There is something beyond language in the feeling one gets when a childhood encounter with art is repeated later in life. It is a combination of familiarity and time travel, the reincarnation of what was loosening the grip of the continuum that brought us to our present; loosened if only for a moment. It isn’t nostalgia, no, as it runs too deep. It isn’t wistfulness because it is not just a deep memory surfacing up to consciousness in your brain – look this art is right there in front of you, real, and it is being in front of people experiencing it for the first time.
What is this sensation? It really is becoming the person you once were! This feeling is beyond language but it resonates in me when I see Kent Twitchell murals, studies, portraits, even doodles on lined paper. In the case of a Twitchell artwork, especially his heroic murals, one of this feeling’s lesser power is serving as proof one has spent their life in Los Angeles.
This feeling was overwhelming when I saw a study for The Freeway Lady upon entering Bergamot Station’s Craig Krull Gallery a few days before Kent’s eightieth birthday. There she was, just as she had appeared looming over the freeway in the 1970s, staring at us in the car in a traffic jam with those piercing eyes, with that magic floating shawl, with the full moon pictured alongside of her assuring us this was in fact a mystical encounter. Calling it “nostalgia” would have meant that it felt like the 1970s again. But this is a greater force, it is the feeling of timelessness, of staring into eternity as eternity stares at us.
This current exhibit is a bold proclamation that Kent Twitchell maintains an art practice in the studio as well as the streets. He is a draftsman of the highest order and can exalt the people he feels matter into positions of civic authority that become iconic via their position on one of his large-scale murals. But in his drawings, the draftsmanship in his soft focus portraits creates a dream-state stature that rivals the mythologies present in those murals.
The exhibit at Craig Krull reminds us that if an octogenarian master can challenge himself in the studio or on the scaffold at this late point in his life, maybe we too can do the things we are supposed to do with a little more effort and a little more care. Kent Twitchell at eighty pushes every artist to do what they do a little more boldly, to never rest on a signature style, to create something that people don’t have words for when they encounter it a second time, later in life and they are suddenly in a state of aesthetic rapture beyond time.
–MG, 8-17-22
