9-23-2021
Statement
"...a good poem leaves one feeling more human".
- overheard
“In Art emotions are the meaning” -Henry James
--- and so with a good painting, I feel.
In the space and time between us, you’ll grow beyond me. I will not have you, but you will have me.
Like you, I’ve put my life together from pieces, shreds really. What art happened for me, withstanding all the predictable diminishments along the way? Just this— feeling-driven, idea-layered paintings in oil & cold wax media, followed by sculpture in select found materials, presenting landscape- inscape —& architecture-inflected— images and objects in a broad, graphic, textured palette, in a full range of colors and dimensions -- reflecting a personally optimistic -though scarcely ‘provable’ image-language sensitivity regarding the innerworldspace.
I say -and it’s no surprise to many - that painting is a language and brush marks appear as verbs. But I live inside a contradiction: I paint, I talk, I write. But these modalities from greatly contrasting sources of consciousness are not the same, not equal, but equally important. And connected by silk-worm holes.
Throughout, insights and ideas take the form of verbs i.e. marks, shapes, colors, and arrangements structured to seem inevitable. Language, music and architecture, healing & self-unity -however inexplicably conjoined… are the origins of the effort. The endpoint of this work (--where my choices and errors have come to appear fateful ) —is to give away the world in me, a contribution to the shared world, OUR shared world, one that prompts us by its fearful mystery, reason, pleasure, and brevity -to live in it ever more seriously.
Image-language sensitivity? Another wooly theory about art-making? This dubio-presumptuous notion is what enables my re-thinking of setbacks & cultural challenges cascading around. me. Further, I'd call my activity art-enabled-reassessments of chaos, spontaneity, and the ever-elusive possibility of inward illumination in the face of the circumstantial dithering & nihilism of the present.
In the end — what is most valuable in art is what can not be explained. And yet I say art exists to reveal what is deeper in us —makers and seers alike transformed by this: the exuberant WORLD-MAKING IMAGINATION by which our souls (all in one world together- where we may flourish.. or without our collective imagination made manifest.. we’ll not realize sustaining possibilities, we’ll perish, canaries-in-our private coal mines, and in our public/collective coal mine, so very done, our little chance in all of eternity wasted.
Backing up from that ledge I savor a few things. Of fascination is the mysterious way that two and three-dimensional shapes beget distinct, often intense emotional responses connected to a range of creaturely and/or transcendental ways of living -in fear and/or sublimity. In my WorkLife, painting is a shape-making language, where advanced and primitive forces meet in diplomacy & battle. Shape-making that SPEAKS is hard labor: introverted, ruminative. Yet invitational, of specific alertness which yields world-reckoning intimacy moment to moment.
Alert, I stop-frame life as found in a promise, or as grieved in a wolf-howl of anxiety, shaped by fulminating fierce labor, images held aloft in a piece of dark music faintly from a tower of longing while…while achieving what? …perhaps just a cobbling-together of a serviceable illustrated story to live by, as the waters rise. To do this I’ve imbued a few available materials with personal meanings, to see whatever might happen in way of enhanced survival.
Too simple? Perhaps.
You also can make your own meaning by not habitually ignoring the simple primitive resources staring back at you. Within you -at once- there is a maker (a nervous imagination to be reckoned with); you are the scene, the subject, the story, the discerning reader, the suspicious innocent listener ( hearing in your moments) plausible affinities (ear-of-the-eye) opening up some vital realm. You conjure eros, feeling the 'evidence' of a vast though private, deeper life in you: it is the consummate life erotic -where reason & pleasure stand together in courage, dry-eyed in the face of mortality. It’s what we do with what we have. Yin-yang, joy & pain. At once.
How does a painting emerge? -It slyly unfolds, for the maker and viewer alike. Mental and emotional dithering fades; visual conversation gains credence; logical (internal) debate aggregates hard nuggets concerning craft and ‘conveyance’, retinal arguments (regarding pleasure v. intellectual ‘discipline’) are hammered out on the anvil of self-honesty. Nuanced body-mind patterns and affinities are honored ...and then are decisively elected, that is… enacted in paint. Previous thresholds of aesthetic insight & emotional courage are surpassed. Thrumming alienation is temporarily quelled. Resulting nourishment and rest allow further gestation to burble and murmur into consciousness that precedes new work.
Throughout, insights and ideas take the form of verbs i.e. marks, shapes, colors, and arrangements structured to seem inevitable. Language, music and architecture, healing & self-unity -however inexplicably conjoined… are the origins of the effort. The endpoint of this work (--where my choices and errors have come to appear fateful ) —is to give away the world in me, a contribution to the shared world, OUR shared world, one that prompts us by its fearful mystery, reason, pleasure, and brevity -to live in it ever more seriously.
From a practice, aware enough to avoid predictable isolation, an iconography has come about; architectural thought figurations in two and three dimensions, a personal aesthetic of attention & intention.
Pulling together compelling elements of a complex structural presence, these GEO figurations undergird what? I say open strength and endurance. However, this has final standing: Art brings fleeting consolation, never a remedy. Any amount of knowledge stares out at the ghastly glory of a night sky; wisdom is burned at the edge that overlooks the unspeakable..
By way of strangely beautiful color, decisive internal density, scale & proportion, these images illuminate a wayward yet determined ArtLife engagement. Well beyond the unavoidable doubt & ambiguity that lends frisson to the graphic & spatial fields of each painting, this art is about a collaborative meaning-creation relationship with a committed viewer -- a non-churchy call & response relationship.
Find here -when taken together hard-won optimism & contribution., an ImagelanguageWorld darkly layered & conjoined, that invites a gathered-self to become noticeable -outwardly & inwardly -in fleeting moments of fragile if exhilarating self-understanding.
***