“Moon Rise, Sunset”
oil on canvas, 18″ x 24″

This new painting is developing from this drawing based on a perspective view in Howard Chapelle’s American Fishing Schooners.

“Schooner, ‘We’re Here!’” Graphite, charcoal on paper

It’s still in early stages, but I’m excited at the way the light and sea are shaping up.

And here are three paintings that have been taken further.

“Backing Around to the North,”
18″ x 24″ oil on canvas

“Raising the Fisherman”
24″ x 24″ oil on canvas

“East Harbor”
30″ x 24″ oil on canvas

These can all be found on the Marine Paintings page.

“Mattakeesett, Indian Header,” oil on canvas, 18″ x 24″

This painting has gone through a long development. It began with this drawing done after a period photograph of this schooner taken in 1905.

“Mattakeesett, Indian Header,” Graphite, charcoal stick and chalk on paper, 9.5″ x 12.5″

This provided particulars of the schooner and its rig and a general sense of a location and time of day and weather conditions, but that is a long way from a realized oil painting!

The entire process can be followed in this post. In brief, what needed to happen once the boat was established was to create a world around it with air and light, wind and water.

Amaryllis, Afternoon

Water Jug, Shells & Jawbone

Carnations, Pears & Peppers

Miniature Daffodils, Conch & Pitcher

White Lilacs

Filed under: News, Painting, Still Life, Watercolor Tagged: Amaryllis, art, Carnations, Daffodils, Flowers, miniature daffodils, oil painting, Pears, Still Life, Watercolor, White Lilac ]]> https://antoniodiasart.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/recent-still-lives/feed/ 1 Amaryllis. Afternoon antoniodias Amaryllis, Afternoon Water Jug, Shells & Jawbone Carnations, Pears & Peppers Miniature Daffodills, Conch & Pitcher White Lilacs https://antoniodiasart.wordpress.com/2013/05/04/signs-extended-metaphor-painting/ https://antoniodiasart.wordpress.com/2013/05/04/signs-extended-metaphor-painting/#comments Sat, 04 May 2013 16:00:01 +0000 Antonio Dias http://antoniodiasart.wordpress.com/?p=1394 ]]>

Signs pull apart the totality of perception. Tearing holes in the field of relationships. Stopping the eye and the mind. Forcing a precipitation of some part held in opposition.

This post is illustrated by a series of images of my work from various “genres” and across the span of three decades. This essay begins to explore why these are one body of work and not merely an eclectic mash-up of “styles.” And not just this work, but all visual expression, is within a single unified realm of perception and action.

“Branded,” oil on panel

“Penetration,” oil on canvas with attached wood, metal and spun Fiberglass

“Ella,” oil on canvas with attached wood

The signs referred to in the opening passage, as they are found in painting, are marks representing concepts. They are read as stand-ins for what they signify. They correspond to the word in language. Both represent logos. If they predominate in a work of Art they tear at the fabric of totality and push us into linear thinking and reactions to what we project upon the work as against what is there to be seen. This is the realm of ideology. Where what is perceived is taken as imperfect stand-ins for some ideal. A perfect abstraction lying out there, somewhere else. This maintains expectation and anticipation as constant forces impinging on how we interpret the world. They strip our immersion in what is of any perception of meaning or value. We are catapulted into elsewhere, nowhere. Chasing utopia or fearing dystopia.

Our organism resists. We are embodied within a biological organism that has its – we could call them instincts or resonances. These guide our existence as living creatures moving around and doing things at a scale of time and space that we recognize. This does not separate us as human or even “living” creatures from everything else. It provides us with intuitions into the way life permeates all existence in ways that cannot be reduced to chemical or physical reactions.

