The Power Of Art: An Artist's Search for Meaning Through Difficult Times

By Alexander J Koleszar

This book is about one person's improbable journey and the transformative role art has played during life's most difficult challenges. It is about a young child's initial love of art--painting--and his rediscovery of the power of art as an adult twenty years later, amid a global epidemic.

The book chronicles the author's path from childhood through college and into the tech industry as a consultant. But no amount of success could have prepared the author for the personal devastation that would unfold through the 1990s and beyond. This book describes what happened during those trying times and, most critically, how the author turned to art as the instrumental tool in his search for meaning. The pages are about both artistic and personal mistakes as well as triumphs. The author provides insight behind the one-hundred-plus paintings presented here--why he chose to paint each painting and, in some cases, the detailed process behind his paintings.

This book is indeed a unique autobiographical perspective into the mind and heart of an artist. Through his journey, you will understand the essential power of art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9798887638447

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Introduction

Finding meaning in life

The role of art in our lives

A note about my story

The Early Years (Age Five to Nineteen)

HSP

A personal revelation

Lamplighter

Becoming an outsider

When passion meets ridicule

The HSP learns to cover his tracks

The Mad Hatter(er)

A bad attempt at trying to fit in

Memorializing the rabbit many years later

Introduction to death as a child

High school memories: the big blur

The battle at home

Navigating Early Adulthood: Finding others like me

Finding others like me

A New Life

Falling in love

In search of a career path

Midlife Crisis in the Age of HIV/AIDS

The mounting death toll

Lessons in Activism

Meeting with politicians at all levels

Alcoholics Anonymous

A road to recovery and rediscovery

The detritus of my past

On to recovery

Returning Home and Rediscovery

Oil paint on canvas

Recollecting the past

A painting titled Returning Home

A painting of the quilt and early mistakes

More paintings about my here and now

Hard lessons: making more mistakes

The studio as my laboratory

The Master Will Appear When the Student Is Ready

Learning about art and the varied styles

Continuing with life on life's terms

When Life Presents the Unthinkable

Another move and the price of my limitations

Finding Daniel

Horrifying Events in America

A Poison Tree

Life's Many Challenges

2002: internal voices and the committee

Hard choices in life

The outside world: Enron, WorldCom, and greed in America

Our last trip to New York

Playing in the water (colors)

Overwhelmed by stress

The Point of War (2003)

More on politics: the use of torture

A commissioned portrait

When All Seems Lost

Losing Scott

Gifts in life when everything else feels so empty

An angel wing

A Move to Palm Springs

Allowing myself not to think

Another commission

A friend from Los Angeles

Archangel Art Gallery: selling art

Colliding worlds

The light and dark of a butterfly

Mid-century modern

John Richardson: a kindred soul from my past

The darkness that followed me to Palm Springs

Living alone

A raven from above

Steven Blakey

The Move to Arizona

Placement at a congressional office and a virus from China

COVID-19

Reconnecting to Art—Yet Again

More butterflies

Re-embracing the abstract

My father's passing (2020)

Feeling isolated from friends

The Porcelain Rabbit: how it was painted

Seeking Simple Beauty

Trips to the flower market

Pond flowers

A gift to my aunt Cora

Self-Portraits

A few elements within the self-portrait

A subsequent self-portrait unveils itself

Life today… and beyond

A Few Thoughts on Painting

Written around 1998

Cover Artwork—Dal Segno

About the Author

cover.jpg

The Power Of Art

An Artist's Search for Meaning Through Difficult Times

Alexander J Koleszar

Copyright © 2023 Alexander J. Koleszar

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2023

ISBN 979-8-88763-843-0 (Paperback)

ISBN 979-8-89061-921-1 (Hardcover)

ISBN 979-8-88763-844-7 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

To my family and friends. Nothing is more important than the people I've had the honor to know and meet along this all-too-short journey. A special thanks to my brother John, who has provided many hours of support and invaluable feedback during the process of writing this book.

Introduction

Find your passion and you will find your purpose.

—Kristen Hannah

This book is about one person's journey and the transformative role art has played during life's most difficult challenges along that journey. It is about a young child's initial love of art—painting—and his rediscovery of the power of art to heal during a global pandemic. It is about artistic mistakes and triumphs. Finally, it is about finding deep love and subsequent tragic loss yet firmly turning to art in a search for meaning when life appeared to be completely meaningless. This book is about the intersection of all these experiences and the transformative power of connecting to one's inner truth and passion. It is my journey as an artist.

