Category: Society

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A thought about Tyranutopias

I am listening to Huxley’s Brave New World while painting this afternoon and was compelled to stop and comment on dystopic visions. I for one often project hopes and mental constructions of utopia, a place where there is little dissention and disorder, rampant happiness and freedom of consciousness. But in all of mysterious ponderings of how any of these possibly positive evolutions of human existence I have to remember the variable that makes it so difficult, what also renders any tyranny based utopias inherently and perpetually disastrous, is that humans need free will. We need options, choices, and cannot, ultimately, be forced by other people into anything. Any attempt to indoctrinate through mandates and absolutes, without the consideration of each and every individual consciousness, even if benevolently intended and practiced, is counterintuitive to the nature of consciousness itself.

However, it does not mean that we are helpless to enact large social change aimed towards individual growth and social harmony together. Peaceful influence, patience, understanding, forgiveness. If humanity is meant to flourish beyond the tyrannies that keep a tiny percent clinging for dear life to hoarding the world’s resources, we need to do so be encouraging as much good behavior and lifestyle choices as possible, and by treating those who could be perceived as our enemies with love. If we use tyranny and violence against the tyrannical and violent we are not changing anything, we are just continuing the cycle which has damned the human legacy.

We can envision a distant utopia where children are raised collectively and indoctrinated with codes and mores but in a way that fosters each child’s connection to consciousness. To make a direct reference to Brave New World, instead of playing hateful and suggestive stimuli to children while they sleep, why not discover the stimuli which most positively and un-invasively stimulates their sleep and dreams? Maybe the evolution and even assimilation of people into a harmonized symbiotic organism comes from a greater connection to the subconscious and dream realms.

Maybe, instead of worrying about classes and segregation, we can give all children a collective chance and nurture each of them in to their best selves while they develop.  I believe in Utopia, but I also believe it as an aspiration, a lifestyle. The ends do not justify the means, they are the means. Freedom via murder is murder. Freedom via freedom is freedom. Ok, enough of this for now. Thanks, Aldus…

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A Call to Abstraction – prelude

Leave preconceived ideas at home and explore color and form for what it does to the mind and body! Having recently conducted some workshops and a demo on automatism, layering, and abstraction, I am invigorated in the call towards are greater public understanding and celebration of the mental rocket fuel that is the Art of pure color and form.

Color and form speak to us in a way that language cannot, that  any image or idea that relates directly to an object cannot. Even when one paints a landscape, or a cow, one abstracts the essence or image of the cow in the form of a painted picture. Take the image away, and you do not lose the power that color and form have over our minds, our imagination, our sense of harmony.

We do not ask all of our music to narrate a highly literal theme, we celebrate the flow and rhythm of the notes and harmonies and sound combinations for their own sake, for how they make us feel or see. Listening to an opera in a foreign language does not diminish the beauty and power of the composition beyond the narrative. If anything, it brings a focus to the magic of the music, its subtle and bold powers, without the distraction of analyzing words or forming a literal theme. As a species, we are better off to incorporate this idea more ravenously into are larger social consciousness, particular when it comes to painting.

One important social implication of abstract painting, and the automatist, build as you go approach to composition, can be illustrated with the public mural. If one paints a mural from a narrative and personalized perspective one inherently stands to alienate at least some of the public who may not identify with or approve of the narrative. Sometimes, this is important, because some public Art is meant to incite an outcry towards perceived injustice, or questions our destructive environmental and consumption choices, which is meant to upset the current systems of the social order. But not only is it important that we have a greater rise in Art designed to unite and harmonize the positive potentials of our social consciousness, but to voice these in a universal language.

One language that almost all people are fluent in is color and form, which is to say, that whether or not you get or agree with a narrative or subject based public mural, one can be overtly and subconsciously moved by the color relationships and compositions integrity of the pieces as a whole. Take away the elements of narrative or representation that can hinder the full immersion in this other universal language, and you have a public spectacle with the potential to move and reach all viewers on a deeper level.

There is another, very important public implication in the move towards abstraction, and that is the collective, evolving mural. If a person paints a mural of a particular subject matter, in a particular representational technique, it serves as a period, a stop sign, to any other interaction with that surface. If I came behind a portrait painter and added a number of circles, however compositionally sound, it would be abhorred by and large as vandalism. But if the painting was a flowing abstraction, I could add another layer too it, within respect to the original composition, and not only supplement the painting itself but bring another level of community into the realm of public Art. And this process can go on, it can be celebrated and nourished, and would inevitably include the efforts a lot more painters of different crafts and strengths. Take the ego out of tagging; replace names and words without content into a celebration of the colors, the forms, the integration of harmony. Create a canvas that invites communion and creation rather than alienation and vandalism.

