On Being


I’ve recently visited with my mentor, Carl Straub, Dean of Faculty Emeritus at Bates College. I first met him in 1970 when I began to take his classes on Religion and Philosophy at Bates. He introduced me to the gang, from Socrates to Sartre and he taught one of the first classes ever given on the Ethics of Ecology. I mentioned how important Phenomenology has been to me – it’s been at the heart of all of my work – and he brought up David Abrams and his The Spell of the Sensuous. Abrams’ work combines the two, an ethics of ecology grounded in a Phenomenological philosophical framework.

The Spell of the Sensuous brought back to me, in all its vibrancy, our engagement with Being; arising from of our grounding in perception within our corporal existence as aware beings. A phrase that had been with me for a while, the Plenitude of Being, was invigorated for me by this reading and my discussions with Carl.  This thread joined my effort to encompass, if not synthesize, all my various activities. This reading has given me a fresh insight into my main thrust as a painter. I was aware at the time, though unable to articulate it, that I was after an engagement with a medium that would allow me to interact with all of the consequences of my existence as an aware being within a Plenitude of Being. The physicality of the act of painting, the physicality of the materials and the direct connections available through perception of the outside, the inside, the past, the present, the future; the immediacy of the act and the potential for reaction it engenders, both as painter and viewer; all of these have been of central importance to me.