Unremembered Gates of Wit(h)ness

Collisions of Understanding

2011-09-03T19:53:00.001-06:00

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

2011-02-05T13:46:00.003-07:00

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

2010-11-07T07:02:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-22T16:13:00.000-06:00

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

2010-06-27T19:28:00.002-06:00

Ora pro nobis

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

But now...

I witnes 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

2010-05-04T14:07:00.001-06:00

   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

2010-02-13T16:44:00.006-07:00

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

2010 New Energies & Musings

2010-01-28T11:05:00.000-07:00

Schooling Sakebu - 25 January 2010

As I entered my studio today I became acutely aware of a question-quest. I am looking for something, I said. It is about poiesis and paint and matrixial spaces. It is about philosophy and mind, an awakening of Sems in the labyrinths of my life. The question-quest articulated itself independent of my agenda for the studio on this particular wintry afternoon.

I am coming to realize that it is about what happens when you stand still listening, in the border space of psyche-soul and canvas. It is a timeless, indefinable space, yet so real I can feel it whispering within, across and through my entire body.

I have returned to my reading and pondering of Bracha Ettinger's writings and work in her book The Matrixial Borderspace.

Intense Liminality

2009-05-05T14:43:00.003-06:00

The Shaman's Doorway

Spring dances among the still present drifts of high mountain snow and the bears paw through the forest startling my silent walks. I keep thinking about the Greek philosophers many references to Hekate, the great goddess of liminal spaces and incomparable originator of ideas. What is the studio, if not the space of liminality in all its manifestations with the ever present invitation to risk and intensity?

The 15th century poet-mystic Kabir wrote of intense living, risk taking, liminal space, 'jumping into the experience'. There is always risk with the jump and the 'plunge into the truth'.

TO BE A SLAVE OF INTENSITY

Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think...and think...while you are alive.
What you call 'salvation' belongs to the time before death.

If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten -
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you will
have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for, it is the
intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work.
Look at me and you will see a slave of that intensity.

Morning Moon-Good Friday

2009-04-10T16:48:00.003-06:00

Moon slipping
behind west mountain

Dawn sky brightens
in the east

Bird song echos
through the snow covered forest.

Risking the Edge

2009-03-17T07:01:00.003-06:00

Risking the edge in studio practice has more to do with realizing who it is that stands before the canvas, brush in hand, than any intellectual explanation of one's work.

COME TO THE EDGE

Come to the edge.
I might fall.
Come to the edge.
It's too high!

COME TO THE EDGE!

And (she) came,
And she leapt,
And she flew.
__adapted from the Poem "Come To The Edge" by Christopher Logue

Dry Mountains in Early March

2009-03-03T09:20:00.004-07:00

THE SOUND OF THE SEA

The sea awoke at midnight from its sleep,
And round the pebbly beaches far and wide
I heard the first wave of the rising tide
Rush onward with uninterrupted sweep;
A voice out of the silence of the deep,
A sound mysteriously multiplied
As of a cataract from the mountain's side,
Or roar of winds upon a wooded steep.
So comes to us at times, from the unknown
And inaccessible solitudes of being,
The rushing of the sea-tides of the soul;
And insipirations, that we deem our own,
Are some divine foreshadowing and foreseeing
Of things beyond our reason or control.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

My mountain is very dry, the forest is crackling under my feet, the fire danger is officially "HIGH". The winds are roaring down and through the canyon and I find myself remembering the roar and mist of hidden coves on my ocean walks. Memory becomes such mystery to me. What my psyche soul re-members on this dry Colorado mountain in early March is part of the "inaccessible solitudes of being."

Cecil Collins and the "realities" of spirit.

2009-01-12T09:44:00.006-07:00

I have recently discovered the writings of Cecil Collins (1908-1989) a British painter described as "creating some of the most profound and beautiful images of any artist of the twentieth century, a visionary artist as the most important since William Blake. (An artist) remaining faithful to an imaginative vision that owed nothing to passing trends..."

In the introduction to Collins' book, THE VISION OF THE FOOL & OTHER WRITINGS ( Ipswich, England, GOLGONOOZA Press, 2002) the reader is asked:

"With what eyes are we to look at the work of an artist who declares his belief that 'art is a metaphysical activity', and who resolutely claims 'there are no objects in my paintings'? With the images of Cecil Collin's art we must turn our gaze inwards to contemplate the realities of spirit. Here the 'eye of the heart' alone will suffice the transformation of consciousness that such things demand. Faced with a vision that runs counter to most contemporary expectations, are we not justified in asking for a guide? And what better guide than the artist himself?"

How does the language I use to speak and write about my work influence my painting? Why do I search as if on a never ending quest for a way to think, speak and write about my work? There is power in discovering resonance with the works of artists, be they poets or painters or both who have gone before me. These women and men become the silent audience in the studio as I paint. Their writings and thoughts are the companions of insight and critique. The ensuing 'dialogue' is held in silence richly embedded with learning and insight.

