| | Mr. Rawlings,
Thank you for this post. I have explored Mr. Cach's site, as you advised, and I have several general observations.
* Mr. Cach is evidently skilled in his technique and is capable of painting with focus and precision. However...
* He does not translate this technique into similarly precise subjects and themes. Even Mr. Vurm (who is supposed to favorably advertise Cach's work) states, "What are his works about? Not an easy question to answer. Above all they are for him the only way to communicate ideas difficult to put into words." This is an admission of failure. Rand had stated that, when one is unable to clearly formulate one's ideas, it is because one does not have clear ideas to formulate; one merely has a vague, contradictory, imprecise hash that needs to be refined, pondered over, and adjusted prior to becoming presentable.
Note how, whenever I write short blurbs about my favorite artworks in the SOLO gallery, be they still life or the works of the old masters, or new Romantic Realist paintings, I always emfasize those elements of the central theme that attract me, and then mention the means by which the artist goes about depicting that theme (through technique, juxtaposition, colors, light, etc.). Mr. Vurm is not an untalented writer, and he could likely do the same for Mr. Cach's works... if Mr. Cach's works had that impression to convey in the first place.
* Then Vurm describes the filosofy behind Cach's painting, which is plainly un-Objectivist: "But Joseph's subject is not merely political freedom from an oppressive regime; each of us can find any regime oppressive at times. It is absolute freedom—freedom from the bounds of matter—that we are dealing with here." This Rand would recognize as the failure to distinguish between the Metafysical and the Man-Made, and the inability to recognize that the absolute reality is all that exists, and "freedom" from it implies being left with a formless void. Hence Cach's paintings are oft pervaded with a whirlwind of colors that lack a definite shape or purpose to be applied to. Or Cach creates forms that seem to have no meaning and are just haphazard conglomerates of various asymmetrical strutures.
The only painting of Cach's that I can legitimately claim to "understand" is "Giorgione's Alternative" in Gallery 10. Cach does an interesting job with the largest background building and portrays it in an intact, neat manner, though its architecture, with its narrow windows is rather gloomy and constricting. But this painting goes entirely against my sense of life or the purpose of rational esthetics as "intellectual fuel" rather than inducing depression. The skies are brewing up a tempest, and there seems to be no image of resilience in the entire painting. Many of the other buildings are mere ruins, and, in the foreground, two exhausted, almost gasping fish leap out of the water, seemingly staring at the viewer and asking, "Where can we go? What is to become of us?" The fact that they are fish, not men, further intensifies their helplessness and portrays them as pawns of their environment.
I have just posted a painting by Damon Denys to the SOLO Gallery, titled "The Soloist." The skies in that work are also stormy, but note the firm, confident posture and glance of the woman in the foreground, and her empowering grace. She, not the weather, becomes the focus of the work and the source of inspiration for the viewers. Contrast this with Mr. Cach's works, and it will be self-evident as to the sense of life and radiant vision of the human spirit that Cach is missing.
I am
G. Stolyarov II
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