Lauren Clark Fine Art presents “True Dreams”, new paintings and a new performance piece by artist, writer, and performer, Douglass Truth. The art show opens with a reception for the artist, Saturday, October 12 from 4-7pm. The show will run through Sunday, November 3. The artist will hold a painting demonstration (a wonderful kind of performance in itself) on Sunday, November 3 from 1pm to 3pm. As he shares his painting techniques, so he shares much of himself along the way. This event is free and open to the public.
Lauren Clark has been representing Douglass Truth off and on since 2002. His most recent collaboration with the gallery was in 2016 when he participated in a show including two other Berkshire artists, David Eddy, and Julio Granda, in a show titled “Color Envy”. At that time, Truth performed his one man show “An Intimate Evening with Death, Herself” which has been performed coast to coast since 1995 with over 100 performances. Recently re-relocated, Truth now lives, paints, writes and performs in The Berkshires.
Of his recent work Truth says this, “My paintings are of a world, a world that I dream up when I have a brush in my hand. I must insist that in some sense those worlds—the worlds in the paintings—are as real as the one in which you seem to be reading these words. In fact these seemingly different worlds may be just different stops on the spectrum of reality, none more real than any other.
I seem to be somewhere, of that I can be completely sure.”
Truth references Donald Hoffman, a cognitive neuroscientist with an interesting theory. Hoffman says the things we think we see around us and interact with are projections of our consciousness. But he goes further than most to assert that time and space themselves, the very ground—we suppose—of our existence are not fundamental, but are also a projection of consciousness. That we, as conscious entities, are not at play in the quantum fields of SpaceTime, but that SpaceTime itself is a kind of dream that we make up.
“I find this exhilarating for some reason. It reminds me that the Buddhists say that what we experience as human beings is in the nature of a dream. But it always seems so solid and real, we think. How could it be? Just a dream?”
And for further enjoyment, please join us for two theatrical performances and a painting demonstration during the course of the show. Douglass Truth will perform his one man show, “True Dreams”, Thursday, October 17 and Friday, October 18 at 7:30pm. Order tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/true-dreams-with-douglass-truth-tickets-74625090655
Consider the premise-“If Scheherazade were a frog trying to cross a river and there was a guy who makes friends with an ant that has a bent for philosophy who then told a story—the ant, that is—about a frozen Halibut, but it might have all been a dream that some random dude has, but you’ll never convince the ant, or the scorpion, for that matter, that it wasn’t all completely real. If an animal speaks, that means it’s a True Dream”.
The artist will hold a painting demonstration (a wonderful kind of performance in itself) on Sunday, November 3, from 1pm to 3pm. As he shares his painting techniques, so he shares much of himself along the way. This event is free and open to the public.
Truth was born in 1953 in Indianapolis, Indiana, into a family famous for its lawyers. Attempts at remedial education throughout the years have met with uncertain results, leaving him with a reputation as mixed as his media.
He has worked as a civil engineering designer and surveyor during the pipeline years in Alaska, as a dishwasher, a waiter, a chef, a building dismantler, an English teacher, and as a software salesman in Taiwan. He once owned and operated a graphic design and silkscreen company called Flying Turtle Graphics. After a serious illness, Truth closed his T-shirt business in order to devote himself entirely to painting and writing, and as an artist has been represented by galleries from California to New York with many places in between.
Truth has written and published three books. “I Am a Dog”, “Revolution of Flowers”, and “Everything I Know About Death (Subject to Verification)” — all of which will be available for sale at the gallery during his exhibition.
“In my paintings, writings and performances,” he says, “The harlequin, the clown, the watchers, giant stone heads, the flower people and the black dogs show up to point out, in ways difficult or impossible to articulate or modulate in our normal signaling fashion, from which directions we might be coming from, and what choices we might have going forward. I certainly believe in otherworlds, underworlds, multiworlds, and so on, but I also think we’re there now and have never been anywhere else. Our vision lapses into a routine. The real mystery — one of them, at least! —is what’s really going on all the time all around us. Here in a gallery, in the corner grocery store, our kitchen, our places of work, the cities and towns and countrysides in which we somehow, miraculously, find ourselves living right now. It’s all alive and it never ceases to speak to us.”