In writing, extended metaphor breaks through this isolating quality of logos. Extended metaphor creates a field in which our mind is not held to literal, reductive, simplistic equations of this and that. Extended metaphor takes us from the realm of simple systems, like machines – and all the metaphoric attachments we have made to seeing the world and ourselves in this manner – and brings us into the realm of complex systems. We find ways to navigate complexity without falling into the defeat of fearfully reacting to complexity as chaos. We have a way of touching and responding to implication that does not continually risk sedimentation. When we persist within any simple metaphor we can be said to precipitate out of the flow of complexity and become frozen like the sediment precipitated to the bottom of a test tube. Extended metaphor, maintains us in solution. It does so by not resting with a single metaphoric connection, but by continually finding other connections that somehow rhyme and resonate with the Implicate Order. They create an environment of mind in which we are working in resonance with the holographic nature of the universe.

In painting, when we transcend the intentionality of the mark, a visual metaphor embodies direct visual perception. There is an amalgam formed combining ambiguity and familiarity. We sort out what we are seeing on the canvas as if we were viewing an actual space. We see a visual field sharing the space of the surface of the canvas. We respond to a fact-ness of these perceptions. As we see apparent light falling within a perceived space that correlates to our world in some way. This fact vibrates with the tangible materiality of paint and canvas. This is a visual equivalent to extended metaphor. Marks take on a holographic quality. They are both part and signifier of the whole. They exist as marks and as carriers of our visual perception. Looking at the surface of a painting we have an insight into the field as it is presented to us. This is not representation. It is presentation. The painting provides us with an experience. Not a description of an abstraction from experience. It is there before us with a heightened present-ness.

This is neither reductivist representation  nor abstraction. Such a painting can appear to be either of these types or a combination of the two. What distinguishes them from either genre, as we have come to expect them, is this direct experience, physical and material, which carries an insight into the field energizing its surface.

How is a painting metaphorical? This may seem difficult to grasp by those more familiar with writing than painting. The following is a response to clarify this relationship:

A sign acts like a word. It stands in for an idea and places it before the imagination.

The perception we have of visual space and light in a painting is a different kind of illusion. It seems that this can be likened to extended metaphor.

Metaphor, simple metaphors that create a single play on words, do not leave logos behind. They don’t resist the illusion of certainty or categorization.

Extended metaphor, and the illusion of space and light created on a painted surface, do resist. They are at once specific and also universal. They are apprehended as experiences and not as representations.

“Stepping aside,” as you describe metaphor,* could be a way of talking about what I’m ascribing to extended metaphor, whether written or visual.

Before getting into that, I just want to add – although not in reaction to anything you said but – it is a common assumption, especially among those who do not paint, to consider visual illusion to be somehow either a trick or just a common-place. Either way it is discounted as an artifact and not an arena of action.

There is a transparency that is unavoidably present when this aspect of a work is there and strong. We see the space and light as though they were there. Right there in front of us.

This is different in some ways – that I would consider superficial – to the way we see a scene as written. This transparency, this sense that what we are perceiving is a fact and not an arrived at artifice, is strengthened by an equal pull to hold our awareness to the physicality of paint and canvas. At the same time and in the same space.

To me this is analogous to the way the language in poetry, and poetic prose, generates a similar tug between transparency and a focus on the way it was made.

Kitsch, in painting or writing, dissolves any connection between the how and what is meant to be conveyed. The imagery is transparent – in the sense that we are manipulated into believing it is real, “It’s so realistic!”

The sentiment, as well as the language of written kitsch, is also transparent in this way. This is not the same kind of transparency as the other alluded to before. This is a transparency of manipulation. The message is fully grasped by its intention. An intention to convince, to create allies in negotiations. Every effort is made to hide the making so as to pull the recipient out of any sense of being an independent agent confronting a realized work on their own terms. We are to be swept-up by the rhetoric. Carried away on as simplistic an emotional level as it is possible to evoke in us. Being a lie from start to finish, and with no interest in confronting anything that might dilute the agenda behind its creation, it does not want to be open to inspection.

A work of extended metaphor holds to its contradictions and to every accident of its making. It carries its meaning holographically. This requires that all its aspects be visible so as to provide another avenue into its wholeness.

