ART: Peter Sacks Paintings

"Visitation II", detail

Peter Sacks is a published poet and professor at a prestige Eastern university.  He began painting a few years ago and his work was received with quantum approval speed.  It’s utterly beautiful and compositionally pure.  Continuing in the shoes of Rauschenberg, Oldenberg, and text-using artists, he covers his canvasses with hand-typed transcriptions of books, old clothing and fabrics from French flea markets, and other materials.  

The allusions are easy and deep at once, and texturally gratifying and embracing.  Sacks is from South Africa, and grieved over the damage apartheid did to all the human souls enmeshed in its matrices.  

Here’s the quandary for me: I wouldn’t have done this because though I have wanted to, I thought it was a vein tapped out.  I’ve seen work something like this a lot.  Not as good, prettier, less polished, whatever - what a shame I didn’t try it.  

How important it is to attend to that first little pique-ing seed of interest and curiosity, of liking, of attraction.  Wherein may lie the real you, that gets squashed way fast and surely by the critical policing self.