Today I signed Lovers Jumping in the morning, in my Idyllwild mountain studio, around 11 a.m., when the skylight creates a magnificent glow throughout the room. Over two decades ago, I had a vision of an explosion of joy, and today I felt it was fully reflected through the painting. I’m feeling a huge sense of peace, spiced by happiness.
More than twenty years ago, I was living in a Turkish-styled house on the island of Rhodes, Greece. My studio there had panoramic views of the fortified Crusader town and the Mediterranean Sea. It was around Easter time, when swallows would gather and move like waves across the entire walled town. From the far end, about a quarter of a mile away, they would bob and weave toward my studio windows and then bank in a spectacular display of athleticism. It was hypnotic and exhilarating to watch them.
That exhilaration spoke to a core force I’ve felt since childhood, an undiminished, innocent excitement. The artist in me wanted to capture not the literal experience of the swallows, but the feeling of their bobbing flight and adapt it to my humanism through human subjects. Out of that came the idea of a couple, joy through space, leaping above the water framed by sky. We know they’ll splash in it, but the painting itself holds them suspended in air.
Their joy is shared love, shared freedom, being playful, being incredibly alive.
The technical concept is a starburst of form, radiating arms and legs. The feminine and the masculine mirror each other, identical in pose and feeling the same kind of joy. I added an extreme contrast of light and dark: she’s white as marble, he’s dark as basalt. Behind him the light shifts toward darkness; behind her, darkness shifts toward light. It’s the harmony of Yin and Yang, giving the whole painting an elemental feeling and bracketing the range of human skin tone.
In this painting it’s not so much that the light is radiant; it’s that their sculpted bodies project an inner radiance through their exuberant body language and their happily glowing expressions. The radiance comes from within, from their joy, their freedom, their shared humanity.
Eudaemonia is Aristotle’s concept of a well-lived life, of experiencing it as an end in itself, that living well, with hard-won values, is the ultimate motive for humans. An end in itself is not about solving another problem or learning from pain or tragedy. Happiness is not a signpost but a destination; it’s the arrival at the high point of being human.
What Aristotle didn’t know is that art is the ideal representation of an end in itself. I’m not showing what this couple did to get here; I’m showing the result of all the great things they did in the past that led to this moment.
For me, completing the painting feels like radiant peacefulness, calmness, glowing warmth. The painting closes a long process of coming into being, through tremendous ups and downs. It’s paradoxical: an end in itself, yet still caught in the action of movement. This is a moment in the arc of a very well-lived and loved life.
Michael Newberry 