This book is a by-product of many questions from friends, family members, and art enthusiasts. What is behind the art I've created? What was the inspiration for a particular painting? What are common themes, and why are they present in so many of my paintings? I will share with you, as I have with those around me, about the minutiae that goes into many of my paintings in addition to the subtle elements within the work. More importantly, in sharing my experience, I truly hope that you might find some level of encouragement to embrace whatever form of creativity or inspiration is in your heart. The process can often feel daunting to move in the direction of a passion, but it is even more daunting in life not to.

Finding meaning in life

Why is meaning so important? Your journey, my journey, and the journey of every human on this planet can often feel mundane, mechanical, and detached—especially with today's technologies, which separate us from one another. Without us purposely seeking meaning, life can appear to be nothing more than a cycle of birth, existence, death, and little more. But what happens when our path is interrupted, and tragedy strikes? How do we make sense of it, and more importantly, what sustains us through difficult times? Having witnessed a profound level of loss during and after the AIDS epidemic, I've learned firsthand how important it is to be connected to a creative refuge and, in doing so, interject a sense of purpose and meaning to my own life. Creativity has been a way for me to express feelings, emotions, fears, deep sadness, and joy. More importantly, my love of art has provided me with an island of inner peace through very trying times. I believe we each have an opportunity to explore whatever it is that inspires us, and in doing so, we can better navigate through the spectrum of life's events—good and bad—and ultimately gain a sense of meaning in our life.

The role of art in our lives

Anyone who has attended a concert, play, museum or read a good book understands the power of art. It feeds our spirit and allows us to tap into our emotions. All one need to do is think about the importance of a musical score for any movie and how it adds tremendous emotion to the film, whether it is Lord of the Rings, Chariots of Fire, Gone with the Wind, or Star Wars. Music adds a critical dimension to our lives that can inspire how we feel.

The visual arts are somewhat different but no less powerful. When I look at Picasso's Guernica, I cannot help but feel the tragedy of the bombs that saturated the Northern Spanish village depicted in Guernica. Another great artist, Van Gogh, was a master colorist who used deeply saturated colors in his work that enable us to see things like an evening sky in a totally new way, as in his famous Starry Night. And while, at one time, painting may have been used primarily to help the illiterate, there are paintings throughout history that have inspired populations politically and philosophically. My very first memory of a painting was by Salvador Dali, and it moved me in a way that has had a lifelong impact on me to this day. And ever since that time, I have felt a deep connection to painting as a way for me to process the entire spectrum of my own emotions.

A note about my story

I talk candidly about my personal life and how my experiences inspired me to become politically active, something relatively common for artists. During my life, I have seen a great deal of loss from AIDS and suicides. Living through a pandemic will have an impact on most of us, as we recently witnessed with COVID-19. Sometimes that can be for the better. In many respects, the AIDS pandemic molded me as a person and ultimately led me to reconnect with a long-lost passion (the art of painting) that I had abandoned at age sixteen. This process was fraught with a lot of fear and insecurity. But by being willing to move in that direction, I was eventually able to find a deep sense of purpose and an outlet that has enabled me to get through some of the most difficult moments of life.

As a final note, I wrote the following pages in a way that ties together various paintings with events or people who've been a part of my life. Some of the paintings, such as the portrait of my parents, were completed later in my life, but I show that painting very early in the book since I talk about my parents at the beginning of this book. Overall, I've tried to present my path and the art I've created along a natural time line that will help you, the reader, understand why certain paintings were completed and, equally important, what my struggles were when each piece was painted.

The Early Years (Age Five to Nineteen)

The early years of childhood are the time to prepare the soil.

—Rachel Carlson

I was raised by two parents, both of Hungarian descent. Neither parent graduated from high school, nor did they have much in terms of resources when they got married.

My father had just served in the army for slightly over three years in Europe during the Second World War. He returned after the war with the hope of starting a family, and my parents were married in 1949. Initially, they lived with their parents. They started out with nothing. Through their own hard work, my parents were able to save and eventually buy a small home. They moved from Toledo, Ohio, to Detroit, Michigan, then Lincoln Park, Michigan, before they finally settled for several years in Birmingham, Michigan. Later in life, they retired in Arizona.

