Sound barriers

I was thinking this afternoon that it is in fact a very sound barrier the pain barrier that is the line between good and great art. Few reach it, even fewer get past it: especially when the onus these days is on immediate gratification and simple one-liners. Mind you, you might think such a barrier would keep out what few might dare call bad art, but bad art does sometimes still get through and even enters the very psyche of the culture. Anyway, I was made aware of this line again, this important pain barrier, when invited by the artist to offer an opinion on the piece she was still finishing. A fellow artist and parent of one of our 8-year-old daughter's good friends saw it the other day and he thought it was already finished. I knew it wasn't. I certainly knew the artist didn't think it complete. Anyway, that was many days ago. Since his visit, the artist has been grafting away, 'polishing' further the surfaces of a thousand pieces of slate - some tiny, some forceful, most half-slid down a mountain side. It is sometimes as if she is actually there, inside the image, polishing away, quite literally, and stumbling precariously across the slippery, steep surface. Look. There she goes, with her bucket, her liquid, her large scrubbing brush. Watch the deep chasm, I am thinking. That was close. Steady while you're on that tall rock. Don't cause another landslide. Careful. Yet more days pass and the artist is still on it, at it, with it. You know why she hasn't stopped because a part of you approves of her tenacity, and you know the standard has been raised so high you may as well carry on through with bleeding hands and feet. Excellence in art is not always waiting by some roadside as in Zen Buddhism. Sometimes you must climb onto, and across, the scree. You must also have a head for heights. You must know what risk is. Idle materialism will go out the window right away. But to watch this pain barrier being broken, I tell you, is to see a coming of age. Ironically, it always reminds me of when I was a boy and the jets in the sky would scream past breaking the sound barrier. It was always a thrill, a kind of sense of achievement, a glimpse of the extraordinary. Well, today, in the late afternoon, I felt the artist close to it again. In fact I almost placed my hands to my ears and ducked.