Collisions of Understanding

                                            The Ocean Room  24"x 36"  oil on linen

It has been a while since writing.  I am definitely a slow blogger.  I have immersed myself in spaciousness this past month to engage with insights about my work. My participation in the week-long August intensive at Whale & Star in Miami, Florida  has challenged me to shift the way in which I view and think about my painting.

I am coming to recognize and claim that the ruptures created by inadequate renderings haunt easy recognition and carry the contradictions of making a painting.  Rather than ignoring these I want to acknowledge and respond to them.  To quote curator and art critic Gean Moreno, I do not want my paintings to "settle into an adequate mode of standardization, repetition and competence."

This is the work of my current studio practice.

Rhineland Mystics in the Studio

                                            The Wonderer - 2010     65" x 72"

2011.
What will unfold in this, the year of the Iron Hare? (Losar-Tibetan New Year is March 5th). What insights and epiphanies will manifest as I grow another year older, deeper and broader in my scope of studio painting?
Time in the studio is filled with my awareness of threads of conversations and reflections weaving their way into my painting practice.  I am spending time "sitting with" the wisdom of my theological and spiritual rootedness in the writings of Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich and the Tibetan Mystic, Longchenpa.  

There has been an interesting number of recent articles on religion and art, the intersection(s) of art and theology, and spirituality in the arts.   Issue 135 (November-December 2010) of frieze magazine, a journal Contemporary Art and Culture is entitled Religion&Spirituality and features a work by Hilma af Klint (Altar Picture, No.1-1915) on the cover.  I am not sure where all of this will lead.  I do know there
 is an internal mandate to listen and sit with an awareness and attentiveness both in and out of the studio.


Quotes from Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen with commentary by Matthew Fox (Vermont, Bear&Co. 2002)

Einstein warned that "science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind." Hildegard would surely concur. But she would add that science and religion without art are ineffective and violent; and art without science and religion is vapid.


Who are the prophets?  They are a royal people, who penetrate mystery and see with the spirit's eyes.  In illuminating darkness they speak out.    So wrote Hildegard in the 11th century.    In the 21st century,  Enrique Martinez Celaya writes of the artist as prophet:  ...art is not revealed in or as stable meaning but by a very particular instability of meaning.  Art is that vibration between meaning and no-meaning, whose experience renders their opposition meaningless and dissolves our separation from the primal nature of the universe.  ( Celaya, Collected Writings, p.232  Lincoln, UNPress, 2010).

This early 21st century artist and  the 11th/12th century mystics of the Rhineland and Tibet have much to say to each other in 2011.  I am reacquainting myself with my own rich tradition(s) of study and practice as I carry them into the studio.

The Pitman Painters

Yesterday I attended The Pitman Painters, currently playing on Broadway.  This play, written by Lee Hall is a delightful, incisive challenge to all artists.

A few of my favorite lines:

Oliver:  Yes. I do.  what I am saying is that art is making things possible that weren't there before.  Don't you see? when you're painting a painting - you're painting a painting, not painting life.


Oliver:  It doesn't matter who defines good and bad.  When I sit down to do a painting I don't sit down to do a bad painting or a mediocre one - I sit down to do something good.  I am not expressing myself if I do a bad picture - it's obvious.

Vocation of an Artist

No artist is pleased.  There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.
                                                    --Martha Graham

Ora pro nobis

Ora pro nobis


Ora, ora pro nobis
From deep heart memory of my distant past
the words swell in vaulted resonance.

But now...

I witness in held wit(h)ness.

No more do I avert my gaze.

The inscription of my eyes
holds the reflected arrogance
of your inattention
in sunken oil,
the terrified pulse of
anguished feathered hearts
and warm silk skinned fins.

Ora, ora pro nobis
Pray, pray for us
if you dare.

