Last week, I picked up the book Everywhere Being is Dancing — Twenty Pieces of Thinking by the poet/typographer Robert Bringhurst. As is often the case with me, the book itself attracted me, not the title (which I have to say, gagged me a bit), or what I assumed to be the subject. When I picked it up I had no intention of actually reading it. 

Its size and simplicity, the weight of its pages, and the typeset all combined to create my sense of the perfect book. It is itself a work of art and makes me want to believe that we will never see the day when we read everything off of a computer screen.  

Then I turned the pages to the table of contents and found an essay about the surrealist painter Joan Miro – Into the Absolute of Nature — The Face of Joan Miro.  Among other things, the essay focuses on the inspiration Miro got from natural landscapes: “Landscape painting is a ‘coitus of the artist with nature,’ he wrote in a letter in 1919.” Bringhurst quotes. 

If Miro escaped into the absolute of nature, it also escaped into him. Increasingly, his work explored what links us to that large and fruitful world. It seeks out the deep truths we share with other creatures — other animals and plants — and with stars, earth, water, air and fire. 

Miro’s work has moved me since I first saw it in Madrid’s Reina Sofia museum. I don’t know what it is about art museums, but they wear me down almost as much as old cathedrals. Instead of moving slowly, painting to painting, I was walking briskly down the center of each gallery, looking side to side, waiting for a painting to “grab” me and pull me in. I’d never heard of Miro when this happened, and I don’t recall the actual painting, but since then I’ve read books on Miro and I “watch” his actual work whenever I get the chance. 

Lately I’ve been attracted to his “Constellations,” a series of 23 small paintings done as WWII broke out “with the minute detail of a craftsman and a primitive.” These paintings were the only possessions he was able to save as he and his family moved from place to place to escape marauding German armies. Miro was very depressed during the time he worked on “Constellations.” 

These paintings incorporate all that he loved most: “women, the night, stars, birds and dewdrops at dawn.” Although I’ve not seen the original, my favorite Constellation is “Woman beside a lake whose surface has been made iridescent by passing swan.” (Miro is famous for using poetic titles, even more so with “Constellations,” because, he said, “there was nothing else left in the world for me but poetry.”) 

According to his friend,  the author Roland Penrose, Miro believed that direct contact with the earth is as important as any perception through our other senses, that this contact “is simple, banal and yet at the roots of our understanding.”

It is from terra firma, the sun-bleached soil, with its appetizing scent of plants, its dust, mud and weatherworn rocks, that we enter and enjoy the great open spaces, the all-invading light of day and the coolness of the stars by night. Just as the permanent foundation of the ground provides the springboard for voyages into outer space, so it is with the more mysterious flights of the imagination. 

Nature — the wild world — moved Miro. He filtered it through his unconscious into his imagination and then onto his canvases, which “move” those of us who view them in a different but powerful way. PJH