* A response within a conversation with Cat Lupton.

Signs are real. Logos exists. We cannot eliminate signs. We find them in random patterns. They are intrinsic to our perceptual matrix. That animals and plants have graphic shapes and patterns shows this receptivity to signs goes much deeper than just human cognition. It is reductive to attempt to remove any vestiges of signification from painting. Just as it is reductive to allow signs to dominate a work. It is in the play of sign and metaphorical perception that we reach painting’s full potential.

“Out,” oil on canvas

“Tor,” oil on canvas

Marks can also provide somatic clues. They embody gestures that our organism responds to as if facing another creature or force of nature. This acts on us as another form of visual metaphor. It acts on our perception, just as color and value relationships do, to provide us with another layer of experienced perception. Again, we are not reacting to a representation, but responding to a presentation with various degrees of connection and correspondence to our sense of the world.

This has been the thrust of my painting since the early eighties. It has taken a long time to recognize this. It has taken the self-destruction of the assumptions we held about Art in the late Twentieth Century to clear space for what this kind of painting might be.

This perspective opens up the possibility to approach painting from a variety of directions. To explore any part of our lives and our search for meaning. The key is in the way this perspective allows us to stay out of the traps of any reductive single point of view. This framework allows us to see all painting as part of a single enterprise and to relate them all through a shared, common language. This language is not stylistically bound within any parochial view of art history. It grows out of the fundamental nature of perception and signification and how they form our interpretations of what is.

This perspective opens painting as a viable and vibrant medium for any number of approaches to the implications of marks upon a visual field. It does this while helping us maintain a firm grasp on the perceptual basis of all our arts and everything we do.

This grasp gives us a field of play in which we are aware of our interplay with implication on all levels and without restricting ourselves to any reductivist oversimplification.

Making and confronting art in this way is an extension of experiencing the world. It allows us the opportunity to grapple with habit and find ways to integrate habit with insight, and so participate in the evolution of our relationship with consciousness.

In this way we are not trapped in our present conditioning. Nor are we expecting to find transcendence in an instant. Each change in us finds its manifestation in the work and has repercussions on everything that follows it. We work within a form of engagement with all realms, internally and externally perceived. Directly, and with a fluency of interconnection between their manifestations.

The external transfixes us. The internal infuses everything we see and do. These occur at time scales, from the perceptually instantaneous to decades – within our own lives – and even millennially long spans of time – as we experience past art. In our confrontations with physical objects that carry within them means of expression and perspectives on meaning. All of this works to provide us with leverage and contact with all forms of reality. It does so with a character of clarity that is not available in any useful action. Without this realm of useless activity we have no way of anchoring our other endeavors in meaning that is actually perceived and not just fossilized into received belief and unexamined assumptions.

We leave a session in front of a canvas – whether as artist or viewer – changed in ways that cannot be arrived at in any other way.

This is analogous to our confrontations with written arts and performances of dance or drama. Each medium brings its own most direct form of engagement with the interstices of our perceptual experiences and our modes of action in the world. Each does not limit us to a single aspect of life. They all bring us into contact with everything, feeding each other and all of us as we take them on.

“Blue,” oil on panel

“Peonies & Dried Hydrangeas”

Beach Point

Sharpshooter on the Ways

An excerpt from my novel, Shoal Hope:

Albert slapped down a quarter on the counter, swiveling away on his stool. A half-chewed toothpick clenched in his jaw, “Thanks!”

The counter-man replied with clipped, professional courtesy, “Thank you.”

Albert stepped onto the street. A low sun shimmered between a filigree of branches. Leaves at their peak of color. Maples shining bright red or brilliant yellow.

Passing an alleyway, a glimpse of the harbor framed by towering Hollyhocks on either side. Ragged spires six feet tall. Large, rough, dry brown leaves. Tough flower stalks silhouetted against the light. The last fragile yellow petals falling over blasted seed pods.

