Chagall Man

Chagall Man

15'' x 18.5''

Why the title Chagall Man? I'm no longer sure. That Marc Chagall painted pastoral scenes with magic goats and floating folk, that there's a circus performance air to those scenes and that both night and romance seem near.... Would that relate to my later generation's flights of fancy via science fiction's fantasy? In the lower plane dancers are conducted like an orchestra. The middle plane offers divided red carpet to its traverse. Steps descend to the earthen floor of the orchestra pit on the right. Steps access a higher platform that extends toward us, the viewers, from the left. A curved horizon, blue sky and humanized landscape are undistinguishable from a theatrical backdrop beneath the red arching walkway. The farmhouse and barn on the flat higher horizon, although also very stylized, seem more 'real'. There are ornamental railings to front and back of the middle ground where a pair of benches with one long straight cane laid across them sit to one side and a chair against which is propped a cane with curved handle sits on the other. In the middle and tangent to the front rail is an angular oval aperture. Yellow knobs atop the back rail indicate the points where it attaches to or opens for the eye shaped form. Five figures protrude from within it and over them rises a sixth character with arms extended in a pose like Christ is often depicted. White lines radiate from this figure's profiled head with its long curl of hair. A yellow band contains some of the white light between the house and barn. Two of the figures in the oval have halos like the saints in Byzantine portraits. I think the drawing is about dimensions, their co-existence and interaction, the down to earth reach of the impossible and infinite. The way that carpeted curve described a greater distance on one side than the other, the way the underworld was this world and the farther field the nearer, the way those characters in the middle seemed to have only just appeared there although their moment was nothing if not poised, these were the elements I liked best about this picture.