John Hastings: David Ford Exhibition at The Bunker Center for the Arts

John Hastings penned this poetic response to the current David Ford exhibition at The Bunker Center for the Arts.

David Ford is at The Bunker
This is my idea of a Great Show.
Big Paintings are alive with Big Ideas.
But you have to pay attention.
The closer you look the more you see.
The more you see the more you feel.
Feeling is meaning.
David possesses a primal capacity for imaging narrative that dances to the music of time. In the same breath. Story intercedes. We understand.
The message is a song without words.
If you allow yourself the luxury of listening.
And of course. There is a payoff !
In the collaboration of artist and viewer a oneness occurs.
We become ‘one’ with the painting.
And with me, that particular oneness morphs into a meditation on the nature of human endeavor.
What more can we want from the action of Art ?
The first time I saw the work, it perplexed me.
Angst is always good. It inaugurates a dialectic.
I find myself in steady dialogue with the lyric allure of David’s work.
And rather suddenly !
I occupy space where the language of language is supplanted by the power of Image.
A space where Painting becomes the substance of itself on its own terms.
Where beauty becomes the irony of a loaded gun splaying possibility onto the surface of an empty canvas.
A Blank that contains everything.
Which is not there.
All at once.