Music of the Spheres and The Sounds of Silence

— 11/08/2004, by YOLANDA MUHAMMAD (Curator, Sun Cities Art Museum)

Mystic currents sweep through the paintings of Bernard Pracko with an undertow of urgency that pulls the viewer into an inescapable depth of color and form. Two and a half years ago he capped his pen, dismissed his secretary, shut the door to his business office and stepped into a studio where he allowed a feverish passion for releasing his creativity through contact of paint and canvas to overtake him. He has quite literally been seduced by his art. He embraces the life of the artist as standard a compulsion and devotion to distant harmonies that resonate with images he sometimes grasps only intuitively. Powerful, purposeful music blaring in his studio, Pracko is carried along by the sensuous connection between paint, color and sound like the blind, bewildered lover who awakes to ask, “What happened?” In the aftermath of research, he finds his answers. His inner visual images have a validity and a connection which are often ancient and always esoteric. The sounds with which he fills his studio are triggers for the silent voice from within the physical body.

Just as with the desert stillness of the ruins of the necropolis at Saqqara, Egypt- human intervention brings the healing music- the stones come alive when a man enters. So it is with Pracko. In reverence he stands before a bare canvas. When the inaudible sound floods into his consciousness, then he has permission to paint. For as author Laurel Elizabeth Keyes expresses, this inner voice to which we respond is “dominated by intellectual direction and is allowed to express only as the mind dictates…sound is the meeting place of the abstract and manifested idea.” Here is where Bernard Pracko is caught, impaled upon the insistence of sound upon his psyche and the figurative demands made upon him to record in a few strokes all the things he hears and sees inside his head. Born in Ada, Oklahoma, he grew up traveling throughout the Southwest- the only constant in his life was watching with boyish, sometimes inattentive eyes as his mother and grandmother painted. His father saw to it that the influence of business was just as strong as the influence of art.

“I was an entrepreneur. I started my own businesses. I guess I was afraid to be employed. When I reflect, I find that my high degree of creativity did not allow me to be contained in the confines of a business atmosphere.” I have owned a travel agency, an insurance company in Bermuda, two arts and crafts manufacturing businesses, precious metal findings, a consulting company that stretched to Panama, Hawaii, Switzerland, Los Angeles and New York. All this was exciting because I looked for alternatives to the standard practices to get things done,” Pracko says. It is this same search for alternatives that determines the style of his paintings, drawings and prints. After 15 years of spiritual exploration, Bernard Pracko took the Tomatis Course in intense listening. He heard the rhythms within; and these translated into color and form that imposed them selves as art. “I feel I am fairly well acquainted with realms other than what is physically here,” Pracko says, looking across the room toward a canvas he calls Life, a large 72”x60” painting growing from a purple matrix- purple the color of higher consciousness, introspection and intuition. A speckled sun glows faintly in the purple heavens; which are spotted with four hazy moons, straining to break through.

Beside a meandering line, which carries the weight of an entity, moving like a Ch’i force pulsating with power, a gigantic red cell bursts to life, a fetus sending tendrils of energy out into the darkness. While in the lower left comer of the work, a field of growth tinged with green, springs into being like crystals pushing up from the bottom of a cave. This is Life, indeed, on both elemental and universal scale. Pracko believes he has created a “sacredspace” with this painting, depicting the cycle of life and birth. He sees, he says, “a non- physical being with regal headdress…the energetic condition of creation in act- ion…observing itself in creative action, in co- operation with all levels of existence.” There is much in a Pracko painting that is embryonic. This is part of their charm. The newness, the simplicity, the searching, the wonder- ment still uppermost in the heart of the artist, yet grounded into his soul’s existence.

His inspiration often comes down and surrounds him, like glowing light, and within this light, he says, an idea, which is also an image, takes form and when he speaks this idea, it is through the medium of paint. This spiritual process creates an energy which becomes manifest in order to be seen. “I have begun to see soundforms … to see what esoteric sound looks like. This is what I try to capture when I paint,” Pracko says, joy spreading across a tanned face framed by gray/blonde hair. “And as these soundforms take shape, they also have color. I have come to realize the exploration of this process is closer to me than anything else I have ever wanted to do.” Pracko says that after this profound experience first touched him he rushed out and bought both paints and a grand piano, not knowing where this connection of sound and color would take him. “But because of my high degree of impatience for results, I sold the grand piano rather quickly and just began to “Life”, acrylic on canvas, 60” x 72” piano rather quickly and just began to paint.” When the poet John Milton spoke of the “music of the spheres” he was alluding to the sounds of silence, the etheric sounds of the universal order that bring peace and healing and harmony. These sounds are not always heard by the ear, but are abstract sound and Pracko says he accesses these sounds in any way he can – through actually listening to music, through deep mediation and through listening as closely as he can to apparent silence. “Often I come into the studio and stand in front of my paints and listen to the colors – see which ones call. Those that speak to me get put on the canvas and often the colors themselves will dictate a form.

“And, as I read and research, I find references to what I am doing…when I read Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art. I was immediately struck with the similarities in what he was trying to do and what I am exploring.” Indeed, as Wassily Kandinsky made his transition toward non-objective art, he struggled to be free of the literal. As Pracko emerges, he tears away at the cocoon of practicality to revel in the experimental. Just as Kandinsky attempted to touch his viewer, not so much with the construction of a piece, but with color, form and line, as he tells us in Concerning the Spiritual in Art his painting became more akin to music and the tonal qualities set up melodic moods, rhythms and symbols. Kandinsky’s Picture With Three Spots, (1914) or In the Black Circle, (1923) or Several Circles, (1926) deeply inspired Pracko. Organic and geometric shapes dance in a cohesive chaos born of a systematic search for Unity. Kandinsky wrote.”just as sounds and rhythms combine in music, so must forms and colour be unified in painting by the play of their manifold relationships.

