Vividly Alive Holiday

My father bought the first Najee Dorsey painting of anyone in my family, and as soon as he did, he took a photo and sent it to me. He knew that the jazz theme would appeal to me, but as my taste in art veered towards more abstract works, he wasn’t sure whether the style would touch me as much as it had him. The paint was thick enough that the photo didn’t do the piece justice, yet I told him that it would look great in his house, and that Najee seemed very talented. Those remarks are very different than saying that something is earth shattering, and that you can’t live without it. Having that type of reaction is especially rare.
The pianist and composer Yaron Herman criticized (kindly) jazz music which was merely clever and entertaining saying that for him improvising music is life and death. When I hear Yaron play I recognize that urgency. This happens when the most powerful moments of life and death are intertwined so that you are not sure which you are experiencing at which particular moment. Yaron wasn’t the first or only one to deal with this. The Bach B minor Mass is strangely more up when it should be down, as is the Verdi Requiem. In the visual arts this is of course possible as well, in the literal ways of the war creations of Delacroix, or the emotional outpourings of Pollack or Rothco. I was lucky enough to have my own experience with a work of Najee’s, which was more powerfully intellectually and emotionally than the first photo my father had e-mailed me.

About six months after my father bought that first piece, Najee invited me to a pre-expo viewing at the New York Art Expo in 2008. Within 2 minutes of walking into his booth, I saw a piece which resonated with me on so many levels that I bought it and another right away. The piece is a mixed media, paint and collage of Billie Holiday. It is impossible for anyone to see or think about Billie Holiday without sadness. She died in New York, suffering from disease, terrible heroin withdrawal, and a lifetime of inequity and intolerance from a country too cold, too jealous, and too weak to see her strength. Her recordings speak this struggle. I had always valued her so much that I had not imagined that the visual arts could possibly increase my empathy and depth of feeling for her. The Najee piece did. He took real objects from photos, which create a perspective automatically, and combined it with a forced perceptive of his vision. In this way the Gardenia in her hair, the gold, the face, exist in a world which is more like our dreams than our conscious reality. Like music it plays with time, but since it is inherently static, it brings us in and forces us to look. It makes her alive in the way that she could have only been in 2008 and beyond, which is in art. The power of this piece speaks to a collaboration of artists, (Billie and Najee) who didn’t even live during the same era. It also speaks to the power of art to reshape our already fixed impressions. Holiday’s music will remain important to me, but she is now vivid in my mind in color, and alive, as the unmovable piece on y wall.