A picket fence, dotted with the last of the Morning Glories. Brilliant blue, white, and gold bells cascading off withered stems. A touch of August in mid-October.

Climbing a rise into the East End he went over his arguments in his head, straining for a foolproof plan, Peter has to go!

He’s no sailor! That last time spooked him.

I’ve got to do this! He’s gonna laugh in my face.

Forgetting himself on the deserted street, “DAMN IT!” Punching his fist into his palm, head down, muttering aloud.

A movement to his right. A matron stepping out of her gate, a wicker basket tight under her arm, a stern scowl turned his way.

He looked down, blushing, and quickened his pace.

Eager to outpace the old woman he went a block too far.

Turning back, “There she is. Damn it!” What an idiot! Oh! Just forget it!

Sweeping into Peter’s alley, coming to the side-door of an old fish-house, knocking forcefully. Weathered wood clattering against its frame. The sudden racket reverberating up and down the shell-strewn alley, “Damn it!” What am I doing?

The old woman walked slowly past, staring.

He stared back. Knocking again, this time more gently. Leaning way back to catch a last flicker of trailing skirts, Good riddance!

He was just settling down off his heels as the door slid open.

Peter appeared in a tattered sweater, a handful of brushes bristling from between the knuckles of his left hand. Peering out into the bright morning.

Albert rushed to say, “Ah, Hello!”

“Albert?”

Albert couldn’t resist one last look towards the street.

Peter stepped halfway out his doorway, craning to see what he was looking at.

Albert did not enlighten.

Peter shrugged.

“Peter! Yeah, ah…. I wanted to stop by….”

Peter looked up and down the alley one last time,  “I’m working.”

“I know…. Hey, listen, I’m sorry to be barging in…”

Peter reached for the door.

Is he going to shut it in my face?

Peter’s arm went slack. He looked at Albert. Sweeping his brush-rimmed hand across his body, he backed through the doorway.

Albert hesitated. He stepped into the dark. Confronted by the first in a series of sway-backed joists at forehead height. He bent over, shuffling his feet, unsure of what lay ahead.

Adjusting to the gloom, there was junk everywhere. Coils of old line and netting. Glass floats, squares of eroded cork; smothered under the dust of ages. Peter’s coats and sweaters hung in groups against the rough board walls or swung from joists like hollow hanged men.

Peter indicated a shaky stairway, almost a ladder. Leaning forward, Albert tapped his fingertips on each step to keep his balance. Cool, bright light flooding down to meet him.

He had never gotten beyond the downstairs before. Slivers of light between its floorboards had only hinted at what lay above. The aromas of linseed oil, varnish, and sweet turpentine clashing with the lasting memories of salt fish.

Rising out of the gloom, “Wow.” I paint in my room. Peter lives in his studio.

He whispered, “I’m gonna do this.”

“What d ’ya a think?”

“Peter…”

A massive easel, the most substantial thing in the building, put the shed’s construction to shame. It stood crusted in layers of paint, stained and battered.

It held a canvas. A horizontal rectangle of flaxen linen with an even weave, roughly tacked to a heavy wooden stretcher. Frayed ends, threads curling into space, framed the canvas in a ragged halo.

It’s so different from his studies!

Its subdued palette lacked the harsh contrasts and strong colors typical of all of Hawthorne’s student’s work.

Its emotional tone registered with him first. Paint thinly laid. Much of the canvas washed in long sweeping strokes trailing runnels of turps over a pale ground. Clear notes thinly applied. A swath of Cerulean Blue suggesting clear sky seen through a limpid, humid atmosphere.

Bright stains of a pigment, the golden tones of Indian Yellow, made from the sun-dried urine of sacred-cows. The color of piss. Areas of impasto a dull, organic orange. Thinner washes ringing with the pure tone of a golden bell.

Thin strokes of deep Ultramarine Blue and warm, Peach Black; carved space, suggesting shallow, overlapping planes.