He continues with the analogy of color as a keyboard…”color is power which directly influences the soul…the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, toucning one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.” For both painters, the circle holds the cognitive power of many ideals and systems of belief. As elemental and ancient as the Egyptian Sun God, Ra, as intense as the sin at the center of our solar consciousness, the circle is repeated, painted, underpainted, and glorified. In Bernard Pracko’s life, the circles drift in and out of the indigo background, one yellow circle mimics the sun and the dominant red circle is the seed of life itself. Circle as cell cannot be overlooked. Looking to Missing 10, viewer attention is commanded by three muted circles resting atop three pyramid forms. Spirals of white light energy join the two shapes.

Purple circles, inset with ghost suns with rays, ground the pyramids into consciousness, while anchoring the viewer, allowing for the open space to calm the eye away from the turbulence of the cloud bursts of white beset by more red and yellow circles.

The ancient Egyptian pyramids are depicted, as are some of the teachings of the schools at Thebes,” Pracko says of his painting. Seven large, and parts of the eighth and ninth, blue dots are apparent, as is the missing tenth dot of the pythagorean and

Kabbalahic symbol of these ancient teaching systems which invisibly crowns the area above the painting. The number ten, which produces the total form, is thus veiled.” This juxtaposition of the visual completeness of the many circles in Missing 1O, present in subliminal contrast to the concept that a circle is missing. These images infer life and the path to spiritual enlightment is a continuum and cannot be complete.

As Alexander Calder Said, “The underlying Sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe, or part thereof. For that is the model to work from.”

Pracko, like Calder, finds satisfaction in the simplicity of the round, which by its nature can embrace the infinite. Art historian Albert Elsen noted that Calder was a “composer of movement in space”.”

When painting and sculpting the illusion of movement was no longer enough for Calder, he turned to the mobile. He applauded Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase for its effort to bring motion to art; and toking his ideal one step further– “why not plastic forms in motion?”– Calder added velocity and dancing form, giving art a truly “active” role in its envrionment.

Bernard Pracko takes this same motion, this same step as Calder’s leap of faith, and reverses it, so that the form of sound undergoes transformation and is given back to the canvas, offering the viewer an opportunity to sense the movement intuitively; The vibration is carried from the ether-the spiritual- through the artist to the can vas and back through the viewer. The circle is then complete.
Pracko says he sometimes feels alone in this process, lost in transition, then he finds the thread has been held, manipulated and then dropped again by many gone before for the greater “many” to follow and to find.

“For instance, several authors have suggested that the color orange is associated with a triangle or pyramidal shape and in the painting Missing 10, this is what I found I had already done,” Pracko muses. “What I am doing becomes a very delicate, intimate place. It requires my complete trust.” Abstract Expressionism was born of the need to subjugate the calculations of intellect and surrender to the freedom of subjectivity. Artist Robert Motherwell said, “The need is for felt experience—intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic.” The act of painting is cathartic for Pracko, releasing the unknown, which becomes known once it is seen. He says, “My works embody the eternal vigilance required to bridge the seen and unseen, the heard and unheard, through color and symbols, as reflected by the ancient paradigm, “as above so is below.’”

His devotion to this ethic can be seen in Souls/Choice where a sea of rich and interlocking star forms crowd the canvas. There is no top, no bottom, no side, only the unity and oneness of repetition of form and color. The background beyond the stars is the black blanket of the universe where star form becomes dot and infinity beckons, suggesting a greater proximity than we had ever imagined. The stars in this con- text ate not supernova, but ganglia. They are the connective tissue of the akashic records, the ideas and memories available to all, but seldom understood. With this presentation, Bernard Pracko imprints this message. These stars are red, yellow, orange, white- their unity permitting dissimilarities in form. But the cohesiveness cannot be denied.

In this painting it is clear that the choice of the soul is a harmonic convergence that originates from deep within and from outer space and time. Looking into Souls/Choice is much like looking up at a temple ceiling at Luxor or Dendera, Egypt. The stars are in profuse procession, covering the blue space with golden punctuation. At Dendera, the temple of Hathor, goddess of love and beauty, there is a particularly engaging image of Nut, the goddess of the Sky, stretched across the ceiling, toes and fingers touching the walls. All around her are the stars of the heavens, bearing testimony in loving allegory to the multitudes of Egypt, who are the recipients of heaven’s blessings. This theme of unity and solidarity is healing at the soul level.

If Bernard Pracko, the artist, wers forced to restrict the impact of his work on others to one element, it would be the capacity to heal—to mend one soul, to mend society, to mend all humanity. As long as Pracko can see this healing affect on those who enjoy his work, he will continue to paint. Music and color are truly medicine. “1 understand, I experience and I acknowledge that the basis of all life is a constant, unheard, esoteric sound…the sound of God,” Pracko says. Rooted in the metaphysical, he thinks in terms rich with Eastern philosophical references, such as found in Unseen Rain, From the Badi-uz-Zarilan Furuzanfar by Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi:

All day and night,
music, a quiet,
bright reedsong.
If it fades, we fade.

For Pracko, who keeps the innocence of the child ever about himself and his craft, his paintings become like whistles in the dark to verify his existence and the existence of all the outside world. As long as he can paint, the light and the music will not stop. His faith in his own need for completion is his affirmation for all of life.