Earlier this week, the art world observed the birthday of the artist Domenikos Theotokopoulos, otherwise known as El Greco ("the Greek").  El Greco painted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, standing on the edge of the early modern and modern world.  HIs paintings reflect this liminality.  They feature curiously shaped people, fantastical imagery, and unusual colors, blending, it seems, Eastern and Western religion and artistic styles, styles that would emerge in other forms in later centuries as, among others, the Cubism of Pablo Picasso.
     Many years ago, I took in an exhibit of El Greco at the Art Institute in Chicago.  I found it fascinating.  Quite apart from the religious imagery which I, of course, appreciated, I saw inklings of an immensely innovative and creative spirit, a spirit that, in the best traditions of modern art, spoke of transcendence in material terms.  The paintings I saw expressed a powerful awareness of the supernatural, transforming earthly sensibilities into metaphysical longing, even while they contained enough intimations of the chimerical present to keep us thinking.
     As it should:  we tread daily on the cusp of what we cannot see, but that which we sense, in a variety of ways, must be there.