There are other important elements to the social and conscious evolution of abstraction. I will be revisiting this theme often in the future as I construct this series, A Call to Abstraction!

 

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Insect Friends

I have a half dozen or so medium-sized ants living in my studio kitchenette area. I never see much more than that many at a time. One or two are regularly there. I can’t say that I have watched or analyze their patterns, but I do notice some of the places they like to go especially the sink. It makes me think that they might be water gatherers. If they are anything like honey bees, they would be older members of the colony. I don’t know if there are any rogue ants, just hanging out and getting by. I don’t leave much food out if any but tea and spirits. They come around, check things out, hang in the sink, and seem to get out of the way when I turn the faucet on. I haven’t killed any of them. I see no reason why.

A few years ago, during my first experience in the summer of St. Paul Island Alaska, I had an awakening regarding our insect relatives which we are bound to in life like it or not. There are lots and lots of flies on St. Paul Island in the summer, and there are a handful of different kinds, at least at first glance. They seem to have slightly different characteristics and personalities, perhaps not unlike the flies here in the lower 48 but with seemingly pronounced features. The bigger flies are especially docile and sluggish; the little ones are especially jittery. But they’re all friendly, they seem to have a very different relationship with our species. I began to really appreciate the flies that came into my room. One night, I left the window open and forgot about it and the next day there were a fair few friend flies. I ushered many of them out of the room for their own benefit. I still lived with some, they didn’t get in my way, they didn’t bother me, their buzzing became almost hypnotic and therapeutic.

I’ve really started appreciating the wonderful mechanism of this life force. Of this this species and subspecies, this set of life beings that have existed for millions and millions of years and continue to find ways to flourish on all corners of the planet. I was very affected by the idea of how nonchalant we as humans are about killing these creatures. We set traps, we dedicate a fair amount of attention to their murder and destruction. They keep coming back, they never seem to be very affected by our attempts to eradicate them from our immediate existence. When I didn’t have the window open, while there were a flyer to that were in the room, there was never hundreds. The ants that I enjoy in my studio now, it’s been months and there have not been hundreds, there haven’t even been dozens. There can be a balance there; I respect them, they don’t get in my way and I can appreciate them enough to not allow just the fact that they’re alive and trying to stay alive to negatively affect my life, to raise a call to arms against a fellow living being.

It has been four years since I have wantonly killed the fly. Not sure about ants but surely I haven’t wantonly killed anything in months. Maybe longer. There may be mosquitoes or whatnot not but the truth is, I would rather be conscious and try to let things live. I don’t want to get bitten by mosquitoes, they have exhibited some risk of carrying illnesses that could be damaging and deadly. We don’t know if they carry stuff that actually is helpful or beneficial to us and I don’t think we’ve studied it in that way, we may benefit from that.

I don’t know if we took steps towards less killing of insects if they would find a balance and equilibrium with us like they seem to in my rooms in Alaska and my studio here, even in our house. It’s rational to think that there could be a catastrophic boom in life that ends up being quite a significant hindrance to our own existence at least as we know it. That’s not necessarily a fact. Insects have coexisted with other life not as the dominant form but as the persistent workhorses of nature for hundreds of millions of years. It is no small amount of power, of energy, of life force inherent in the creatures we encounter today. Who’s to say that there isn’t a greater consciousness guiding them through their own generations of life?

I have no doubt that this is interwoven with my approach to painting in its interconnected layers and trying to make everything even annoyances work. There are bugs in my paintings. There are literally insects sometimes that fly into them, sorry guys. But there are pieces of dirt and little things that fly around, specks and this and that that get in there and get in the way and become nuisances and there’s that similarity, but even those in the paintings I will use or allow in and work with its as elements of the painting universe. There is a similar approach. I do not allow them to dismantle my compositional discourse or my life as an Artist. Now if only interacting with all people were as fundamentally simple as interacting with insects.

There is always hope for all of us to see places in our lives where we can take steps towards a greater global harmony and take those steps one at a time. I love the relationship that I have developed with insects. I love saving spiders, though I don’t like scaring them. I’m trying to learn how to deal with that when trying to get them outside. I rather enjoy occasionally herding  flies, ushering them out of the room, and I a skill that I think I might be apt to develop more. In these acts of acknowledgment of life within these other beings I think we can develop a much stronger connection to each other. It may help build  a greater empathy not only to individual suffering but to our collective cause as a conscious life force and a species with the responsibility of planetary custodianship.

