 3, 2020
THE MONTEREY MUSEUM OF ART features the entire series of 12 images in Storms will Come online:
Storms will Come 1
Smoke(8-3-2020)
"The light is golden, transcendent, tempered as in an eclipse. The smoke from the fires nestles in among the redwoods and Monterey pines down the street. The Berkeley hills have disappeared. It is only midday and already the sun seems to be setting, a burnt orange, pale disk in the sky. Ashes on the car, on the newspaper, on the spiral aloes, on the spider webs: suffering from afar reduced to its smallest slivers. I work in the studio with the smell of firplaces roaring in midsummer. I wonder if deer can cough? What shall I save if the fires come? It would be my father's self-porrait, a sculpture made at the Antwerp Academy. It was done in the years of the war, but he looks composed and serene. I might lose most of my work, but the feelings that engenderd it are etched deep within. What does a spider do when its web is ripped and destroyed?"
Herlinde Spahr, Notebooks
Storms will Come 3
Storms will Come 6
Source(11-2-2020)
" Tristesse. It is predictable. When I near the end of a new series, I feel regret rather than gratitute. I am scratching the flames into the Formica. What is this source within, this dark well that keeps refilling itself? Gustave Courbet paints obsessively the source of the Loue, sometimes as a voluptuous spring that bursts forth in springtime. More often as a dry, looming crevasse. He is looking at the source of his own creativity while looking at the natural world outside. Mostly he paints the mysterious cave as black and ominous. The Loue was a good choice: it is a limestone river that originates undeground, feeding its aquifer from far and wide until the pressure builds and it finds an escape and floods the land.
Johann Gottfried Herder describes the creative source as an inner ocean that is fed by five large rivers. These are the senses which the artist must cultivate to keep the inner ocean from drying out. And so, I must leave my studio and explore new sights, trusting that the waters will rise and again flow gently from the source, pure and transparent.
Herlinde Spahr, Notebooks
Storms will Come 5
Storms will Come 11
Storms will Come 10
Storms will Come 7
