In the first part of The Attic Gallery Art-In, I left you with a link to Complementarity and the Quantum of Life. Artists seem to have an intuitive sense of complementarity as indicated by the reference to Blake in that article. A great artist understands how to use opposing truths as “raw material” to create art rather than choosing one idea and discarding the other.

Artist Unknown, can you help?

Understanding complementarity might help you maintain sanity in this time of intense political debate. The fact that “two things can be true at once—even opposing truths” does not mean that you can avoid a choice, a political choice during an election. It does mean, however, that you can learn from both the candidate you reject and the candidate you support. Choosing one does not mean excluding the other. That is the essence of democracy. It blends diverse points of view into Walt Whitman’s “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Unknown artist contemplates her work

The artists who participated in the Art-In made a political choice to support Norman, but the art they created blended opposing truths in their own individual ways.

Artists at work

Questions haunt the kind of writing I’m trying to pursue here, questions about time. Does time exist? Why does time seem essential to us while science seems to get along without it, without even understanding it? Time is joined at the hip with memory. We understand neither very well. Is memory the memory of a dream or of some actual reality that occurred or is occurring or will occur? Is it the way we’re conditioned to make coherence out of incoherence, a story to make sense of chaos, a story like those told by Scheherazade to fend off death? Is it true, as some physicists maintain, that anything that resembles memory is confined to unfold in the thermodynamic arrow of time?

Unnamed visitors viewing the art

I don’t know. Maybe the pictures will jog your memory (whatever that means) or assist in the creation of memories that will allow you to escape the arrow of time, to experience one moment in the mix of all moments that make up your life. Spontaneous reactions I’ve heard from a few followers confirm this.

Diana Daly sketching out her painting

Finished Work

“God, were we all that skinny?”

Unknown artist at work

“WOW! It is Monique. She doesn’t remember it but it is Monique when she was young and beautiful.”

Monique Frankston watches as artists work

“Oh My!!!! I have been lost in the memories.”

Unknown artist at work

I can’t help but think of Bertrand Russell’s beautiful words from A Free Man’s Worship:

Unknown artist at work

“This is the reason why the Past has such magical power. The beauty of its motionless and silent pictures is like the enchanted purity of late autumn, when the leaves, though one breath would make them fall, still glow against the sky in golden glory. The Past does not change or strive; like Duncan, after life’s fitful fever it sleeps well; what was eager and grasping, what was petty and transitory, has faded away, the things that were beautiful and eternal shine out of it like stars in the night. Its beauty, to a soul not worthy of it, is unendurable; but to a soul which has conquered Fate it is the key of religion.”

Opposing Truths

So as I promised in the list of questions HERE, this is how a bunch of artists elected a County Supervisor, and a few thoughts on what I think about it. Speaking of memory, I’m unable to remember the names of many of the people on this page. Maybe you can put names to the pictures where they are missing. Feel free to comment.