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Art and Field Theory

A few thoughts on how color from an Artists perspective relates to color from a Scientists’ perspective. I have been listening to various lectures on quantum physics recently. I have been working to use some of its mechanics to explain how color on a canvas interacts with other colors on the canvas. I was intrigued to learn that they use a chromatic metaphor to describe the interaction of quarks within a proton or neutron, using the idea that within the way we perceive physical interactions would make quark interactions impossible unless they acted like colored lights do , red green and blue, to essentially cancel each other out and make white light.

So basically, I think, even at the subatomic level quarks form larger particles because of a principle of color mixing. I am no scientist, but the bare bones idea indicates to me as an Artist that there are greater implications yet to the world of color and color interactions, even on subatomic and infinitesimal levels, and we only chip the iceberg when we look at the obvious or surface interactions of color and form.

Another avenue of intrigue that came from the basics of field theory came from explaining existence as a liquid like fiend in which ripples sometimes merge to form particles which merge to form atoms which merge to form everything, all fluid parts of a rippling reality. Or something like that. Beyond the spiritual or metaphysical reflection on this principle, what it means as a way to explain color mixing could change how artists look at color and form by.

Let’s take a white canvas and call it the known universe, a field of reality in which all other realities exist. And then there is a ripple, the form of your making a mark on the canvas, and know the filed has globbed up a little and formed a particle. That particle is now the lone glob on an otherwise seemingly ripple-less universe, or is it? I contend that the red glob, interacting within its own field of existence with the field of the canvas, is generating other globs, fields of color, which our eye picks up on even if we have not physically added more color fields.

When you see a red blob on a white canvas, you are seeing an interaction of fields that generates energy, and that energy is interpreted by the eyes as optical color vibrations. You see pinks, basically. And where that red blob is placed on the canvas matters, the gravity of the white universe changes in our perception of it as the glob or globs move around within it. While we are well aware of how color reacts optically and changes with composition. seeing color interactions as real things, physical fields of space, can alter and broaden our explorations of  Art.

This is essentially the basis of composition, I think. And the more you add, the next stroke of blue, for example, the more the fields interact creating exponentially more fields taken in by the observing consciousness. We sense some of these fields as emotions, and within the interaction of these fields is the reason color and Art move us so. If we then continue to layer, and add fields, the universe begins to ripple with a life that is ripe for the possibilities of “intelligent design” and I believe that it is within composing these ever increasing field interactions beyond the surface of a preconceived idea or image, we can find new dimension in which to interact within this expanding universe. This does not happen at the expense of representation, it can be used to evolve representation. The colors covered by other colors are still interacting in the field of existence and do so even as they are used to garner the larger scope of the composition.

The idea of fields and quantum physics serves to highlight the constants we know about Art, the power of interacting colors and forms. By expanding our scope of color interactions themselves with further depth than our predecessors, we can contribute to the greater cause of Art the way quantum physics does to the greater cause of Science.

 

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New History

Yesterday I learned something that has a direct impact on the construction of Art History. Watching a documentary on abstract Art, I was introduced to the name Hilma Af Klint, a women from Sweden who was Theosophist born in 1862. By 1907, she was painting abstracted shapes and forms that she claimed were diagrams of the spiritual realities she discovered through her theosophical search. Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon was finished in 1907, which is considered a representational segue into the birth of abstraction. Her work, while not in the Artistic tradition of those history has come to consider great painters, predates the pure abstractions of Kandinsky, the accepted founder of abstract Art. And yet I never studied her, not even a mention, in my years as an active student of painting.

In the show I watched, the narrator highlighted her disconnect to the greater Artistic world as her works were the spiritual searches of a mystic and not the compositional searches of an Artist, but that dismissal of the Artistic importance of her work seems stiflingly academic. As Giordano Bruno, a monk, should be studied in association with space travel, so should Klint be studied in the development of the Avant Gard. Her greater spiritual awakenings foretold the development of Art away from the image or physical representation, as Bruno’s spiritual awakenings opened up a larger universe for the discoveries of science. And certainly, she channels the medieval Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, another under-celebrated clairvoyant spiritual Artist.

I still know little about Hilma Klint. She is said to have written over 150 journals describing her spiritual quest. The one early, naturalistic painting shows Artistic sense, talent, and some degree of education. Her work is very geometric, balanced and evocative. It speaks of concepts beyond words yet they are diagrams of real ideas. I don’t know if she was known to the Artists who opened the flood gates of abstraction; there are a great deal of similarities in some of what I have seen to the works of Paul Klee twenty years later. Often discoveries are made simultaneously but geographically and philosophically independent of each other.