Albert considered Peter the best young painter he had ever met. His estimation of his work rising along with a lump in his throat.

His eyes adjusting to the limpid north light. A penetrating illumination falling on the canvas.

His understanding grew. Discovering a series of close relationships, tone against tone, plane against plane. Sky, grass, water; resolved themselves. Structures; trees and houses and boats; fell into place.

It seemed unfinished. Unlike most works-in-progress, including his own, Albert found a scrupulous discipline. Peter hadn’t brought any one area further along than the rest. Certain, junctures, that was how they struck Albert. Intersections in a network not representations of objects. Stood out as focal-points. A result of the paint’s application and the way the eye traveled across its surface. Not as objects overtly, clumsily, signified.

The painting’s power grew along with his acceptance of what he saw. He recognized a language. Not systematic, consistent. No single placement in space, or tonal consideration, overcome by a notional graphic shorthand. This spare quality did not misrepresent the work. What was left undone implicit in the gaps.

Albert’s trust grew. What was there was matter-of-fact. What was missing would arrive in due course.

This trust completed the painting for him. Even if it had been abandoned after only a few preliminary strokes, It’s done.

They stood, silent for a good, long time. Peter off to one side, leaning against a post at the head of the stairs. His right hand stuffed in his pant’s pocket. His left, held up and away, clutching his brushes. He spent his days this way, watching and waiting for clues to present themselves.

His sketches in oil or charcoal were quickly done. In class, he pushed through a motif before the model could twist away or a cloud obscure the sun. Albert could see a clear deliberation at work here. Each observation transformed into pigment. The result slowly exposed the painting’s essence to a viewer. Albert felt an intimate connection with these realizations, None of this would be obvious to anyone but another painter.

Its pace, the span of effort in its creation, clear and visible, without histrionics, It don’t put on a show!

Albert peered at its surface, standing close enough to smell sweet, fresh linseed-oil. The sharp tang of Damar Varnish cutting through. He stepped back, squinting to take-in the overall massing of tone and value. His footfalls echoing back from below up the open stairway. A dog barked a block away. Sand swished as a wagon drove by. Muffled, indecipherable voices murmured outside.

A ragged salvo of steam-driven shrieks rolled across from east to west. The noon-whistles of the town’s seven cold-storage plants letting go in a punctuated crescendo.

Albert almost forgot his friend was there. Trying to think of what to say, he almost let the moment pass. Expecting Peter to start one of his usual monologues.

A lightness rising in him, “Peter, thanks,…”

Peter nodded, waiting.

“It’s an honor… I mean… Let me put it this way…” Looking down, blushing, staring at the floor.

“It’s not what I expected! It’s so good…” He stammered, “That’s not what I mean! I expected it to be good! It’s different.” Looking up at Peter, back down at the floor, gazing at the painting, “It’s done isn’t it?”

Peter cocked his head, looking past Albert at the painting, “I was still working on it when you knocked…”

Albert blushed.

“Now? A painting changes when you look at it with someone else!”

Albert nodded.

“It’s not just wondering whether they’ll like it or not. Sometimes, somebody Oohing and Ah-ing. They leave. And you feel like slashing the damn thing!”

Albert nodded.

“It’s watching their eyes on it. Seeing a person in the same view. Something….” Peter leaned back and squinted, “I guess… I don’t really know…. It happens! It happened today.”

Albert related his reactions to his friend. Emphasizing a point by meeting his eye. Filled with the painting as he spoke.

October light has a softness, like early morning, all day long. The path of the sun across the sky never penetrated the room’s north-facing windows, but a house-front across the street, bathed in full sun for a time, sent sharp reflections flooding into the room. A tree shaded everything, filling the space with the soft glow of its lemon-yellow leaves. The painting felt alive. The light gave it breath, modulating subtly altered relationships, blending differences, highlighting contrasts.

Albert and Peter had carried the image of a living painting within and between them for hours. They stood watching the light fade out of the room in silence.

