Still the Clyfford — IFSF PUBLISHING

Looking at Clyfford Still paintings inside the Cylfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado, I find myself standing inside the colors Clyfford Still made inside his paintings, wondering how the heck he did it!

I’ve had the gallery—one of nine in the museum—all to myself for at least 6 minutes to look at Still’s paintings when I first hear the footsteps of one or perhaps two other people in an adjacent gallery. The footsteps must have stopped being footsteps, since there’s still just me looking at Still’s paintings alone in the gallery.

There are five large Still paintings on the walls of this particular gallery, and I still have each painting all to myself. Some time goes by, not much but more than a little, and then four footsteps enter the gallery I’ve had all to myself very quietly. Hearing the footsteps come closer and closer I count to four, the footsteps that is, of a woman and a man who’ve just walked into the gallery I’ve occupied without them.

Looking at Still’s paintings, I get the picture: that I’ve been searching for this kind of realism all my life, though I can’t really say what that realism is, only that it has something to do with Still’s tremendous paintings which are abstractions and not realistic at all, if, that is, realism is something I’ve been searching for and not the abstraction I once thought it was!

The young man and woman seeing me there on the bench looking at Still’s paintings in the gallery I’m occupying, nod and smile at me, take a quick look around at Still’s paintings and leave almost as quickly as they’d entered.

I’m alone in the museum once again and continue looking at Still’s paintings. A tiny little thought occurs to me: yes, I’ve been searching for realism, but mostly for the realism in writing and not in the visual arts! I do miss writing, but do I miss the tremendous negativity in my writing, and in most of the other negative writers I like to read. I need to examine my negativity, the roots of it. Having never dyed my hair, I wonder where my negativity comes from, so automatically, an instinct it seems embedded as troops are embedded when there’s war in the middle East and CNN is preparing to broadcast yet another conflagration…

Another 5 or so minutes pass. I finally rise from the bench I’ve occupied and head for another gallery to see some other Clyfford Still paintings in the Clyfford Still Museum.