Letter to the Editor:
From: Frank Balaam - Cover Art Dali Lama May 9th Edition Eugene Weekly
Thank you for using my portrait of the Dalai Lama to help Eugene welcome His Holiness to Oregon. We are grateful for the Dalai Lama’s visit because he helps us all to be a bit more reflective of our lives. I have had many enquiries about the style of this portrait, which I created in 1997 and I hope this description is interesting to your readers, because it illustrates the unusual story behind the painting.
For many years since my arrival in North America from England I have explored American society and myself through portraits of American people, which ranged from the homeless and disenfranchised to commissioned portraits for celebrities like Carlos Santana and Jerry Garcia.
In purely visual terms, as with the portrait of the Dalai Lama, I have tried with my painting to celebrate universal connectivity by creating lines which originate outside the portrait and progress across the painting, entering the central image, traveling through the individual residing there and then eventually exiting the painting. I use each individually coloured “life” line as a metaphor for the paths our own individual lives take while on earth. It is as if we are born onto the blank white canvas of our lives, exploring our identity while experiencing and examining our relationships with each other and the lively interactions of our existence. In the same way each colour, in its journey across the canvas, finds harmony and contrast and it is born and dies having enjoyed the passionate experience of the journey.
Unfortunately the “Life Line” concept was broken for me in 2005 when a massive fire swept through the four-story hotel, which housed my gallery and destroyed over a thousand portraits. The fire was caused by the greed and dereliction of a notorious building collector and the destruction of my life’s work reminded me of the time when my wife and I were on a forest painting trip in Northern Arizona where we had to be evacuated from the path of the enormous Rodeo-Chedeski forest fires. Artistically, I found myself identifying with the forest because of its inability to avoid a catastrophe caused by thoughtless human acts. Since the fires, I nowexclusively focus on the forest as a metaphor both in my art and life, for the growing battle we must face against ourselves and the world we have built.
Another aspect of my paintings that is also reminiscent of the tenets of Buddhism is the fact that each brushstroke, even those in my complex textural portraits of trees, is painted over its own section of white canvas. I paint this way because I want every individual brushstroke to have its identity respected and the intensity of its colour maximized. Each brushstroke has its own place in the grand plan of the canvas and if it were not to occupy its space on the canvas then the world would be incomplete.
Our brains have told us that we have dominion over the earth and we are very important, yet an objective view of reality instead tells us that we are so connected that to attack another is to attack oneself and to do good to another is to do good to oneself, and by “another” I mean any other and even any thing.
As an excellent example of obscure connectivity, I enjoyed some recent satellite images, which revealed to us that millions of years ago the death of microscopic diatoms, which once lived in a massive lake in the middle of the African Saharan desert, is the main reason that today the Amazonian forests of South America are so fertile. Without those satellite images we would not have been able to separate ourselves far enough from our immediate surroundings to be able to see the bigger picture. In the same way I believe art and the words and lives of extraordinary persons like the Dalai Lama can offer us vitally important perspectives on all life and the future of this lovely blue planet.
Frank Balaam