Peter had returned to his post. Albert leaned against the bench along the far-wall. Absentmindedly rubbing a daub of Peach Black with his thumb and forefinger. He loved the silkiness of it. A fat glob, deep black. Aggressively black. Sensually black. He smeared it away. Thinner streaks, a surprising blue, an alchemical transformation. Nothing about the full pigment prepared you for this change. A cool blue-gray against the pink undertone of his flesh.

Gazing down into his open palm in the deepening twilight, a soft smile spread across his face.

Peter rolled a cigarette, scratched a match, and lit it. Its glow magnified in the lenses of his spectacles.

They shuffled, restive, thirsty, hungry.

Albert remembered his reason for coming.

With the tail-end of his match Peter lit a lantern. Its golden glow, so harsh after the soft dusk, alive with a flickering heart.

Albert took one last look at the painting.

For a moment a sharp sense of confronting a living thing revived before his eyes. Another insight twitching in his spine.

Peter shifted the lantern. Their shadows fell across the canvas.

Further work on this suite of Marine Paintings. A few new ones, and some drawings preliminary to a few I’d like to get going soon.

Another change is presenting them here in “frames.” I do think these help. Let me know what you think?

Below is the same set in a simpler gallery. Just click on any image to start a larger scale slide-show.

“Backing Around to the North,”
18″ x 24″ oil on canvas

This painting was inspired by the sloop Regina M. now at Mystic Seaport. Regina M. is a Carry-Away Boat, an early form of Sardine Carrier closely related to the Lubec Boats.

Here we are caught outside in a No’th-east’ah as the wind backs around to the North.

This is a series of marine paintings I’ve been working on. Some have been shown here before in earlier stages, a few are new.

“Pound Scows at N. Truro,” for example is only recently begun. A small painting on panel, a sketch.

The question of “finish” is broad. A painting can only be definitely termed complete when it leaves the painter’s grasp.

There does come a time when painting changes from a search for what is not yet there to a recognition of what is there. At that point the flow of the eye over the work is uninterrupted. There is a totality present. The whole can be glimpsed at once. There is a definite light visible throughout. A level of vitality is apparent and it grows on us as we continue to look.

This recognition requires time. Sometimes rather deep time.

A painting changes physically as it “dries.” – Drying is a misnomer, it is more an act of healing. 

These changes run parallel to a process of acquaintance with what has been freshly created. Painter and painting change together and in relationship with each other.

Working on a suite of paintings, insights and discoveries that illuminate one work have repercussions that ripple through the way we see the others. These may lead to re-visiting what had appeared to be completed. There is an atmosphere of insight. Illumination spreads, providing another level of vitality to each work as we consider an entire suite.

Paintings and photographs seem similar at first glance. Paintings are not like photographs. These elements of time within their making are only apparent as we spend time looking. Paintings require that we encounter them in person. No single snapshot can capture a painting. What we see on a screen is only an indication of what is there. It is at best a first impression.

But, that’s what we have here, pictures-of-paintings.

Paintings need to be confronted directly. While a photograph is instantaneous – both in its making and in the way it is seen – paintings take time to materialize. To create an experience. To perceive over time. The experience deepens and broadens with our engagement.

Here’s the same gallery without the JavaScript:

See these and others of my Marine Paintings here.

There is a point at the start of a painting when there is a precariousness between what the painting “is to be about” and the first touches of what is actually there. Something I’m only arriving at now is that the former, while of great interest and concern at the start, is of no account. It becomes – if we insist – an obstacle to the work’s development.

What if we let go of such concerns? What if instead of focusing on what it should be, or what we want, we simply allow the painting to occur?

You see, painting never happens as “thoughts” translated into “actions.” As much as we wish this were true. As much as all of our mythology of genius and heroes would make us insist things must happen this way, they don’t.

