Paul Darrow
MOVING STUFF AROUND: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF THE ORDINARY
Huntington Beach Art Center
November, 2001

"Everything," says Paul Darrow, "is a possibility." Like much about this artist, who has been a quiet but significant presence in the Southern California art community since the 1950's, his pronouncement is at once deceptively simple and dead-on true. Possibility, for him, is not only a working process but a life's commitment. As an artist, the possibilities he has explored in the course of his long career include painting in various media, film and photography, drawing, collage and assemblage, not to mention illustration and cartoon.

If the current exhibition highlights his mixed media work from the past decade, it is surely because this arena offers the greatest play for both his restless imagination and his delight in the material world. Eager to find beauty and meaning in what to others may seem the most insignificant and least lovable of objects, his eye is engaged in a perpetual search for hidden treasure. Rusting metal fragments, ends of rotted wood or oil-soaked cardboard, discarded magazine clippings, old faded images, creased and soiled with wear, passages from calligraphic texts, abandoned odds and ends whose purpose has long since been forgotten-these are Darrow's passion and his stock-in-trade. They are rescued from trash heaps and junkyards, from beach-combings or garage sales. Sometimes they arrive at his doorstep as valued gifts from friends who run across some delicacy of detritus in the street. Fondly, Darrow refers to all these things collectively as "my palette."

His process then becomes a matter, as he puts it with characteristic modesty, of "moving stuff around." He works in a small studio that to a casual visitor might appear like an impenetrable jungle of unedited jetsam, but is clearly to the artist a sanctuary of objects and materials that have quasi-sacred standing: each one of them is a possibility in waiting. A series of photographs on a working bulletin board is testimony to the way he works, documenting a sequence of variations on a theme, conjunctions and arrangements of a few selected items that will finally, in their own good time, settle into the form of a completed work. Darrow waits patiently, sometimes for years, for things to tell him where they want to be: "I can't plan ahead," he says. "I never know until it happens."

Still, no matter how intuitive his working process, he will sometimes pause, looking back with curiosity at completed works, and become more cognitively aware of what it was that he was after. A while ago, for example, a friend brought back a collection of old shoes from El Salvador-worn fragments, pathetic remnants that speak of human poverty and deprivation, of years of use and abuse, of erstwhile wearers, men, women, and children, each suggesting some unknowable but somehow compelling life story. Darrow loved them not only for their soulful presence, but for the encrusted strata of time evoked by the peeling layers of leather, rubber, canvas, and synthetics worn through by footwork and the processes of decay; and in the course of time found ways to incorporate them in works like "Temple" (2000), where a torn-off heel is restored to a place of quiet, mysterious reverence between two architectural pillars, and below a single, iconic metal form. It was in retrospect, after working with them for some time, that he began to identify the unifying theme for these footwear fragments as the journey, or the path, an ancient metaphor for a man's spiritual progress through life.

Similarly, in more recent work, we find the recurring motif of a molded cross as a raised relief or an indented pattern-not only the familiar symbol of death and resurrection in traditional Christian imagery, but also an archetype of the four directions-north, south, east, and west-that carries spiritual resonance throughout human history. Darrow's work seems to enjoy playing with such resonances, though without needing to become attached to any of them. Thus, in "Heritage" (2001), he places the image of the cross, set with the face of a tiny angel, against the background of a rectangular section of rotted wood, juxtaposing it purposefully with another archetypal image immediately below: a decaying white circle, rimmed with rust, and set with a single feather and the stylized image of a setting sun. Speaking to us at a level below consciousness, this small icon manages to conjoin Christian and Native American traditions in a powerful evocation of the American heritage itself. As usual, though, it offers itself to us simply as an invitation to reflection, not as in any way didactic.

Rooted from his first years as an artist in the then-current tradition of California landscape painting (Millard Sheets was an early mentor), Darrow is still fascinated with images of land and, particularly-since he is a passionate sailor-the sea. He creates his own images of the natural world, no longer with oil or watercolor, but with the same source material that he uses for his objects. Thus "Tidepool" (2000) uses gold fragments, formica, and a scrap of cardboard in an atmospheric seascape as evocative as any more literal rendition. Rooting us in the primordial quality of landscape and reminding us of its raw, physical materiality through his seemingly crude medium, he connects us as viewers with our obsession to know exactly where we stand in the universe at any given moment in time and space.