Irene F. Sullivan

9 June 2010

Shapeshifting Calligraphies of the Heart

                                            The Radiance of Attention - 2/2010


I recently spent two days with the Luc Tuymans Exhibit at San Francisco MOMA.  The fifth floor of SFMOMA became a womb of multiple inscriptions.  I sat with these paintings, moved in and out of their space, walked silently at a distance gazing at them and stood in a transfixed space before them.  This was an encounter-event.  Upon leaving the museum for the day I would retreat in silence back across the Golden Gate Bridge and sink down into the concentric ocean energies of Stinson Beach.  My early morning practice of walking at the tideline helped me realize that my experience of movement and fluidity, the visible and invisible, the familiar and unfamiliar in these paintings was manifested in  a space of shared breathe.
                                ...woman is not standing in forcible proximity but SHE STOOD VERY STILL,
                           in fragile vulnerability in 'besidedness'.  
                                                   (Ettinger in Athena: Philosophical Studies, no.2 (2006), 100-36 (117)

 It is, as Belgian psychoanalyst Ann Verougstmete writes "an affective and informative contact where existence comes to itself. " (Studies in The Maternal, 1 (2) 2009).  Could my experience of meeting these paintings carry the ensouling  that Bracha Ettinger writes about?  Which in turn shares the borderspace of my studio practice, my embodied space as an artist?

Tuyman's paint, at times as thin and light as breath and at other times as powerfully clear and strong as an unencumbered Sumi brushstroke is a shapeshifting invitation of transformation. The work is about the painting, the paint. Brushstrokes emerge, invite,  and pulsate in shrouded passages. At times the 'erotic antennae' of my psyche-soul are flooded with a feeling of strangeness and unfamiliarity.  K-2, Chalk, "W".   Gaps are created in my mind. Thinking and analyzing cease.  Experience is inscribed.  I am sitting with The Blue Oak (1988).  Fortune (2003) is a painting I want to kidnap and live with so it will reveal it's secrets over time.    

-Excerpts from my forthcoming book:  Inscriptions From the Goldfinch (Ensouling with a brushstroke)

I continue with my pilgrimage of meeting paintings, working in my studio, mining the language and borderlinking with the thinking and writings of my current philosophical  companions.

The Gaze

                                                       Portrait of a Young Woman - Vermeer          


                                   The gaze rolls into several eyes, transforms the viewer's point of vision and returns through his/her eyes to culture.  --Bracha Ettinger


Portrait of a Young Woman shares wall space with Young Woman With a Water Jug and Woman With Lute.   Unbelievably, I have the room and space to myself on this February afternoon at the Metropolitan.   I am in a "matrixial border space".  The "distance-in-proximity" continuously re-attunes my erotic antennae as I sit with this painting.  This fills me with an interior stillness.  The "border-time"  described by Chrysanthi Nigianni in her recent article The Matrixial Feminine... is both elusive and disturbing. I am making a conscious choice to immerse myself in reading the challenging and shapeshifting work of Bracha Ettinger's work on"matrixial borderspace."   I want to challenge myself with creating "new spaces of encounter" with the hopes of  fashioning "new modes of transformative thinking."  This is crucial in my work as an artist who is committed to painting in the 21st century.

My pilgrimage year of meeting and learning from paintings in museums and exhibitions across the country has begun.  I mine the depths of Ettinger's language searching for a way in which to write about my experience with these paintings and to create new spaces of encounter.

Vermeer's brush strokes carry across the distance of six centuries.   They are right here, with me, in front of me, inscribing themselves within me as I present my painter's queries. This young woman's hair is only a few shades darker than the brown umbers behind her.   The canvas breathes. The breathe is palpable across centuries.  Distance - in-proximity.  The  varied brushstrokes of  dark, humus colored paint in this section of the canvas are alive and vibrant.   How can this be?

The palest of blue wraps and entrances in its folds around the figure.  Her left lower hand is only suggested by the simplest of brushstroke.  Her eyes open the "non-conscious lanes" of my psychic space as I interlace with this painting.   I am caressed in an experience of "metramorphosis" as all the traces of the painters hand circulate in my psyche-soul-body-mind filling the space between me and this painting.

This young woman's eyes transfix in her inscriptive gaze.  She beckons: sit longer, sit in the cascading stillness of my ancient soul eyes peering at you from a young face of enjoyed (jouissance) encounters.


I am smiling back at her.  Greeting her smile of whispered life filled with a soul of sights seen and acknowledged across the distance of centuries.

 Excerpted from my forthcoming book:  Inscriptions from The Goldfinch - Ensouling With a Brushstroke