We all live inside the theater of our minds. The skull, the forehead as the proscenium. Dreams, daydreams, thinking stuff up, inventing the day as you drive to work. Theatre people talk of the “fourth wall” the curtain opening and closing as we move from private thoughts in darkness, then into the light of the world seen around us. This story is about all that mind in motion, inside out side. Inside, what was I thinking about when I went to see the Juan Gris exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum in 1987. What was the internal movie playing on my proscenium?

I was fixin’ to leave a marriage, a marriage we had “worked” on in carpeted quiet rooms to no avail. We just rubbed each other the wrong way until our fur was sticking up all pointy-like. There were two endearing and ripening children. And a third who’d been bashed by another divorce, but not down for the count, ready to launch into college. The younger ones needed both a husband and a wife to care for them. What to do? “Don’t worry, kids, your father will always watch over you.” That was the stuffy room we were living in, with no answers on the horizon. Somebody open a window would’ya? In this state, the internal sound track playing was Lester Young playing two to tango. Is the repeated line really “drop yo drawers, drop yo drawers”?  It is. Two to tango indeed. Probably how we got into this stuffy room in the first place.

With all the cacophony of a troubled marriage, kids, and pretty much, very recently, solidly reaffirmed in my dedication to the artist’s mind, I had a lot going on…My teaching job had vanished like snow on the water into the caldron of the witch’s brew of Prop. 13. (45 years later it’s finally being remediated—it’s the tax-cut proposition that rocked CA schools out of #1 position in excellence in the US to #47) and I was hard at it editioning lithos of my watercolors to remake my money life. Things were compressed and very rich and not at all comfortable. These days, I know what comfortable is, thank god. And that sense of being comfortable goes back to the feeling of the Open Window.

I walked into the Berkeley Art Museum to see the Juan Gris retrospective. First off, and you have to believe it, the museum itself was a Cubist wonderland. Empty now, and shuttered for seismic peril resulting from the Loma Prieta Quake of 1989…it was great place to see most kinds of art. Big wide vistas across an internal court and little nooks where you could be surprised. Time and Space explicated in Brutalist Concrete, walls left to be as close as possible to the plywood that shaped their molding in concrete….. You were on a shelf looking out into It. “It” being the bustle of the world. It’s your own body out there in space looking at pictures on the wall as if from some forbidden fastness. Somehow you’ve gained entry into a kind of precious temple of cubism with many hidden secrets, one after another, just around the corner.

You follow the curator’s direction and visit a logical progression of the Gris’s development—these days the kind of stuff you find on WIKI.  Then suddenly it’s in front of you shining with its own light. Not so much the illusion of light but the light of compositional precision. It glows with “rightness.” It steps directly in front of all the other pictures, in front of all the other pictures. The shutters become your very rib cage as uplift drowns all the rest of your internal landscape. Life is not only possible, it’s gonna be OK. It’s so perfect in telling the story of inside and outside, and there you are vibrating with all the troubles of modern life. THIS  is the open heart.

Suddenly, in a wink, my insides are up on a wall of unfinished concrete. You’ve felt this with other paintings and sculpture like the Bierstadt painting of Mt. Corcoran a feature of the Corcoran Gallery where I went to school. But the Mt. Corcoran picture is all about the outside. It doesn’t let you in. It wanted to, but somehow it’s just another artifact. Maybe it’ll open up an internal space again for me someday, but the Juan Gris is all about the movement from inside to outside and that’s important. The picture doesn’t stand as imposing, standing between you and its imposition into where you are standing. The Juan Gris picture tells you the eternal truth that — if a work of art is true, it’s a mirror.

Through the Open Window, a calm horizon is even-steven with the clouds and mountains, the regularity of the waves on a mountain lake on a breezy day, the base line. This is wisdom without all the sentimental clap-trap running through the “New-Age Therapy Culture.” It is wise and not glib. The picture is musical; the music is another of this in/out movement. Music is pictured in the guitar and sheet music tablature but the real music is the dance and rhythm of the shapes, the clouds catching a ride back into the room, surfing in on the shutters. The bottle acts as the conductor in this chamber music number.

I haven’t gained the grace of an exemplary teacher. Getting into the dark edges of things. Into the deeper spaces you find a quiet resting place.