I am not sure why she is less known, even to Artists, than she is. There was more distinctions between endeavors in her day, perhaps, to say that as her focus was on Theosophy and therefore her contributions to Art are sequestered under that guise. There is precedent for using symbols and arrangements of forms to represent ideas or graph concepts (the Venn diagram, the color wheel, the Chakras) and coupled with the newness of abstraction as an idea relative to Art, not to mention ever festering misogyny, it may not be surprising after all that this explorer has gone under the radar.

I am grateful not only to have learned of a person from our past that might enhance our future, but for the chance to be humbled by the ever changing realities of history. Facts are fleeting. Even the laws of physics get changed and modified as we continue to grow and learn. I hope there are other Artists that pop up which challenge our view of history and how Art evolved. We need to be humbled in order to grow together.

 

 

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Sharing Abstraction

4/29/18 – This evening, I get to teach a painting workshop about abstract Art. I must say I am very excited about this class. I have never taught a workshop that is centered around abstraction and a desire to learn more about that specific focus in Art. I feel like I have been preparing for this class for 20 years or so. Of all the different subjects I have taught, this might be the most important.

I allege that we as a culture have not yet come to terms with abstraction and the power it wields. We are still, largely, tied to the representative image in our main vocabulary or understanding of painting. We have made strides of the century, but there is still so much to be learned about Art through the application of abstraction.

I attest that abstraction engages another part of the brain that representational recognition does not. It engages the eyes, heart, mind, emotions, and all of the other things that are affected by Art with the language of cognition. To understand abstraction is to understand a universe beyond our own ideas.

In addition to sharing this class and my ideas on the subject with others, I am grateful for this opportunity to better articulate and understand my own relationship with abstraction. I appreciate the opportunities to grow that are offered by teaching…

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Divisiveness

4/4/18

I am deeply concerned about the divisiveness of our current culture. Whether it be NRA members ridiculing adolescent tragedy survivors or progressives calling people “ignorant assholes” for daring to explore the concept of a spirit animal, this “my way or the highway” attitude of social communion causes subconscious walls to be built up against understanding and harmony as well as begs the question of who has the absolute authority to dictate anything.   Why do sides need to be formed in order to spread understanding, isn’t that counter-intuitive? No one has all the answers, and no one person ever will. If we are going to save the planet and the human spirit from disease and destruction we need to learn how not to insult and hate on each other, especially when we feel at odds.

I look at painting and I see answers to our problems. i see entities of all different colors shapes and sizes working together. I see subtle support strokes and dramatic scene dominating marks both find their communal place in the balance of harmony. I see cooperation and intrigue, simultaneous oneness and celebration of the singularity. I see even marks and colors that are no longer visible to the naked eye serve their place as foundations of the visible composition. I see the living and the remembered in unison in the universe. And throughout the painting process and its subsequent energy radiates love. We can learn so much about how to better come together as people through the evolution of Art…

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Art Sphere, part one

I have come to view Art as an ever radiating sphere, somehow uniting everyone in some way as Art effects everyone in some way. But that does not mean that all Art has the same gravity. Painting, as far as we know, came first, as has a distinct magic that exists in its explorations and evolutions to this day. With the break from narrative and objectivity that happened in the early part of the 20th century, painting’s potential for the discovery of yet unknown realities grew exponentially.

At its core, Art is a quest down the rabbit whole of Reality to better understand existence, the opposite side of the coin to science perhaps. Art as narrative, as illustration, as expression, all come from that, and have varying gravities connected to their relevance to that core search. The works of Michelangelo have more gravity, more power in the truth of their creation than say a superhero comic, not because of the subjective way we might relate to these respective Arts but because of the breakthroughs in achievement and understanding generated by the work itself despite its meaning, representation, or narrative. That said, more people in the world know the name and stories of Batman, or Superman, or even Bart Simpson, than Michelangelo. Societal or cultural impact does not in and of itself represent the gravity of Artwork. Ask Van Gogh, whose works had no impact at all in his own time. Now, you can’t even walk into a dentist’s office without seeing a print of Sunflowers or Starry Night (I have a problem with Art prints, as they detract from the singularity of the painting/painter relationship, but that is another subject.)

The sphere of Art inherently unites the subjective and the objective in their respective places, in order that Art may maintain its deep core power and still speak in some way to everyone.