Excerpts from Paper Four

Blessedly the Friday night angst is over and writing won. It seems I have picked up on an ancient conflict between the one who paints and the one who writes in China. The best of both is found in the genius scholar-painter archetype.

Writer's who could write about art but did not paint well were considered "at home with theories but at sea with the brush". And painters who could paint well but not write were considered "uncultured"...Ouch! Quite the insult! The solution is to tactfully ignore the conflict. Easier to do if you can paint equally as well as write.

This paper is my favorite so far and I have relied heavily on excellent writers (see reading list). An except from Taoism and Ink Brush Painting reads:

Direct Perception
The intention of the painter is to create an interpenetration and mutual influence of scenery and feeling. The feeling is the scene and looking at the scene leads one to experience direct perception. Direct perceptions are thoughts uncolored by dogma, belief systems and philosophy, even Taoist philosophy. Landscape painting is not considered an intellectual, technical or formal challenge and does not require metaphor or symbolic interpretation. When the mind perceives and experiences nature directly selfishness and emotional preoccupation fall away. A painting provides the viewer with inherent meaning that is obvious and immediate. Inner feelings are not explicit (or exploited), but extend throughout the painting to create a general mood. As the viewer makes a personal interpretation by bringing their feelings to the painting, the mood of the painting takes on personal qualities allowing the painting to carry depth of meaning for each viewer. This is why ink brush painting has a universal appeal.

In the October 2006 issue of Discover Magazine an article written by Kathryn Garfield discussed Vincent van Gogh’s famous spiral brush strokes and his ability to render natural forms that closely match the famous Kolmogorov statistical model of turbulence in fluid dynamics. "The problem of turbulence is considered the last unsolved mystery in classical physics". This article raised the question; did Van Gogh’s psychotic mind allow him to perceive existing natural patterns that are generally unseen? A scientific study found bumblebees that had never encountered real flowers favored Van Gogh’s Sunflowers over the floral works of other well-known artists. "Van Gogh owned a large collection of Japanese prints and was deeply influenced, by implication Zen Buddhist views of nature". Van Gogh painted visionary landscapes with the principles of Yin and Yang related to the conjoining of sun and moon, clouds and swirls in “Starry Night.” Heightened perception is a prerequisite for intuiting nature, being crazy is not.

Read more

Indirect Painting

Frankly, everybody I'm in freak out mode. I've been so straight out working I haven't been able to make time to connect or contribute to my fellow scholars on Flickr.

There is making art or production, writing about art and teaching about art. These are all separate activities, people! Hello! They each require separate skills. How can one do them all well? Seems to me, somethings got to give.

I know, I know I've whined about this before, but I'm stressed out. I like to write about art and talk about art and teach art. These activities take my attention off production. Production is the key to it all...AGH! No, must produce, must paint, must push through the desire to rest and regroup. I want to paint and gain expertise in the indirect oil painting style that I was luckily enough to see a demonstration of. A new door of knowledge opens, and I have to do laundry and...

I have another paper due next week; a fantastic topic, too Taosim and Ink brush painting.... What to do? Stop world, I want all the "have to's" to stop. It's going to be a rough Friday night...Help!

Ink Brush Painting

I have been doing small ink brush paintings every day since the beginning of this residency. I took digital photos of some of the paintings. I put them into a Quicktime movie. I was surprised by the results. Posting this movie on the web doesn't show a lot of the paintings textures. But it's meditative and the music called Summer's Almost Gone, (which it is) by George Winston. Let me know what you think.

Excerpt from second paper

I'm not going to post to the whole paper but thought I'd give you some highlights. The book is called The Reenchantment of Art, by Suzi Gablik.

I like Gablik, she's a succinct and articulate writer. I've found it much harder to write on what I agree with than what I disagree with; here's a snippet of those five pages.

The Role of Art
“The source of creativity in society is the person”, says Gablik. She deftly reminds us of our authority. Art does have power to access and move forward new values and beliefs. “We have the power. The truth is, only we have the power to transform our situation; there is no one else.” I would add to this, all of our power lies is in the present moment. It is this moment where our power to change, is accessed. The action of change can only be through the present moment.

The late modernist premise states art has no useful, purposeful or meaningful role. It is disavowed of all responsibilities which effectively neutralizes value art has to offer. Art immersed in disconnected sensations difusses the power of art into a downward spiral of depair, apathy and self indulence. This western nihlistic attitute toward art and life in general is inevitable, if one believes in the postmodern ideals.

In purposeless detachment defined in Zen in the Art of Archery, purposeless serves the individual as it facilitates the experience of the illusion, of a separate ego or self. The illusion of a separate self dissolves and a knowing of interconnectedness is experienced. Meaninglessness and purposelessness transcends to become meaningful and purposeful.

