GET HIGH

By Pam Woolway - The Garden Island
Published: Friday, August 28, 2009

“You must always be high. Everything depends on it: It is the only
question. So as not to feel the horrible burden of Time wrecking your
back and bending you to the ground, you must get high without respite.”
– Charles Baudelaire, French poet

Casual observers at the opening of Galerie 103 last Friday were
probably whispering behind their hands, “Is that woman on crack or does
she just drink way too much coffee?”

I was out of my mind. Elated. Wired. Falling over myself like a
Labrador puppy greeting strangers on the street.

From the moment I stepped through the door of Galerie 103 at Kukui‘ula
Village I was on fire.

Baudelaire’s poem, “Get High” goes on to ask, “But on what? On wine, on
poetry, or on virtue, whatever you like.”

I get high on art.

Is it fair to say this is my first experience of a genuine art gallery
on Kaua‘i? There are retail stores around the island packed with art
but to my definition of what makes a gallery, they fall short. A
gallery allows for space to breathe. Art demands it. Perspective. Room
to make leaps. Room to imagine. Room to pause.

I stood on the threshold for a few minutes just taking in the view, a
corridor with a high ceiling of exposed ventilation painted white. To
the right, a metal chair by New Mexican artist Tom Emerson. Clinging,
delicate and fierce to the wall above, three framed works of ghostly
orchids by Liedeke Bulder; below them on a child’s red foot stool, a
stack of books by local authors Todd and Linda Shimoda.

I literally opened my lungs and took a giant hit of art. For the next
two hours I would bounce off the walls in good company with a hundred
other art loving maniacs.

It was embarrassing. At one point I had to step outside myself and say,
“Easy girl.” I was just so excited to be in a giant space packed with
people ogling works by mostly local talent.

At home later, my husband would ask me if I saw all the creatures
tucked into bubbles in Sally French’s “Swine Flu” or if I realized
Carol Bennett had painted “Flow” on a sheet of plywood and how the
grain of the wood mimicked the texture of water.

“I look at a painting from a distance,” Wes said. “It draws me in and
then I’m rewarded every time I get closer.”

Sally’s creatures tucked into every corner or Carol’s material choice
are the pay off for time spent. But for a viewer to step in for a
closer look, there has to be an invitation. To have perspective
requires distance and that pillow of space becomes the invitation to
enter.

Art stacked on art in small spaces over-stimulates me. Galerie 103,
with it’s exposed ceiling and double room capacity offers an entirely
different experience.

I seek art for the same reason I climb to the top of Sleeping Giant —
to find a spaciousness that might, for two minutes, interrupt my
internal dialogue. When the chatter stops, something magical happens,
inspiration. It’s like my soul receives a huge dose of oxygen and I
wake up.

“And if sometimes you wake up, on palace steps, on the green grass of
the ditch, in your room’s gloomy solitude, your intoxication already
waning or gone, ask everything that flees, everything that moans,
everything that moves, everything that sings, everything that speaks,
ask what time it is. And the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds,
clocks, will answer, ‘It is time to get high!’”

• Pam Woolway is the lifestyle writer at The Garden Island. Her column
“Being there” appears every other week.