We all respond in some way to the gravity of mortality. Various conditions create the tenor of how we move through our days – experience, -- including age, environment, and success – and personality. Some carry its weight with less effort than others. Treading lightly through the atmosphere, there are those who are simultaneously holding a fascination with being alive, able to feel deeply and let go. There are those who pretend, wishing they could be light and airy, but that is truly not who they are. Moving quickly so as not to plant roots they force themselves to be indifferent. They break bonds when things get too heavy, engaging in cloaked and clouded relations to avoid the pain of inevitable separation. This dishonesty leadens their wings as they try to shake off truths. They float above the surface just to hang themselves on an existential tree limb. Others fight internal wars, unable to reconcile how they want to walk through the world due to obligation and circumstance. Take young Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars II and III , torn apart by his promise to be detached, following the Jedi way, and by his passion for Padma. The burden of mortality sometimes warps our vision.

We melancholics suffer all of the world’s wrongs as our own load to carry, not always out of philanthropy, often from unexplainable guilt. Dissatisfaction will permeate one’s being. This lack of contentment can be unbearable, dramatically woeful, not just for the sufferer but for the unsympathetic bystander. Wonderfalls (2004), a television show cancelled after only a few episodes aired, focused on Jaye, an angst ridden twenty- something working in a Niagara Falls gift shop. Unlike, let’s say, Paris Hilton, Jaye carried a heavy load. Then the tchotchkes in the shop began to speak to her, forcing her to follow their instructions by engaging with and helping the people around her, tormenting her until she did. Strong acting and witty writing could not save this weighty drama from succumbing to the needs of popular culture, which is thriving on the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition-s and other so-called reality television shows. Unchecked heaviness is not attractive to the general public at this point in our history – we could handle The Hulk in the same time slot in the late ‘70s, but I fear the consistently depressing ending would knock it off the air today.

In literature, film, and visual arts, these characteristics are usually gelled into a singular, flat archetype for the sake of simply embodying the idea. Any change of heart is specifically related to a well-worn linear path drawn by the author. In reality, at different times in our lives we carry strange, sometimes disconcerting combinations of these weights. Some artists and writers are able to get this across. Take Milan Kundera in his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), turned into a film in 1988. He lays out various entanglements, one sort of weight pushing up against another, prodding forces emerging from inside and outside the individuals, causing tension and dissatisfaction. The four main characters are pushed to their limits. Just the title gives me pause, a challenge to keep myself in check. The film Sideways (2004) also zooms in on four main characters, laying out their expectations from life and their companions. To borrow from the visuals of string theory, which holds firmly that all are connected, here I see literal strings intertwined, some tighter than others – suffocating, or tentative tentacles, sulking. If you have seen this film, you can take apart how each is engaged in the truths of their worlds. The protagonist, the writer Miles played by Paul Giamatti, is breaking down, souring himself by allowing his wine tasting hobby to mask his abundant alcohol consumption. He can barely communicate with the beautiful available Maya, who has her strings open to him. Jack encourages Stephanie to wrap hers all around him, making a tight cocoon. He floats along, hooking onto who looks appealing at the moment, encouraging meaningful ties, only to let go, dropping bombs of deceitful promises and selfish motives that could pollute his future. The characters each hold their own weight of commitment, self-absorption, sense of aloneness or togetherness. As trust enters or leaves the picture, they change.