Darrow confesses, too, to a love of walls, particularly those that bear the marks of a layering of time, a deep encrustation of materials and meanings, where history is evident in the accumulation of peeling paint and plaster, calligraphic gestures, pits and gashes, stains and smudges, recording what may be centuries of human experience. He honors the age and venerability of walls such as those in a Buddhist temple, a central American church or shrine. By no coincidence, the walls of his studio and home, inside and out, surround the visitor with multiple textures of nature and artifact, time and knowledge, with visual harmonies, juxtapositions, and distortions, all of which speak of his restless imaginative quest and his peculiar passion for how life manifests itself in every nook and cranny.

It is this textured quality of experience, I think, that he refers to when he speaks of "messages"-a word that recurs in a number of his titles. As a young man, he matured as an artist in the conscience-stricken post-war period, when the message that concerned the majority of artists was of what he latterly refers to as the "heavy-breathing" kind: it was a time of angst-ridden screeds on man's inhumanity to man, on war and social deprivation, on the sheer enormity of the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Darrow remembers having seen at a great distance, without knowing it until later, the quasi-cosmic flash of that first atomic test in the American Southwest; and some of his early work derived from that aesthetic of social responsibility.

The message in his mature work, however-though no less human in its reach-is more subtle, and operates at a deeper level of consciousness. It is also more intensely personal. "Looking back," he noted in a rare statement about his intentions as an artist, "it seems I've been affected by some peculiar trauma, event, or circumstance. My personal art is from that interior jumble of thoughts and things that are in need of clarification or celebration. With or without my approval, or public approval, this exposure and release are about as close [as I come] to putting my inside out."

There's story here that might shed light on Darrow's attachment to the forsaken objects of this world: his father, an artist and screenwriter to whom he acknowledges the debt of his creative genes, was also a philandering manic depressive, who abandoned his son at the age of ten. As an adolescent, Paul would fantasize about the day this absent father might return to embrace and acknowledge him, but that day never came-and later, as a young man, he learned that his wayward parent had committed suicide. On hearing the news, he collected every remaining item of his father's worldly possessions, including all his screenplays, and ceremoniously burned them.

In the absence of his father, he was brought up by a mother who was much engaged in the occult and mystical explorations of her time. Even in childhood, he was no stranger to the religious traditions of the East, and by the early 1960s, married for a second time to the woman he still refers to in glowing memory as "the love of my life", was already a serious follower of such practices as meditation and yoga. His stepson left for the East, and eventually became a Tibetan lama. And, embracing Tibetan Buddhism long before His Holiness the Dalai Lama began to spread its influence in the United States, Darrow found a guru, took refuge, and was granted a Tibetan name: "Transcendent Awareness Spreading Dharma"-a name which takes on a special meaning in the light of the art he practices today.

For Darrow's mixed media works invariably carry the weight and the significance of the religious icon. Many of them incorporate passages from Tibetan prayer texts, or calligraphic notations that have the feel of ancient writ. Of all the recurring images he uses, though, perhaps the most familiar is the circular form of the mandala, to which he returns time and again as the central image for a collage or assemblage. "Kalu" (1991), a tribute to his guru, Kalu Rinpoche, invokes this archetype in the form of the worn wooden frame that encircles the frail, fading, barely discernable picture of the holy man-who remains nonetheless a powerful presence, transcending the inevitable entropic processes of time. In this simple act of reverence, Darrow seems to sum up what his work as an artist is all about.

In good part, it is about transcending the illusion of self and its need for identity and approval, and instead finding a place of pure serenity. "Man is a thinking reed," Darrow typed in a note citing one of the pioneers of Zen teaching in the West, D. T. Suzuki: "but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. 'Childlikeness' has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness." For Darrow, the art of assemblage offers the opportunity to "break through the self-consciousness." "When I am drawing," he says, "I'm in control. I know exactly what I'm doing. But here, the big challenge is the element of chance. It's almost as if I didn't have a hand in it."

By the same token, recycling forsaken bits of the real world into objects that proclaim their sacredness, these works invite us to see the transcendent in the everyday. Through his own journey, Paul Darrow has found the wisdom to recognize that it resides in the small things, the details, the commonplace-in all those things we normally overlook as we rush through our lives. His work is all about stopping to look, and seeing what's there, and celebrating its presence. By transforming the neglected and the ordinary, he invites our attention to those things that deeply matter.