Collins held that a picture "must live on many different levels at once, it is an interpenetration of planes of reality, realized as a total experience."

New Year's Quotes for Reflection

2009-01-04T14:55:00.010-07:00

-Heidegger - January 2009-

The piercing cold of high mountain walks on clear days demand a clarity to my reflective musings. Several quotes come to mind as Heidegger and I walk on frozen paths of crunching snow. We are surrounded in a dazzling display of swirling hoar frost. I commit to inviting these quotes into the studio with me, to sit by the warmth of the fireplace as companions for the winter season in this New Year.

"The vehicle that makes great art is extremely subtle, it is ethics, morals." -Enrique Martinez Celaya

"The journey between the known and unknown - at the boundary is art." - Enrique Martinez Celaya

"There are words I cannot choose again:
'humanism' 'androgyny'

Such words have no shame in them, no diffidence
before the raging stoic grandmothers

their glint is too shallow, like a dye
that does not permeate

the fibers of actual life
as we live it now."
-Adrienne Rich

"Only bad painters enjoy painting." -Cecil Collins (1906-1989)

Wonder embedded in darkness.

2008-12-08T11:37:00.010-07:00

St Gregory of Nyssa wrote:
"Concepts create idols, only wonder comprehends anything."

This season of waning daylight heightens the mysterious clarity held in darkness. What concepts do I hold that cannot stand to the dark, pregnant silence of early December nights in the mountains? What concepts of painting have I made into idols that would rob my work of wonder? I find that this time of solstice invites to wonder. I think back to my studies in theology. Advent; the great season of anticipatory "almost, but not yet", the season of brilliant darkness prefaced with the rich gradient hues of purple-pink-red-orange evening skies. I still believe a painting can create such wonder that the viewer is held if even for a moment in the space of unarticulated "knowing".

Nietzche's 'amor fati' & painting

2008-11-18T16:54:00.005-07:00

I frequently take my questions and ideas for long walks. Today Heidegger and I hiked the mountain path from the studio up into the forest behind our home. Accompanying me were thoughts partnered in dialogue. The first dialogue partner is from Enrique Martinez Celaya's latest blog about PAINTING & STRUCTURE . He invites us to view painting as a "state of thought". In doing this he posits that the "underlying supports that give shape to the state of thought will soon become clear." Enrique defines thought as "the entire force of spirit: reason, emotion, intuition." I am abducted by this idea and find a dialogue emerging in the studio as I sit with my current painting.

My current immersion in reading about Nietzche's teaching of 'amor fati' is challenging and affirming. I find it is giving me a grounding in my work, answering unformed yet intuited questions that I have about the purpose of my painting. Do my paintings reveal the state of my current thought? I realize I engage in thought exploration. It is part of my vocation as an artist. I am always asking how does this inform what I paint? How I paint?

From WORDS IN BLOOD,LIKE FLOWERS:
"What the artist realizes in art -this is the erotic valence-is the external in (herself), "the eternal joy of becoming."
"...-one realizes what Nietzsche calls the "joy encompassing joy in destruction"-a joy with nothing to do with violence, a cruelty that is also a rueful name for sadness. Such a tragic joy is the affirmation of life because no affirmation, and no love, can choose any part, such as life and not also death, or ecstasy and not also longing, disappointment, and consumate sadness, or joy and not also suffering, or being and not much rather and also becoming."
"...It is the 'heroic' spirits who say Yes to themselves in tragic cruelty; they are hard enough to experience suffering as a 'joy'."
"Thus for Nietzsche, Those imposing artists who let a 'harmony' sound forth from every conflict are those who bestow upon things their own power and self-redemption: they express their innermost experience in the symbolism of every work of art they produce-their creativity is gratitude for their existence."

Creativity as gratitude for existence.

Painting as a state of thought.

The "genius of of the heart who makes everything loud and self- satisfied fall silent and teaches it to listen..."

Sappho's Memory

2008-11-09T14:13:00.006-07:00

In the fast approaching evening light of November, Sappho's memory graces studio walls.

#92

Do you remember

How a golden
broom grows on
the sea beaches

Sappho
(c.a. 610-580 BCE)

Early November Silence

2008-11-04T12:31:00.006-07:00

Returning to my studio brings insight, challenge and deepening commitment. Autumn days have run their course in the high mountains of my Colorado home. This morning I met a large bear on the forest path. Her luxuriant brown fur glistening in dawn light. She was in a hurry, interestingly, I was not. The light changes seamlessly at this time of year in the studio and I think of Charlotte Bronte's poem as I engage with completed work, hanging on quiet walls.

