THE SELF AND THE WORLD: Norman Carr’s Haven of Nonobjective Painting BY ARLICE W. DAVENPORT

Blindingly bright lights. Strange creatures wearing head gear and masks. High-decibel voices barking out commands, enforcing procedures, laying down rules. Behind, a mother cries, weeping in exhaustion, or calling out, “Where is my baby? I must see my baby!”

And so we are born. Once out of the womb, we undergo the primal encounter that sets in motion our initial glimmer of self-awareness: not with a sterile hospital room, but with our nascent self’s confronting the world, to which it will remain forever bound.

The decisive component in this encounter is the self, of course, yet to be fully formed, yet to be focused, but already tucked away in a hermitage of inwardness. There, we reside. There, we huddle against the noise and pain and cacophony of voices that serenade our path to the future. In hiding, we remain untouchable, free to flourish and thrive.

This circuitous line of reasoning has dominated my musings since my great friend and award-winning nonobjective painter, Norman Carr, created dynamic covers for two of my most recent books of poems, Kind of Blue and In Search of the Sublime. The link between poetry and painting is well established, wrapped in the term “ekphrasis,” what I call the poem’s attempt to recreate the essence of a painting in words. It is a risky business, because abstraction, non-representation jettisons our reliance on natural or familiar objects, instead using only color, line, and form to “write” its message of the self’s rising toward a spiritual beauty.

For decades, I have been an aficionado of the titans of American painting: the abstract expressionists of the 1940s and ’50s, who raised the United States to a position of artistic pre-eminence that usurped Paris’ reign as the grand training ground of serious artists. What these abstract painters – Rothko, Pollock, Motherwell, and others – did was to herald the importance of the hermetic self, at home in the heart of nonobjective art, art that no longer strives to represent objects of perception but plumbs the depths of inwardness.

Carr, in following these great trailblazers, has refined their visual tropes by rooting his hard-edged, brightly colored, and visually complex paintings in the interiority of the artist’s and viewer’s protected selves. Here, geometry replaces nature as inspiration and instrumentation of replicating what Carr encounters with the blank canvas, or paper, or rough-shod wooden panel. His is far from the naive style of self-assertion, of defining a practical way to guide his art. No, what is expressed in his paintings is a vision of the haven of the modern self. And that haven lies at the core of his nonobjective pursuits.

I make this claim primarily because I resonate inwardly with the visual waves emanating from Carr’s paintings. Take his symphony of blues in the work that adorns the cover of my third book, Kind of Blue. With this painting, titled Midnight Melody, Carr establishes a visual pattern of light in a field of deep, dark blue, replicated like DNA in a genome. This paradigm sets a tone of regularity, but also of subtle differences, a type of soft mutation that points to the possibility of the birth of new signs in a saturated field of blue hues, forever fixed and solid, but perennially open to the possibility of new birth, of a genuinely original manifestation of color, line, and form. To call this technique cellular is to embellish the primal regularity of Carr’s forms, a raw repetition of the building blocks of his expression: the elements of form as content, content as form.

This chain reaction of blues on blue not only illuminates the words of my poems – an homage to the 1959 jazz masterpiece by trumpeter Miles Davis – but spawns newer angles of approach to Carr’s field of color and light. What I find is blue modulating blue, drawing out the depths of cyan, dappling it with azure and white, and raising the expectation of meaning to contemplative heights. Midnight Melody bears repeated encounters, the regular calling forth of the spontaneous and new through the sheer force of replication and repetition.

In this dramatic push forward to a new revelation of color, line, and form, of like birthing like, all three are unified in Carr’s intent to map the self’s safe hiding place, energized by its interactions, blossoming in its reproduction, growing from its generative seeds.

Although I may claim this painting as “mine” because of its intent as a type of reverse ekphrasis, bringing the essence of my poems to painterly light, I know it belongs only to the next viewer, who out of his or her own subjectivity, fashions a meaning both personal and universal. Here looms a painting of and for the human self, safe in its haven, protected from the elements, but still vulnerable to the passions of color, line, and form, combining and recombining as errant cells bouncing off fluid walls that separate them from the world and the forces of pressure and change, the slings and arrows of sui generis misfortune. In other words, of the great blooming, buzzing world that American philosopher William James christened for us at the start of the last century. We can abide in this encounter with the world, born so beautifully in Norman Carr’s nonobjective art, rising to the realm of spirit on the wings of his passionate symphony of painting.

Arlice W. Davenport is the author of four full-length books of poetry and two chapbooks. All books have been published by Meadowlark Press or Meadowlark Poetry Press in Emporia, Kansas. His academic background includes degrees in philosophy, literature, and religious studies, along with a concentration of work in art history. He and Norman Carr have been friends for more than 40 years, traveling internationally, along with Davenport’s wife, Laura. He lives in Wichita, Kansas. Learn more about his books at and http://www.poetsatwork.net.