David Little
Revisiting the Past—Still Searching for the Unknown
Most folks know me as a co-author with my brother Carl of several art books and as a long- time plein-air impressionist landscape painter. But that wasn’t how I started out….
In March, 2020, when the pandemic lockdown closed my coffee group meetings and most social events, feelings of complacency laced with procrastination had me wondering how this crisis would affect the creative juices. Late that month I came across a New York Times article “Readers’ Ideas for Finding Cheer at Home” that struck a chord! The Times asked readers “to share their ideas for pursuing the traveler’s spirit of discovery, curiosity, and delight within their new limitations of home.”
The first submission, “An Artistic Exercise in Patience” by Andre Williams of Montreal, and the accompanying illustration (see attached) by Lars Leetaru that featured an artist about to apply ink to paper, caught my attention. I had taken lessons in Chinese calligraphy for several years in the late 1970s and early ‘80s in Queens, NY. The many hours of practice required sustained determination and patience!
After ten days or so chewing on this Montreal artist’s reflection on patience, on April 3, two days before my 69th birthday, I climbed to the third floor of my barn studio and started to explore work stored in portfolios that dated back to the 1970s and ‘80s. There I found Surrealist-inspired paintings and drawings, lyrical abstracts and mixed-media experiments, Chinese calligraphy practices, figure drawings, folders and notepads filled with doodles, scribbles, and ideas for collage. That same day I cleaned off work tables and enamel trays, opened old boxes with paints and brushes, and broke the ice, and started working on five small watercolors.
The Times article triggered a vague longing to look back and see if I could pick up where I had left off—in 1989! This “reset” helped fill the vacuum created by the pandemic and kick start a review of my earlier style (think Miró, Kandinsky, Klee, Ernst, Arp, Tanguy, De Chirico), to return to my first love, something I had dreamed and hoped might someday happen! The works in this show represent some of the fruits of that journey from the past to the present.
- David Little