To talk about the heaviness of sex in these films would take pages. I’ll move on, honing in on the idea of sex and expectations, and what one takes or gives to their partner. Our bodies will intertwine with another (string theory never seemed so sexy). Sometimes the experience of the flesh is absorbed as part of one’s being. For others, it slides off, to be washed down the drain. Bertrand Morane, the avid womanizer in François Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women (1977), played by Charles Denner, had a secret weight that kept him from engaging on a significantly deep level with his sex partners. He was a remarkable lover, attentive, obsessive, seemingly fulfilled. Late in the film we find out that Morane was actually avoiding feelings never resolved, that he tried to plant deeply, only to carry them like a stone. Sex, and can I say love, between the four characters in Closer (2004) becomes a series of beautiful lies that unfold on top of each other to become a mountain of betrayal. Dan, played by Jude Law, hangs above the ether of his relationships, afraid to touch down for fear of getting dirty – of knowing truth. Clive Owen’s Larry is not unaccustomed to the dirt, the perverse. Though he does not embrace it, he allows himself to fully experience a broad range of difficult emotions. He walks with the weight of his mortality, ingesting it, rather than denying it or carrying it bound like a bundle on a stick, far from his body. Larry forgives. What sort of person forgives such unfaithfulness? These are complex characters, on whom the heaviness of humanity shifts to a lighter arena depending on how deeply they engage those around them. Natalie Portman’s Anna – well, see the film and take note of the final scene.

Chewing on these thoughts I knew I wanted more. How can one express these ideas visually, abstractly, or symbolically? I am reminded that all things are connected and nod toward string theory king Brian Greene, alongside the fictional existential detective Bernard Jaffe, played by Dustin Hoffman, who in I (HEART) Huckabees teaches that all that exists in the world, galaxy etc. is connected, made of the same blanket/ material. I had to look no further than the Athens , Georgia artist Scott Belville who has designed the perfect metaphor for the burden of life. Let me say here that I apologize to Mr. Belville for appropriating his symbols for my own use. I believe that his stumps and cut limbs hold the weight for the ways we walk through the world. He may full on disagree.

How heavy is our branch? Are we growing, branching out? Is our stick in the mud? Are we just a bump on a log? Do we go out on a limb? Walk softly and carry a big stick. Belville’s paintings, on view at Sandler Hudson Gallery through early July, articulate a rural environment filled with truncated limbs and stumps, all felled by the hand of man. Thrown around without a care are squashed cans, hubcaps and chained sleeping dogs. Empty of trees – only overgrown monsters of kudzu and clear-cut bulldozed land, are in his backgrounds. Cut branches are abundant, strewn in away that makes their presence beyond background language – they are major players in his surreal, southern gothic world. If I recall correctly his palette is somewhat higher key in these works than his earlier paintings, though this does not hide the pervasive weight that permeates like a humid August day in Georgia .

One of Belville’s cast of characters that I have seen only recently in his work is a young girl, maybe twelve, in sort of Alice-in-Wonderland-like dress. She seems sad, lonely, disengaged. In Detour she sits sideways on a cut log, a short thick limb heavy in her lap, pressing down. In other scenes she holds the limb above her head. This would not be a comfortable position one would hold for long. The reason for such stance can only be surmised. In Swarm, the girl is running, being rushed by a swarm of many charcoal scratches, we can only guess are bugs or bees.. Still, she carries the limb over her head – not letting it go even though I am sure she would move much faster to escape the “swarm.” The preciousness of this limb is incomprehensible. Is she cold (out in the big bad world) and this will provide warmth (think Little Match Girl)? The stick keeps her balanced.

Did I mention that Belville writes no statements on his work?

My stick theory is adeptly expressed in Belville’s fifty-four inch square painting Carnival. Oil on canvas, this work is blocked into a grid of nine scenes each set apart by two flowing curtains on either side, presenting a young boy standing like a magician in front of an audience. The color of the scene changes throughout the sequence, from light lurid yellows to calm grey-blue. The boy’s face is aged for his not fully developed body, and I must say is reminiscent of Belville’s own visage. The boy lackadaisically takes on various stances of “see no ….hear no….speak no evil.” He knocks on his chest, with hand over heart in two scenes. Around him floats a few small cut limbs, some highly detailed, others ghosted. It is as if his mind is juggling them. These sticks do not touch down, not engage with the world but float over. In each scene a stump appears in front of him, at different heights, or directly underneath him with his leg merging with the wood just above the knee, barring fluid movement. In the final segment, the boy with bags under his eyes too heavy for a youngster, has grabbed a stick n each hand with aggression and anger, yelling. It is painful to engage the world deeply, to hold tight to one’s stick. Does the boy want to beat his audience, himself? I’m beginning to believe that all of these figures are part of the artist.

