Honorable Mention
Broken Spirit Whole
DESCRIPTION
I was looking for the color between blue and violet, but knew that it would have to find me, a pure form, not the in betweena pure blueviolet that had the voice I could hear
Between heart and mind, a dream melody of chromatic correspondence like a Rothko Yesterday
Every rain would completely erase everything I ‘tried’ to paint, until I stopped trying to paint, stopped trying to hold any image, just let it rain and added deep purple and blue dye, and watched the sky’s indigo variations moving into dusk or cloud behind the trees in the reflection
The piece suddenly was about the trees, about that Springsteen invocation at the end of ‘Born to Run’ when he goes back to his childhood street in Freehold to find that the copper beech tree he climbed as a child had been cut down, then staring up into the starry night, sensing that the vanished tree was actually there evermore, full of souls, music levitating, voices, ancestors, reappearing fathers, legends, sea grit squalls of the gut, spirit reunion & the Big Man
And I recalled the first time I was in the forest of giant trees, alone staring into the night, I saw the purple behind the darkness, the empty sky fullness, some compassionate feel of space between the stars beyond the ideas of void and life
We talked later in the tub under the freezing stars of a myth, our story for the new earth, where a girl can see a color between violet and blue, and within this color an enlightened world building vision, one where
every broken spirit fit
AUTHOR
Neil Enggist of Swiss and Taiwanese descent, was born and raised in Princeton, New Jersey. His father was a stained glass artist and mother worked for the state. Growing up, Enggist drew, played soccer and saxophone. He studied fine arts at Washington University in St. Louis and Santa Reparata in Florence. For the next 20 years he followed the great performances of color into the mountains, canyons, coastlines, and rivers across the US, Europe, China, and India. His ‘Nature action paintings’ are composed within a system of nature, performing ecologically harmonic phrases in a tidal conversation between human spirit and the wild. Enggist earned his MFA at San Francisco Art Institute in 2016 where he made paintings on steel in the tidal zones of the Bay Area incorporating ideas of performance and sculpture embedded in the earth art movement. Enggist has participated in a number of art residencies including the Lucid Art Foundation in Point Reyes, CA, and journeyed to the land of his grandmother to paint in Shanghai and the Yellow Mountains in 2019. Through his travels, Enggist developed a body of painting and poetry shown in New York, Milan, Mumbai, Luzern, and Paris. Along the way he saw Bob Dylan in concert around 40 times. During Several summers he worked with master gardener, Andre Ammann, realizing landscape projects around Luzern. In 2020 Enggist painted between NJ and SF, painting in the Sequoia forest, Lands End, Yosemite, Trinity River, Big Sur, the Central Valley, writing a book of mystical Love poetry. He currently paints and makes stained glass in Taos, New Mexico with his wife, artist Ziggy Khan, working together on a multi-media album weaving memory, music, painting, skiing, meditation, and poetry inspired by Japanese tanka, also painting and showing in Switzerland and Italy. 