Nick Benfey: Light Springs
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Nick Benfey: Light Springs

Light Springs

This collection of paintings is just that: a collection. If its themes seem disparate, that's because they are. "Light Springs," however, names something specific. The title refers to our inner fountains, the vanishing sources from which our perspectives emerge, the lights and voices within that guide our way. With this in mind the paintings can be viewed as recordings, fruits of contemplation, drops from a fountain, each moving toward a different outward expression yet sent by the same propulsion.

Time And Timelessness

 

A few months ago a painter friend was asking what I was thinking about in my art at the moment. I started telling them how I'd been thinking of my practice as way out of time. They replied jokingly, "Wow, tell me how!"

 

It's not that great a mystery, but it depends on what I meant by the word "time." Conventional time is what I meant: a ribbon that stretches between the past and future. upon which a flimsy momentary "now" barely has a chance to rest. Conventional time is where our world tends to demand we live: between appointments, between events, between commitments, planning, worrying, running.

 

How can we get out of time? "Be drunk!" advises Baudelaire. "So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish." Meister Eckhart might not have used the same word, but the sentiment is the same: "Be without before and after."

 

When I was 20, my grandpa sent me a copy of Thomas Kelly's A Testament Of Devotion. Kelly, like both my grandparents, was a Quaker. Among other things, the book is about orienting our mental experience so that we experience things on two planes: the outward, and the inward. Though we deal outwardly with commitments and events, inwardly we must tend the fire of our inner light. This interior space will become our sanctuary.

 

Equally the book is about time, and Kelly describes a similar double-level phenomenon. There is conventional time (I borrowed Kelly's image of the ribbon, above), and there is timelessness, the Eternal Now. As we are to emphasize the inner world in importance, so we would equally do well to emphasize our experience of Nowness. "Presentness is grace," declared Michael Fried.

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