Painting happens as the hand and the brush and the eye – well, it gets so complex so soon, we might as well just say the organism and its enveloping surroundings; physical, mental, emotional – act. They simply act. There is, or might be – I suspect there always is, although it might not always be apparent – a seed of an intention. But even this cannot be said to be a “thought.” It is at most an urge, a leaning, a leaning towards some sort of decision, a decisive trending that is felt and that initiates the process. By process, I mean, getting up out of the chair, or away from one’s perch, or entering the studio itself with this kernel of decision inside one’s self. But once initiated, the “self,” the “thinker,” is no more than an observer, and best left where he cannot do any interfering with what is going on.

This is not some “free-spirit” “anything goes” condition. These are critical reactions, or naive interpretations, colored by the Ego’s jealousy at anything that might go on without his involvement. It is a clear and nuanced affair. There is nothing un-rigorous about it.

What happens next is that either the moment passes, or the intention’s course is run, or we “get in the way.” And, when this happens, most likely, we push on and attempt to turn what has happened into what we want.

The result of this is one of painting’s true wonders.

A wonder that is tied to the way it presents us with the unbending force of reality while doing so in a manner which is delicately open to our learning from these interactions. While “real life” can have fatal consequences, here, when we open ourselves to be sensitive to the range of its own consequences, painting is there to provide an arena for play, practice, and achievement.*

We may have an image of what we think we’ve achieved dancing before our eyes, but to someone else, or upon returning after this fever has cooled, we discover the resistance of the actual to our illusions.

* Achievement in this context is not success. It is a satisfactory engagement with what is. These range throughout all the potentialities held within meeting each moment as it comes throughout the full range of momentousness each moment may carry.

At this point we may either continue to insist that we can wrangle what we want into being, or we let go of insistence and begin to see what is actually there.

Act and repeat. Eventually – and this can be moments or years later – we discover what the painting is. First comes a recognition that it is something. That a scrap of canvas, and colored muds and oil, has come alive. It holds light within it. It shapes attention directed at it. It unfolds. It has a capacity to hold our attention in the way living things – which means everything actual – can.

There is no striving in it. There is no attempt to convince. There is no rhetoric. It is. It is sufficient. It is somehow miraculous. Miraculous because this scrap of material that has been manipulated has somehow left all striving behind and become “something.”

At this point, it doesn’t really matter what was “intended.” It doesn’t even matter what that some thing that it has become is. The fact that it has arrived at this condition, and that – by its act of being that something – it brings joy.

Lee Shore

Horizons of Significance

“Raising the Fisherman”
24″ x 24″ oil on canvas

Ivan Illich‘s work turns on two related concepts. One is of our need to dwell, to inhabit a home, to have a place. The other is our need for conviviality. We cannot exist in isolation. We are vulnerable and part of everything as everything is part of us.

I’ve come to relate these two principals to a developing attitude towards sincerity and seriousness. I’ve come to learn that a supporting theme of all of my work, in painting, fiction, essays, poetry, and even within the Craft of the Boat; revolves around a drive to connect with and revitalize the place of sincerity and seriousness within our views of life.

This is an overwhelming task! I recognize that, but I also recognize that just about anything worth doing today shares a deeply fraught, problematic nature with such a quest! Our situation would not be what it is if what we confronted was somehow easy!

There are, of course, the benefits of steering clear of futility! So much of what drags us down is the clarity upwelling from within our very organisms that so much of what is “asked” of us, by our social roles and the institutional frameworks bounding us within a hegemonic culture of death, is futile. Once we are able to work through the mourning for the world, and ourselves, this requires of us we are met with what I’ve been calling a joyful disillusionment. The energy this releases from the forces of repression and denial in which they have been channeled is tremendous. This energy pulls us along toward that which is merely overwhelmingly difficult!

