Shall We Continue?

 

 Shall We Continue? 

We're Finally Landing

Mother Tree

I Go to See the Place Once More

Interloper

Torchlight

By Tom Wachunas  

“Contemplation is at once the existential appreciation of our own ‘nothingness’ and of the divine reality, perceived by ineffable spiritual contact within the depths of our own being.” – Thomas Merton

“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.” – Pascal Mercier

EXHIBIT: Both Sides of the Brain – Paintings by Kit Palencar, at Strauss Studios Gallery/ 236 Walnut Avenue NE, downtown Canton, Ohio / THROUGH AUGUST 23, 2025 / viewing hours Wed.-Fri. 11-6, Sat 12-5, CLOSING RECEPTION ON AUGUST 23, 5 – 9pm

 

https://artwach.blogspot.com/2025/02/life-at-corner-of-now-and-not-yet.html

   He’s baaack…For the second time this year, Canton viewers can embrace the art of Kit Palencar. In February, I saw his marvelous solo exhibit at Canton Museum of Art (CMA). You can click on the above hyperlink in case you want to read my thoughts about that experience. While this collection at Straus Studios Gallery does include several pieces from the CMA exhibit, the majority are other and newer works, though certainly no less compelling infatuating. What I wrote in February remains apropos here: Palencar’s paintings are profoundly soul-probing visions.  Constituting an eloquent object lesson in contemplation, they are poignant, mystifying and illuminating all at once.

   Contemplating what? Palencar tells us, "The left and right sides of the brain—often accepted as separate domains—merge in these works to form a unified, complex narrative about our existence and inevitable mortality…I encourage viewers to confront the tension of our human nature against the scientific definitions of what nature is. Nature does not resist its cycles… Through these paintings and drawings, I aim to question how we, as conscious beings, engage with our own impermanence. Can the cerebral and the organic find harmony? This exhibition invites viewers to witness that tension, and perhaps, to feel at home in it."

    There’s a painting in this exhibit which reminds me of doing what I do with much of my time, why I do it, and where I often do it. The painting is titled, interestingly enough, I Go To See the Place Once More.

    And so I’m baaack, in an art gallery. Seeing once more. I’m riveted by that guy immersed in an eerie glow of greenish light looking at what might be a smart screen (or a smart SCREAM?). With his mouth slightly agape, he appears gripped, surprised. Maybe even a bit alarmed. Might this be an OMG moment? A reveille? Is it a call to tension, or simply whole-minded attention?   

     Palencar’s paintings ask us to think about thinking by bridging the gap between our cerebral hemispheres. A marriage of left to right, as it were. The left hemisphere of my brain, where logic and reason supposedly reign supreme, accepts that the artist is embracing the inevitability of natural life’s impermanence. Mortality. Ok, death. However, that ever-present interloper - the right hemisphere of my brain - breaks in and incites an emotional dialogue with all sorts of suggestions and questions, including a memory of God’s somber words to Adam in Genesis 3:19 (which Palencar cites in his statement), “…for dust you are and to dust you will return.” If that’s all there is to our story, such a promise could conceivably create an inconsolable existential angst. Tension, to be sure.

   Yet as long as we’re on the subject of conversing with God about nature and death, what do we think about these words (from Romans 8:22-23)? “We know that the whole creation has been groaning, as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.”

   Another promise, another truth. For relief, for release. Can we think of death, then, as not a meaningless dreadful end, but a necessary portal to glorious eternal life? From dust to divine destiny. It’s…inevitable. And with that, I feel perfectly at home.

   Thank you again, Kit Palencar. Your art is an exquisitely epiphanic conversation starter.