Engaging with Reality

There are many forms of Buddhist meditation. Some involve following thoughts as they arise and fall away. Other forms engage the world around the meditator. The sitter views an object or listens to sounds or focuses on scent. All methods lead to more open acceptance of what-is. To understanding the nature of reality, that all phenomena, mental or physical, are impermanent.

Realist and abstract/conceptual painters still argue about the value of their chosen fields. They squabble about what’s truly real and worthy.

Realists engage with the world around them by mimicking it in paint or pencil. Taking a photograph of a subject doesn’t replace the act of gradually accumulating direct knowledge of a subject. Deep understanding, like the building of a relationship, requires time, patience, and effort.

Oven Light, graphite, Catherine Murphy

Some abstract artists, like Robert Ryman, believe that focusing on the physical qualities of materials is a more direct engagement with reality. Instead of creating an image of a subject, they explore what tools, surfaces, and paint do when they interact. Or they experiment with layering contradictory processes to see how different techniques enhance or disrupt each other. The resulting work emphasizes the tangible qualities of paint itself.

Robert Ryman

Other artists (De Kooning, Pollock) explore the contradictory movements of mind. They make series of intuitive marks, new ones responding to preceding ones. A canvas becomes a record of shifting interior states. These painters argue that our sense of reality is a product of mental activity. Intuitive paintings go to the source by revealing the mental structures that create reality.

De Kooning

I’ve seen these approaches combined. Some painters, like David Park, Van Gogh and Nicolas De Stael, acknowledge the physicality of paint while making a realistic image.

Soccer Players, Nicolas De Stael, oil.

Others layer intuitive marks until they form thick surfaces emphasizing physical presence (Larry Poons).

Larry Poons, acrylic

Jean Dubuffet developed heavily worked surfaces, made of collaged passages of intuitive marks, that crudely depict a readable subject. His work records mental activity, the recreation of a subject, and the exploration of the physical properties of materials.

Madame Au Jardin by Jean Dubuffet

These hybrid practitioners interest me more than the purists. Their explorations remain more open-ended, lead to fewer dead ends. They remind me that reality, even during a focused Buddhist meditation, is multiple. I hear birds while focusing on breath. Thoughts still rise and fall as I stare intently at the surface of a wall.

Who Was I?

Have you ever wondered who you might have been in previous lives? Many reincarnation enthusiasts believe that their progression through time is shot through with fame. Few like to imagine themselves as anonymous Medieval peasants, 19th century factory workers, or 20th century office drudges. The ego calls for glamor, excitement, power. J’etais Napoleon...

I occasionally tell students that their work reminds me of the drawings of a famous artist. Some accept the compliment. Some take offense. The latter group believe that everything they produce comes from a spring of creativity to which they have exclusive rights, that they have no predecessors or close relatives in the art world. I, on the other hand, look for kinship. Making art is a lonely exercise. I like to daydream that I’ve got a few friends who have traveled similar roads.

I sometimes look for artists whose work I could have drawn or painted. I imagine that I might have been one of them. I usually discover, however, that my favorites died after I was born. The chained sequences of our lives remain unlinked. In more pessimistic moods, I suspect that in a former life I sat at a Parisian bistro with another painter, an anonymous Jacques or Jean, but not with anyone whose work I now admire. Jean and I would have stared down at our cups of absinthe, bemoaned injustices perpetuated by dealers and critics, while secretly despising each other’s work. Quelle domage.

I’ve recently discovered a group of French artists who were active after WWII. The Tachists worked more intuitively, spontaneously than the rationalist, reductionist painters preceding them. They wanted to find out where the paint would take them instead of chaining themselves to a programmatic methodology.

Tachisme has often been described as the European response to the American Abstract Expressionists, but the movement arose independently. I find their work more palatable than Pollock’s and De Kooning’s. The Tachists still believed in composition, while the American painters often let their paintings drift until they became collections of inarticulate wriggles.

Oil painting by De Kooning

Serges Poliakoff and Andre Lanskoy seem the most attractive out of the Tachisme group. They both died, inconveniently for me, a decade or so after my birth. I was neither of them. C’est triste.

Oil painting by Serge Poliakoff

Oil painting by Andre Lanskoy