#168

The Autumn day its course has run - the Autumn evening falls
Already risen the Autumn moon gleams quiet on these walls
And Twilight to my lonely house a silent guest is come
In mask of gloom through every room she passes dusk and dumb
Her veil is spread, her shadow shed o'er stair and chamber void
And now I feel her presence steal even to my lone fireside
Sit silent Nun - sit there and be
Comrade and Confidant to me.

Plein-aire concinnity

2008-10-26T08:52:00.009-06:00

I have not done any plein-aire painting for three or four years. Yesterday I returned to some places along Bolinas Lagoon and Tomales Bay where I have painted in the past. I found myself greeting trees as the incoming tide lapped at gnarled roots. One tree in particular that I painted several times in the spring of 2005 was greeted like a dear old friend. Bowing to the egrets and basking seals in the lagoon, I realized the intimacy of place, space, sound that has been created in my psyche and soul.

There is concinnity-a seeing with one's ears. Babette E. Babich discusses this in her rich, delectable book WORDS IN BLOOD,LIKE FLOWERS which I am slowly savoring. I am thinking about this in terms of plein-aire painting and found myself painting small watercolors on gesso covered rice paper with awareness, passion and sensitivity. This goes far beyond "landscape-painting". The Latin word, concinnitas carries the meaning of "rhythmically attuned diction." There is a rich scholarly tapestry of the word's meaning. It invites reflection for me as a painter to think about my painting and how I speak about my paintings.

I wonder about the rhythmic attunment to the place I am painting. That "place" dissolves the interior/exterior division. Painting is rhythmic attunment. Taking this further, I think of one's heart-soul-psyche, a "corda-concinnity." Listening with heart-soul-psyche, seeing with my ears. Painting.

Ocean Song

2008-10-23T08:21:00.008-06:00

I am much like a migratory bird returning to this part of the ocean every fall. Drawn by the sound of the surf pounding, the smell of eucalyptus and sea breeze. I am also on pilgrimage to a place that resonates with wonder and unpredictability. I came to realize this as I slipped over the peak of Mt. Tamalpais and saw the ocean before me. This part of the California Coast holds every tear I have cried, every prayer I have uttered and every question I have carried for the past three decades of my life.
I take my questions for a walk along the dancing surf and elusive horizon. They accompany me, imprinting upon my soul like my footsteps in the sand. If asked, 'What is it you DO as an artist? I would answer, "I take my questions for a walk on the ocean every morning as the sky is turning light. Then I paint."

I am thinking alot these days about Nietzsche's call for a musicality (as embodied in the Greek term musike) in reading and thought of philosophy and his works. How does this thread into my work as an artist, as a painter? Art and truth formed an indissoluble unit for the ancient Greeks.

Babette Babich, in her book, WORDS IN BLOOD, LIKE FLOWERS states that this sense of musicality "corresponds to the entire cultural scope..." and the "modern tendency to reduce music to the 'organized' art of sound obscures the equiprimordial sense in which MUSIKE could be regarded, as Nietzsche saw it, as the enabling element of intellectual or spiritual as well as aesthetic and physical education and in which MUSIKE figures as the determining force of both individual and societal character -ethos-."

What is the enabling element of intellectual and spiritual and aesthetic and physical integration for me as a painter. What is the ethos of my work?

Shakespeare in the now barren Aspen Grove

2008-10-20T11:01:00.007-06:00

Sonnet 73

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self that seals up all the rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed, whereon it must expire

Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong

To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

Silent listening, authentic questioning.

2008-10-13T17:50:00.006-06:00

Silence offers an invitation to wonder and astonishment that continues to deepen within me. How do I attentively bring this to my painting in the studio? Heidegger wrote that this astonishment, this wonder is kept alive only in "authentic questioning" a questioning "that opens up its own source." I am wondering if the authentic questioning he refers to is the dialogue that opens when I sit with a painting? Sometimes there is wonder, occasionally astonishment. I need to listen to my paintings.

Rilke, Rumi and metaphor in the Aspen Grove

2008-10-07T11:36:00.007-06:00

The Aspen are shimmering in passionate delight today. Rumi wrote that leaf sounds are poets talking together/making fresh metaphors. I wonder what metaphors the Aspen are offering as Heidegger and I walk on our mountain path. What is the role of metaphor in painting? Am I even conscious of using metaphor? Nietzsche believed that we can have no genuine knowing without metaphor. I am sitting with all this as I read Words in Blood, Like Flowers (Philosphy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Holderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger (Babich, Babette E. Albany, SUNY Press 2006). In the rush of the wind and leaves I am thinking of this morning's newsclip from NPR: "1/4 of the planets mammals are currently threatened with extinction." A quote from Rilke that hangs in my studio floods my mind as brilliantly as the Aspen grove. ...our task is to stamp this provisional, perishing earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its being may rise again, 'invisibly' in us.