Brian Novatny, whose works on paper will be exhibited at Marcia Wood Gallery June 3 - July 9, 2005 , also uses tree trunks or branches to indicate a state of being. As a disclaimer I must say that I have not seen these works in person, but have been inspired by jpegs. I can only imagine that his surfaces are layered and aglow. A level of pensive lightness is linked to his trees, but without much deviation in sensation from drawing to drawing I garner from the images that I’ve seen. Using a variety of media, including pencil, ink and gouache, he presents the tree limb disengaged from its environment, cut down to a lonely lovely form floating in Novatny-land. Limbs, both tree and human, are delicately rendered, even romanticized. Picture planes waver with a particular floaty-ness solidified by the surfaces whitness: tree branches partially cover faces as in Diane and Richard with a House (2005) or hover above or touch flesh. Even Charlie in Charlie carrying some Firewood (2005), has a light, easygoing manner. (Why firewood and not just a log? What is different about this log that suddenly makes it firewood? And different than the log wavering in and out of space on the right?) In the details, the logs and branches lend an awkwardness to the entire scenario; no longer whole – nor are the human figures, really – they stain the picture with a delicate sadness. The middle-class beings are brought to life through segments of their figures: faces and trunks, arms or legs; the rest of the body fades or is just not there. The subjects might disappear into material or are cropped off by the edge of the paper; sometimes they are meticulously dressed in tight drawings using gouache, with hair curled just so. Subtle elements in the wardrobes and sensitively drawn patterns bespeak of the 1950’s. I am reminded of “Leave It To Beaver” and suburbia. All told, the situations evoke the idea of memory through a non-linear weaving back and forth of objects and overlapping. Novatny’s certain denial of gravity brings me to the conclusion that in Novatny-land memory is often easy and light – possibly a place to return to when the present is unbearable and we want to pretend that the past held more success.

So much can be communicated with just as limb, as in The Giving Tree (1964), the illustrated story by Shel Silverstein where the tree gives all it has to a boy he so loves, who takes and takes…. Martha Whittington’s untitled branch (2004) was exhibited last year in “So Atlanta,” an exhibition at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (ACAC). This work speaks of the loss of habitat in the ATL . The pale branch, 156” long and made from polyester resin and paraffin, is a ghost, or as Whittington writes, “an echo of the tree.” In an email she says the piece “ was cast from a branch of a bulldozed over pecan tree, the last from the farm that use to be here.“ This is they “every” branch and the uber-branch, the living and the dead. We are all one material, intertwined, with the capability of understanding one’s fellow human, and the importance of a healthy environment.

Most consider trees to be the ultimate in grounded, so permanent. A detail of Megan Lillie’s Phantom Limb (2005) from the Dos Pestaneos Studios exhibition “Our Land” at Lump Gallery in North Carolina (http://lumpgallery.com ), another work of art that I experienced via internet, emotes a modern day irony, taking on cliche and truth, “steady as an oak.” This embroidery on canvas depicts the exquisitely stitched contours of four leafless trees, each cleanly sawed at the base, hovering a few feet over their stumped wounds. Sigh… Speaking of unbearable lightness and tragedy.

Is it how high you carry your stick that is most significant? Or how big it is? Does yours have sparklers on one end, now legal in Georgia ? Does it burn with extreme delight, turning to ashes, only to be regenerated the next day? I bet that Barbara Campbell’s does; her paintings in this year’s ACAC biennial exhibition make me imagine it so: “a fir tree gets infused with explosive, interior light.” Is your stick more like a toothpick with an endless supply of olives? Do you trade it often with your partner? Your nemesis? How heavy is your personal forest? How dense the atmosphere, the landscape? Some of us have palm trees on the mind, others dank lush rain forests, kudzu fields, dessert cacti, each with their own smells, energy, lust, All covered and connected by an electric blanket of the mind.

Brian Novatny, Charlie Carrying Some Firewood, 2005, 20 x 18"

Martha Whittington, untitled  branch, 2004, polyester resin, paraffin, 48 x 156”