“Almond Trees, Judean Hills,” oil on canvas.
Deconstruction and then reconstruction — that process comes into play whether you’re making a medical diagnosis, putting oil paint on canvas, or writing poetry.
The agreeable results from two out of three of those processes are on view in distinguished cardiologist Barry Zaret’s newest exhibition of 25 paintings and one poem. They make up “Journeys,” the new exhibition at the Da Silva Gallery in Westville.
The show runs through Jan. 30.
Gallery owner Gabriel Da Silva (pictured) said he was eager to give Zaret another show — there have been two previous Zaret exhibitions at Da Silva — because the painter is passionate about his work. That passion shows up the canvas as well.
The works, which span about ten years, are landscapes from the Berkshires, where Zaret has a studio, as well as Israel, Egypt, Italy, and other places the artist has visited.
Hence the title of the exhibition, which is also the title of Zaret’s 2012 book of poetry.
After touring the show, I asked Zaret why he chooses landscape to work in. Why are there no people in the compositions?
“Doors of Safed.”
“I work with people all the time,” replied Zaret, now an emeritus professor at Yale New Haven Medical Center, where he was chief of cardiology for 27 years. “My ‘portraits’ are old doors and they have their own personality,” he added.
It’s not all that unusual to encounter physicians who also practice an artistic craft seriously — think of Anton Chekhov the doctor/dramatist, or more recently the doctor/screenwriter Michael Crichton. But it is unusual for a physician these days to take up two artistic specialties: to be both a painter and a poet. Zaret has been wearing all three hats for decades.
“I think the poetry, art, and medicine all feed one another,” he said.
“Becket Quarry 1.”
They’re all based on observation, he said, and to do any of them, he suggested the same process is followed: breaking down the elements and then putting them back together into a kind of whole, be it a diagnosis, a landscape, or a sonnet.
And yet there are differences, which Zaret found out when he lost his first wife five years ago.
After losing her, he said, poems came only intermittently, and frequently their themes were aspects of grief. And painting ceased altogether.
As a physician you would think that Zaret might have found a way to use his artistic craft to work his way through his bereavement. That turns out not to be the case.
“The art didn’t help the healing,” he said. “I can analogize to one of my favorite quotes from poetry, Wordsworth: ‘Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility.’”
In order to paint, one has to have a certain level of tranquility, he said. Writing the poems was a way for the grief in part to exit, he also surmised.
“Feluca on the Nile.”
One of those poems, about the tubes of paint in his studio beckoning him to come back, is affixed movingly to the corner of the gallery wall among the framed canvases.
“Please receive me with smiling remembrance and understand where I’ve been,” it concludes.
Reading that poem might be a good place to start a journey through “Journeys.”
“Journeys” appears at the Da Silva Gallery, 897 – 899 Whalley Ave., until Jan. 30. Zaret will be present at the gallery to discuss his work — but not do any cardiological diagnoses — on Jan. 13 from 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
