James Lee Hansen gave this eulogy for his dear friend and collaborator, Don Sorensen, at his funeral services in 1994. Those words still ring true today, and continue to reflect Jim’s philosophy of his life.
To My Friend, Don Sorensen, Painter.
It is difficult when an artist friend dies, not to speculate what more they might have done. Don Sorensen was a painter who worked all his life in the sanctuary of his studio, away from the commercial validations of annual public exhibitions. That aspect, for him, might have interfered with his particular private vision. His work however continually found its way into discriminating collections. But in the spirit of all the solitary artists of the past, long before the frenzy and the requisite hype of our exhibitionist culture, we observed that a painter paints for a private vision; its only and incidental and retrospective observation by the subsequent culture that awakens us to the art maybe more intentional and purposeful perhaps, but certainly subject to some irritation along the way. It is that abrasive rub of consciousness between the spirit and mundane realities that gives artists their cause. There exists an ephemeral strata, a fragile thin domain, between the temporal and divine, a wonderland of the spirit, where the artist’s vision manifests the substantive imperatives and like that great friction that grinds earth to molten heat and forms the gems and metals of our earth, so too the rub of life between spirit and substance gives us the fires of creativity. Artists, like my friend Don Sorensen, are likewise conveyed, through such an abrasive course in their lives. But what we see in the end are the works that artists leave behind which gives testament to the hope that there is a beauty and spirit beyond the flesh of our mortal being, beyond the panoply of disappointments and regrets, beyond unrequited love and ambition.
Their works are the tracks of their dreams on the pathways of their lives. Don Sorensen left such tracks on his life passage, each painting was a foot step on his path, each track a visual invocation. His rich sense of color and lines are alive with the vitality of this quest for an expression that would try to transcend mundane realities. It brings to mind an old common prayer, which I will paraphrase: Give us this day our daily hope and forgive those who will not see the beauty that exists amongst us, for surely this is the spirit and glory forever and ever. I am sure Don would rather have made a self depreciating joke about it all but he’s not writing this, I am. So we might envision as time passes, a pathway full of his tracks to enrich our spirit as we pass by in our turn.
We build cultural structures to the material evidence of that ephemeral spirit we call, Art, and we pay it just homage, but it is much more than canvas and paint, it is much more than stone and metal images, much much more that the collective icons of art history. It is what transcends our mortal existence as our poor prayers probed into the why of it all.
Don, as with other artists of the past, has with consistent and quiet resolve left us with his legacy of visual songs that give us his colorful canvases that shine after his smiling eyes have lost their light and illuminate for us no more.
– J.L. Hansen
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