In one instance purposelessness is destructive and in another, creative. Art has a dualistic nature as process and product. Processes are neither useful nor useless, they simply are. The product of art is where we assign art its value.

Is it easier to say that art is useless rather than define its purpose? Does it come down to a subjective experience justified by an assortment of philosophy? What is art? Is it a vehicle for biocentric ecology, social justice, or aesthetic personal experience? Maybe it is easier to define what art is not.

When I was a child, it was my habit to go off into the woods and “play”. I remember going out to a small stream that had garbage in it. I spent time hauling away old tires, cans and broken bottles from the stream. I couldn’t clean it all out and didn’t know where to put the garbage I took from the stream. It had to come out and it was all right to be able to just clean out a section of it. I remember feeling like it was my stream and I wanted to see it without garbage in it. I remember organizing neighborhood kids to help. No one told me to do this nor was it written up in the New York Times Art section. The garbage offended my sense of aesthetics and moral values I had developed as an eight years old. Gablik suggests that cleaning out a riverbed is art. I disagree; I was cleaning up a mess, not making art.

Is a clean river beautiful? Yes, but the river turns back into its original state, and does not add to, or move forward knowledge of ourselves or the river.
Read more

Richard Serra at the MoMa

Looking at Serra's work from the second floor of the MoMa was very different than being in the actual space the sculpture occupied. The massive walls of the piece, created simple minimalist curving flowing lines, that from above I found pleasant, calming almost meditative.

All that changed drastically when I went downstairs to experience the space of the sculpture. My first reaction was, Good God! I hope those steel thick walls don't fall on me! I could feel the crushing weight of the material just by looking at it. I felt liquid and insignificant just being so near those walls. They were so solid and the shear amount of mass was incredibly intimidating. I felt so distinctly small and vulnerable as I walked around the work. I tried to keep my distance; it was increasingly distressing where the walls sloped outward from the center of the piece as they created overhangs that you had to walk under. The exterior walls were not as intimidating when the walls sloped in on themselves, they provided some relief from the anxiety of the overhangs.

The patina of the steel walls was a simple matte red brown rust that varied subtly on the surface. I was more comfortable with the smaller interior bowls of space the massive walls created. Groups of 10 to 12 people wandered in and out of those enclosed spaces. Inside felt like containment with one entrance functioning also as the exit.

To Sell or Not to Sell?

"Sea Glass" and "Across the Species" (see blog sidebar) were accepted into a small juried show. The question put before me was, did I want to sell my work? Well, yeah... don't we all need to generate revenue?

The next question then is, how much do you sell your work for? How do you price YOUR work? Do you consider the amount of time spent on a piece? Do you factor in materials and framing? What about perceived aesthetic value or the socio-economic ability of those who attend the show? Oh, man this is a big can of worms!

I have to come up with a dollar amount before I drop off the work. I'm curious how other artists deal with this. What's fair, what works?

Trip to NYC

One of the hottest, muggiest days in August, and I was standing in the bowels of the Manhattan subway, waiting. My throat burned from the acidic air and sweat and anxiety dripped from me, as waves of people went about their business. Hordes of people, but I felt alone. Ok, ok... suffice to say, NYC for me is nothing like Sarah Jessica Parker's; if this is city living, I'm a country gal.

I met fellow graduate student John Chang and Ebenezer Singh at the MoMA. It was great to finally connect with familiar faces. John introduced me to Gaetano La Roche an artist friend of John's who also met us at the museum. John was tired after a very long flight from LA but in great spirits and Ebenezer was dancing with excitement, too.

The MoMA was cool, spacious and completely packed as any Saturday afternoon at a major NY museum would be in a heat wave. Gaetano was having an exhibition at the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin on 145 West 46th Street on Sunday and Nancy McTague Stock, another fellow grad student and I were invited to attend. More about MoMA and the Richard Serra exhibit in a future post.

Why go to all this trouble? It was an energetic shot in the arm I needed after two months away from residency and a trying summer.

We left the MoMA in a taxi with artist Long Bin Chen and headed for his studio in Tribeca. Nancy McTague Stock met us there with her lovely daughter and we all headed to Chinatown for dinner. It was fun to eat, drink and talk about art. It is energizing to be with artists serious about their work and made me miss all you AIB'er even more.

I stayed at the Integral Yoga Institute which is downtown and a quiet oasis in a noisy city. On Sunday I headed to Time Square to meet John and go to Gaetano's exhibit.

Next post, I'll talk more about the work I saw. Cheers all!