A Season for Ripening
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven…”
-Ecclesiastes 3:1
In his latest exhibition, In Due Time, Mark Andy Garcia underscores how all objects and beings in this world have a season for ripening and fullness. A barren land, so long stricken with drought, will one day be visited by rain. A road travelled, which may seem as almost endless, will always conclude to its destination. A person who has known suffering for most of his life will find grace. This is what is Biblically referred to as “God’s time.” In everyday speech, we say: “in due time.”
But to get there, to reach the place of fulfillment, one needs to exercise faith, the certainty of belief in spite of the rain not yet coming, the road meandering and seeming leading to nowhere, the suffering not abating. It is the same kind of faith that Garcia has exercised in much of his artistic career: faith in his own visual language, faith in the themes he has pursued constantly in his works, faith in the viewer to take the leap and enter through the thickets of his vigorous brushstrokes in order to find something enduring and timeless.
For Garcia has always committed himself to the pursuit of discovering what it is to be human, the abiding longing that we have once the superficial things have fallen away and we are made to confront what is larger than us. Nature, the changing of the seasons, night and day: for Garcia, these are just mirrors to the great spiritual truths, afforded to us in our mortal existence. Everything for the artist is simply the expression of the One, which we call with different names in different languages, in different tongues.
Even the creative impulse, embodied by the work “Heart of a Painter,” is but a manifestation of the yearning for the truth of who we are: the ability to imagine and represent beauty, to capture the energy of creation, to make things bloom. But it takes patience and care for these things to happen. All we need is to prepare, cultivate, and wait. Nothing can force anything to flower if it has not reached its due time.
Garcia reminds us, through the works “Rainy Days,” “Sleepless Nights,” and “Storm,” that God’s time doesn’t always happen in perfect weather, when the conditions are ideal. While renewal and flourishing may be signified by the coming dawn, such as in the work “Joy Comes in the Morning,” perhaps we are being prepared to blossom in the depths of the night, when we are alone and no one is watching. Perhaps the devastating rain is what has cleared the path for us to continue our journey, as represented by the title piece.
In Due Time is a moment in Garcia’s own journey, his own exploration of the questions we have continued to ask as part of the human race. These paintings are not answers but pieces of revelation that Garcia has found along the way, which he offers us an encouragement that something marvelous awaits.
- Carlomar Arcangel Daoana
Joy Comes in The Morning. 72x96 inches, oil on canvas - 2022
In Due Time. 60x60 inches, oil on canvas - 2022
Sleepless Nights. 60x60 inches, oil on canvas - 2022
Heart of a Painter. 60x60 inches, oil on canvas - 2022
Familiar Place. 60x60 inches, oil on canvas - 2022
Rainy Days. 60x60 inches, oil on canvas - 2022
Storm. 60x60 inches, oil on canvas - 2022
