Sean Flaherty

“To paint not the thing but the effect it produces.”  -Stephane Mallarme’

     I was always an artist.  I have always been very much affected by nature and the visual reality of life and how it makes me feel.  In fact, my  intense  experience leads me, drives me to convey these feelings to others through painting. 

     It is a long process to identify what affects us the most in this life.  What has the most meaning for us and the deepest implications?  For years, before working with Aleksandr Kharon, it was nature: grand purple mountains, silent and solemn trees with delicate tresses, nature, outside, waiting and occupying with its harmony of warm and cool, consolation and danger.  I was a backpacker for all the years I was growing up, thanks to my dad, and it was my intention to convey the feelings of the outdoors.  Landscapes.  Isolation.  To put a person in the painting would’ve been a disturbance to the essential, primordial climate.  It is the essence of creation that attracts us and reminds us that nature is but a veil for the spiritual.  The forest was my cathedral.

     When I painted with Kharon in Berkeley, California  I developed a sense of the sanctity and potentiality of human beings.  We were painting icons according to the ancient Byzantine and Russian Orthodox Canon, and it challenged me in every way.  It challenged my pride and gave me a little humility; it challenged my desire to be quick, efficient and modern, and gave me patience; it challenged my self-made, self-taught artist ideal, and gave me a taste of complete submission to a process that was older, bigger and probably more complex than myself.  I lost a lot of naivete  in 1999, and  I was given self-knowledge,  clear direction, artistic technology and an enchanting horizon of what I could do with painting.

     I really used to think people were about as complex or as interesting, as say, a tree or nature.  However, through developing as a person and becoming less dense and woodlike myself, spending the last 12 years in a passionate marriage relationship and raising a family, I have an awe for what drives us and gives us strength to love.  What is this?  What affects me the most?  What most strongly appeals to the fundamental emotions and realities in our psyches, including mutual acceptance and consolation, unconditional and blind confidence, the message that despite conflicts and mutual deceptions we are still prepared to try togetherness over and again, the awareness that life’s happiness can only be found in constructive interaction?  What has God used to transform my inner life and to purify my intentions?

      The female  form and countenance is much more than just an erotic incitement, but in its relative  likeness and connection to the perfection of childish beauty, its suggestion of tenderness and vulnerability rather than aggressiveness and harshness, it reminds us of a perfect world, a constructive and positive future, or at least of our aspiration to such a reality.   Woman, as allegory, represents the totality of what can be known.  As a man progresses in the slow initiation which is life, she lures, she guides, she bids him burst his fetters.  And, if he can match her import, the two, the knower and the known will be released from every limitaion.  By deficient eyes and darkness she is reduced to inferior states; by the evil eye of ignorance she is spellbound to banality and ugliness.  But she is redeemed by the eyes of understanding. 

       Sean Flaherty,  December, 2004