My dad worked two full-time jobs for over forty years. It was a remarkable achievement as it had enabled me and my siblings to attend reasonably good schools including college—but most importantly, we were exposed to more opportunities than the impoverished roots of my father's and mother's origins.

In their retirement years, my parents were able to move to Fountain Hills, Arizona, which was extraordinary for a tool and die maker. It is in that Arizona setting that I completed the painting Afternoon Card Game—Portrait of My Parents (2002), as shown on the next page.

My mom and dad learned to play a simple card game, gin rummy, soon after Dad retired. At this point in life, they could enjoy the fruits of a lifetime of hard work.

I had thought about this painting a lot before I sat down to discuss it with them. Once my mom agreed (my dad would always go along with whatever my mom agreed to), I helped them select what to wear and simply asked them to play gin rummy as they normally would. I photographed them individually and separately as they played several hands of the game. I was able to take several hundred digital images, and out of those, I found very classic moments and expressions that I could bring into my painting. I wanted to indicate who held the most cards and who was more assertive in the game. This was typically my mom. And yet they both were enjoying the game within an uncluttered world, regardless of the cards they were individually dealt. That was the point of this painting. While their actual backyard was not as expansive as I portrayed it, just being able to afford to retire in their own home gave them both the sense that they had reached the top of the world.

Afternoon Card Game—Portrait of My Parents (2002)

HSP

In 1963 I turned six. I found the photo to the right, which was taken that year. I was the ring bearer for my cousin John Szalay's wedding. The wedding reception was in a modest location with long folding tables and metal chairs. When I look at this photo, I recognize the exceptionally cautious and controlled young boy who had an innate desire to please others. My mom wanted all her children to strive to do their best, and I did my very best as a young boy. There were times, however, when doing my very best simply didn't cut it, no matter how hard I tried.

I don't recall the exact age, but somewhere around age five or six, my mom suddenly announced that I was going to play T-ball. To be perfectly honest, I had no idea what that was. But my mom handed me a worn-out old baseball mitt, and she sent me on my way to Westchester Elementary on a partly cloudy Saturday morning.

I tried to understand why it was so important for me to do something I knew nothing about and really had no interest in. What was it about T-ball that would be so much fun, as Mom had suggested? I remember slowly walking the four blocks to Westchester Elementary School to find a group of about twenty other boys around my age. Most were accompanied by their dads. Many of the boys had baseball hats and shoes that were different from street shoes, as well as brand-new baseball mitts. A few were throwing and catching baseballs with their dads.

The old baseball mitt my mom gave me was far too big for my hand, and worse yet, it was falling apart. That mitt was handed down from my oldest brother to my next older brother, and I am pretty sure my older sister used it when she played softball with her friends. I was the mitt's fourth-generation owner. I felt certain that the mitt's usefulness should have ended with my sister.

I remember wearing a pair of light-beige short pants (also handed down) and a T-shirt, both of which were completely different from what the other boys were wearing. How would I know there was a dress code? It was summer, and I was dressed for summer. But the other kids somehow all knew T-ball required special clothing. I felt completely out of place and wanted to disappear before anyone saw me.

Unfortunately, my wish to be unnoticed failed when one of the fathers who had a clipboard and pencil asked me for my name. It was too late to run away. He asked if I had ever played before. I admitted that I had not. I had never held a bat before that day.

Suffice it to say, when it came time to pick teams, I was picked last (even over Carl Semour, who had Coke-bottle-thick glasses and could barely recognize a person beyond five feet). After the first T-ball meeting, I was put into left field and, unfortunately, never got a base hit during the entire season, no matter how hard I would grit my teeth and want to hit the ball that was pitched over the plate. I always struck out, and I began to dread going to T-ball. I was further humiliated when Carl Semour did indeed get one second-base hit. His base-hit accomplishment meant that I had no equal on the team; I was at the bottom.

I had my first encounter with utter failure, and as a highly sensitive person (HSP), I took it very personally. I also had my first taste of not fitting in, and that feeling made me incredibly uncomfortable.

Family encouragement, a chance to practice even a little, and getting the hang of what