“How do we distinguish, what is sometimes referred to as “a false sense of paradise,” from the respectful honesty and the real intimate thing?”
Hide and Seek - New Doggone It Painting From Tahiti
HAMILTON-SELWAY FINE ART
January 13 - February 13, 2024
“I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he’s wrong, than one that comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil.” -Malcolm X
This quote was introduced to my life when I was a very young living being through my grandmother, an individual of great insight and intellectual honesty. It would come to be the headlights for my road to grow and see more experimentally with truth, constantly questioning, seeking, and taking nothing for granted. How do we distinguish, what is sometimes referred to as “a false sense of paradise,” from the respectful honesty and the real intimate thing?
In the paradise environment around my Tahiti studio, Hide-and -Seek, a universally familiar game to most children, is a way of life for many living things in this hot, humid-dripping world. Under the water’s surface, the game is alive and very active as fish are constantly hiding behind clusters of coral to survive the other larger fish. Quite often, they even camouflage their forms with light, as they angle their metallic bodies towards the sun, so as to confuse and transform how the hungry flying birds perceive their movement. Even above the water’s surface, exquisite white and black tropical parrots hide among the endless brightly sun soaked palm fronds from the seeking Pacific Seahawks, knowing that the game can end in one of several ways.
This new body of work is dripping in a certain universality of paradise, intimacy and closeness because these are real places with real feelings in Tahiti. Although, as the onlooker, in front of the work, discovers the game oriented titles, the realness of the immediate content may change into a new illusion of liquid flowing color sensations on a window dressed flat surface that ushers one into a new game of seeing. It is meant to be a beginning of what the viewer is about to see and feel.
The work’s immediate visual content, observed from the overwater deck of my Tahiti studio, is a perfectly distracting metaphor for the intended subject matter of “Hide and Seek.” The actual game is the one we eventually play when someone’s intellectual honesty (their true self) has been hidden in order to seek out a new, less authentic image for personal gain, safety, or just narcissistically to make one feel better about one’s self.
For example, politicians and lawmakers bring us into their game when they proclaim to protect citizens with gun laws while simultaneously creating endless policies that push their citizens to desperately need guns for their own protection. Not to mention, city leaders who preach accountability for crimes as they design laws that decriminalized the majority of crimes that effect their communities. Unfortunately, these games are all difficult to perceive with our eyes closed while the other players hide, “Ready or not.”
Hopefully, the titles of the imagery, within this new work, will convey the urgency I feel to communicate to the viewer the importance of perceiving the world with a greater intimacy, and more importantly, with our eyes wide open, seeing with a more conscious awareness of what is intimately real and what is a game of illusion.
In addition, for the viewer, who may be somewhat familiar with my 35 year body of work, influenced by the drawing constructions of my friend, Charles M Schulz, a natural game of Hide-and-Seek may unfold, courtesy of the absence of the recognizable expected, Schulz imagery.
So, the next time you are confronted with “a false sense of paradise,” whether it be a hungry quietly floating shark pretending to be just a log in the lagoon or a devilish politician hiding behind the image of an angel, maybe just shout, “Come out come out wherever you are!”
TOM EVERHART
Venice, California
Taha’a, French Polynesia
September 2023