Darkness moves, by Wendy Heldmann

Flight-delayed Tuesday greetings, my friends in the computer! I'm just in from a jaunt to Minneapolis and am readjusting to the atmosphere, paring down my layers and shaking the scent of sickly-sweet taxicab air freshener from my locks.

Today's edition, Darkness moves by LA-based painter Wendy Heldmann, is pretty freaking brilliant and thought-provoking.

I've been semi-obsessed with Wendy's work since I spotted it during one of my pre-launch late-night online meanderings. My note to her regarding doing an edition was an especially plaintive "would you, could you, might you please consider this project?" not only because it was sent before the site even existed publicly yet, but also because I would've been truly crushed by a no.*

My affinity for bright colors and beauty in art is obvious. Scan the archives here or on jenbekman.com and you'll see plenty of evidence. You'll also notice that beauty is never enough - there's always got to be something more - a big idea, humor, a glimpse of tenderness.

So imagine little Miss Lover of Bright and Shiny Things stumbling onto this painting here and having her "Oooh, pretty" reaction readjust itself to the true darkness of the scene. Wendy's something more is particularly bold, affecting and honest. In this body of work, she coaxes beauty out of the detritus of disaster, and in doing so, she's provoked a series of questions and conversations for me that have resurfaced my own personal relationships with disaster in ways I hadn't seen them before.

In venerating and elevating disaster scenes as paintings, Wendy is opening up quite a can of worms. Photos of disaster can masquerade as documentary, photo-journalism, reportage - call it whatever you like. Disasters, natural and man-made, march across our broadsheets, tabloids, monitors and tv screens. We're not allowed to think of them as beautiful because they are bad and because they're photos, we might be tempted to believe that they're the whole truth. And yet, their beauty is what makes us look and what we're looking at and/or choosing to see is merely some person's version of the truth.

And this is where it gets really uncomfortable - Wendy's paintings embrace (perhaps invent?) the beauty of these scenes, and well, you just don't do that, do you? Not out loud at least. We don't talk about it. It might occur to us as part of our own inner dialog but it's not something to be discussed in polite company. Which is awfully ironic considering how preoccupied our culture is with violence, imagery and... images of violence. Because we don't talk about it, I've always felt a little funny-in-a-bad way about how the memory of disaster works in my mind.

I remember September 11th as a really beautiful perfect day, and each day subsequent as being persistently, painfully, equally as beautiful. I remember the strange beauty in steady shots of the remaining shard of a tower torqued and reaching upwards reflecting light in ways I hadn't seen light reflected before. I remember a certain excitement in the spectacle, completely involuntary, but undeniably there.

I put it away for a few years, after turning it all off as quickly as I could. (And, if you remember, turning it off wasn't exactly easy.) I don't like telling my own story, and I have a particular discomfort about stories I heard and retold because telling them made the pictures we were seeing real. The truth is that it's all real, and it's complicated and actually you can't put it away.

That was painfully obvious to me this weekend as I was driving on a bridge across the Mississippi with Karolina and Colin and off to the right over there was the wreckage from the bridge collapse from earlier this Summer. We started talking about that day and where they were, and where I was and what we did and who we called and how it felt.

How it felt for me, even though I really didn't want it to, was like September 11th. And all those feelings are so closely tied to images that are mapped into my memory. On September 11th, they were things I saw with my own eyes, from my own roof, in the sky before me. This past Summer, it was what I saw on the TV and how it connected me so immediately to what I'd seen and felt before. And so I told my story, and a lot of what my story was about had to do with how it looked, or how I remembered it looking.

*Actually I probably would've been crushed for a minute or two, and then I'd figure out a different angle by which I might get to yes. I am bull-headed, especially when I'm excited about something.