On the transformative power of personal meaning — and a boat on a still lake in Bandon
Yesterday was one of those days the Oregon Coast saves for people paying attention. Blue skies, a soft breeze off the Coquille River, the sun blazing over Old Town Bandon while tourists wandered the shops and galleries of a town that knows how to make a summer afternoon feel like a gift.
I was driving in to pick up a painting.
A few weeks earlier, I had driven down to Gold Beach to preview an upcoming studio show hosted by one of my represented artists, Morgan Johnson — a painter with fifty years of Fractionalism behind him and a home that doubles as one of the most extraordinary private galleries on the Southern Oregon Coast. I fell in love with a piece called Construction before the show even opened. When I heard it hadn't sold at the event, I didn't hesitate. Morgan was making a run up the coast to deliver sold pieces to High Tide Gallery in Bandon — a warm, tucked-away gem of a gallery in Old Town, owned by José and April Nunez, who had graciously offered their space as a pickup point so Morgan's collectors wouldn't have to make the drive to Gold Beach. That kind of generosity is why small town galleries matter.
I walked in to find Morgan already there, deep in conversation with my neighbor Patricia — a woman I had referred to his studio show weeks before, who had attended and bought a smaller piece while she was there, then bought a second painting afterward because it simply wouldn't leave her alone. Morgan does that to people.
Patricia was there to pick up Solitude.
Solitude is a long, narrow painting — a still lake, mountains receding into the distance, a single small boat floating just off-center in the quiet water. The subject alone suggests peace. But Morgan sets that tranquility against a sky that burns — deep golds and oranges, billowing clouds filled with motion, their reflections caught in the water below so that the stillness of the lake holds the turbulence of the sky perfectly intact. Horizontal bands of color run the length of the canvas, cool blues alternating with those vibrant sunset tones — a compositional choice that should calm, and somehow doesn't, because the sky above is alive and insistent. It is a painting about peace that refuses to be entirely peaceful. Which, if you think about it, is exactly what solitude actually feels like.
I had my own interpretation of the piece. I always do with Morgan's work — it invites that kind of attention. But I wanted Patricia to share hers, and I wanted Morgan to hear it. So I asked her what she loved about it.
What she said stopped the room.
She told us that her church group had been studying the book of Matthew. That in the fourteenth chapter, just after the execution of John the Baptist — Christ's cousin, beheaded at the request of a king's daughter during a dinner party, his head delivered on a platter — Jesus withdrew. "When Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place." Matthew 14:13. The world around him was churning: a political climate coiling tighter by the day, miracles happening faster than he could move away from the crowds, and now this — the violent death of the man who had baptized him, the cousin who had prepared the way. And what he asked for, in the middle of all of it, was a boat and a moment alone.
Patricia looked at Solitude — the single boat on the still water, the turbulent sky above, the calm that holds despite everything pressing down on it — and she saw that moment. She saw a man on a boat, trying to find his breath, surrounded by a world that wouldn't stop moving.
There was a breath of silence in that gallery. And into it, I found myself asking: who cannot relate to that right now?
None of us could argue. We stood in the gallery in Old Town Bandon on a perfect summer afternoon and looked at a painting of a boat on a lake with new eyes — eyes that belonged entirely to Patricia, and that she had just given to us as a gift.
This is what art does at its best. It begins as pigment and canvas, as a painter's private inquiry into light and color and the ideas that won't leave him alone in his studio. It travels — to a gallery wall, to a studio show, to a small pickup in a coastal town — and somewhere along the way it stops belonging only to the person who made it. It finds the person who needed it. And in that person's hands, it becomes something the artist never intended and couldn't have planned — something true to a life he never lived, a grief he never felt, a moment of recognition that is entirely and specifically hers.
The meaning Patricia found in Solitude is not the meaning Morgan painted into it. It is the meaning the painting earned in her life. And that meaning doesn't stay with her — it travels forward. The person who stands in front of that painting in her home and hears the story of a boat on a lake and a man who needed a moment of solitude in the middle of a churning world — that person will never look at it the same way again. The story compounds. It opens the next heart, and the next. That is how a painting outlives the moment it was made.
Before we left the gallery, I suggested she find a small metal nameplate — the kind you can have engraved — and attach it to the frame. The scripture. Matthew 14:13. So that everyone who stands in front of that painting in her home will know, without having to ask, exactly what they're looking at.
She loved the idea.
That is the power of art. Not that it's beautiful — though it often is. Not that it's skillfully made — though that matters. But that it holds space for meaning we didn't know we were carrying until we saw it reflected back at us from a canvas across a gallery floor. It doesn't ask us to arrive with the right interpretation. It asks us only to arrive with an open heart — and to let it do the rest.
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2 comments
Your article about Solitude was… both superb and educational in an amazing manner, showing me new possibilities of how to look at art. Thank you.
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nicartgallery replied:
I’m so happy that you enjoyed the article, your comment means more than you know — “new possibilities of how to look at art” is exactly what I’m going for. Art has always had this depth in it. Sometimes it just takes the right story to crack it open. I’m so glad this one did that for you.
One of the brighter parts of the story that didn’t get conveyed to Nicole was that this realization had awakened her, Patricia related to me. She hadn’t thought too much of the painting after attending the open studio until out of sound sleep at 3 am she was brought the awareness that melded her experience of the painting and her understanding of recent sermon she’d attended. I love that the mind can bring such enlightenment, and bind people together in a moment of relating. Thank you Patricia and thank you Nicole. This will be a permanent fond memory of mine for years to come.
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nicartgallery replied:
Morgan — I didn’t know the 3am part when I wrote the article. And somehow that’s the most important detail of all. The painting didn’t find her in the gallery, or at the studio show, or even in that moment in Bandon when she told us the story. It found her in the dark, out of a sound sleep, when her mind finally put two things together that her heart had already known. That is not something a painting can be asked to do. It either does it or it doesn’t. Solitude did it. That says everything about the work — and I’m so glad you shared it. :D