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.