To clarify what is meant by sincerity and seriousness:

I’ve had a series of conversations recently that have kept coming back to these two points. My Qi Gong practice has also been gently nudging me into a habit of dwelling within a space of sincerity that had almost been lost to me due to the corrupting forces surrounding us and the way they tend to push us into forms of disengagement like ironic detachment or cynical defeat. I have felt the tension between my organism‘s need for sincerity – as we can see it, if we give it a chance. We cannot dwell anywhere without giving our vulnerability its due and accepting the fullness, the completeness of our need to be connected, to be integrated into all – and the cultural friction constantly pushing us to give it up.

One thing I’ve only recently been able to recognize is that what I had long taken as a series of surrenders and defeats have, in fact, been examples of letting go of the barriers to my acceptance of sincerity and all that sincerity brings. Let’s not forget that giving up and letting go are very different things!

Seriousness is related to sincerity. As with sincerity, it is commonly hidden behind toxic simulacra and straw-men arguments that work to hide its true nature from us and keep us at arm’s length from its embrace. Seriousness is not any form of masked aggression hiding behind piety so as to justify violence done either to the self or the world. It is not an enemy of joy, but its precursor. It is a characteristic I’ve long admired in other creatures – and not just eagles and lions, but howler monkeys, and even kittens and puppies in the silliest of situations. I’ve also found glimpses carved in light and shadows upon old daguerreotypes of indigenous peoples, or reading transcriptions of their words. A connection between the seriousness I’ve found in animals and these not-civilized people has led me to insights concerning how to approach life and how to put one’s responsibilities in order.

How does Art bring us to dwell and how does it manifest conviviality?

A painting is not made it is arrived at. This is a direct act of dwelling within a place that occurs within the privileged space of the canvas’ surface. To paint, if we approach the work with any honesty at all, is a constant lesson in the futility of intentions. The complexities of perception and action and the way they work themselves out physically upon a surface and within a mental field in a give and take, iterative and additive, but ultimately transcendent alchemical process can fool us into thinking what we wish to find is there for a while, but when we see it actually occurring we cannot mistake the real thing for anything else – so long as we are open…. This complexity engages us on every level if we allow it to. The nagging concerns that first led me to doubt modernism came from its reductivist strategies employed to channel and control – or simply eliminate by fiat – aspects that seemed too unruly.

Engaging with a painting, everything from sitting quietly in front of a canvas at whatever stage of its development; to the moment of lifting a brush; to reaching for a color; to envisioning a shape, a form, a curve, a line, a gesture; to glimpsing a scrap of light, or a form resolving itself as unmistakably “there” from out of the tentative marks surrounding it; to finally having the painting speak with a full and confident voice, marking the arrival of a Being, as real as any other and ready to join into conversation with all the rest; these are the elements that make up Art, and also are the elements that make up the way we find and carve meaning for ourselves in life. These are the same exercises that strengthen the muscles we require to navigate the complexities of perception and action in anything we might attempt. Without some working knowledge of how this unfolds we are apt to consider such a difficult task impossible and be that much more anxious to reach for solutions in techniques and to hide from life’s promise behind the myths of control.

A painting does not come fully to life until there are at least two people in the room with it. This must be experienced to be acknowledged. It is strongest, not in a museum surrounded by sanctified art – though it can certainly happen there, and does, once we are receptive and aware of its potential, but in front of a new work, especially when the artist herself may not be quite certain of what is there yet. Something happens to the painting when that second person stands in front of it. Even without any verbal or even “subliminal” communication between the two parties, the artist will see the work transformed. What then happens between the three; the painting, the artist, and the receptive visitor; is a dialogue. This dialogue is not predominately verbal, not even visual, it is a direct connection between three organisms, two human and one made up of marks in pigment upon a substrate. The communication is fluid and passes in every direction.

This is not just a communion between Art lovers. It is an experience of communion between creatures; dumb and sentient, mineral, vegetal, and animal. It brings us to a direct experiencing of the power of life within everything as it courses between and among these three entities and spirals out to encompass the entire world.

Related articles

• A Conversation around Questions of Sincerity, Stone Soup (horizonsofsignificance.wordpress.com)
• Making Sense (horizonsofsignificance.wordpress.com)