About
Fishing for the Moon in a Well
Jameson Green
One evening a man went to draw water from a well. Looking into its depths, he saw the moon return his reflection. Alarmed, he vowed, “I must hurry home to fetch my fishing rod and fish the moon out of the well.” He returned with his rod, lowered the hook, and waited for the moon to bite. He waited and waited until something finally tugged on the line. The man pulled with all his strength, but the moon pulled harder; the line snapped and he fell flat on his back. When he sat up he saw the moon restored to the sky where it belonged, and he felt proud of his hard work. The next day, meeting his friends in the village, he proudly recounted his nocturnal exploit; no one dared tell him that the moon had never been in the well. Dao Shi (618–683)
A Daoshi serves to provoke reflection. Perhaps this is also what a painter does. The pursuit of the impossible — a recurring process, painting after painting — is an endless, indefinable quest: to free oneself from the duality between what does not exist and the chimera of giving it surface presence through artifice, color, lines, points, interlacings, scratches, splashes, strata. Then to cover, erase, mask, repent. “To paint is to interpret one’s shadow; it is vague and ephemeral, and sometimes seems absurd.” Fishing the moon from a well: an obsessive, breathless race that can lead to madness or loss. Do we contemplate this vertigo?
Maybe we seek answers, illumination, through a struggle carried by another. Moving from one visual study or language to another, never approaching a painting the same way twice, Jameson Green is obsessed with constraining that wild search to something singular. He summons men and gods, fauns, halves and in?between beings — figures not quite this, not yet that. Perhaps because the painter accepts the possibility of finding no answers, he appears either sage or fool. Despite spirals of doubt, his characters—large shoes, fishing rods that fish for heads and reel in the dead—seem to have understood that the moon is up above: full or dark, it can illuminate or engulf us. Minotaurs and demiurges remind us of our ignorance while the painter watches for whatever might seize the root of his curiosity. The pursuit appears doomed to fail, inevitably poised for failure. Yet he cannot stop, even if he wished to; he is truly bewitched. “In my mind, I am the man with the fishing rod who fishes the moon’s reflection. Perhaps out of a strange sense of duty, or perhaps I am an Fool.”
EP
