Learning and Breaking Rules

I went on a docent-led tour at the museum this afternoon. The topic: artists bending the rules.

The docent was a seventy-year-old woman with marked arthritis of the spine. To turn to look at something she had to turn her whole body; her neck  was frozen. She has not allowed her body’s aging limitations to keep her away from her love for art.

One painting that we looked at showed a variety of brush strokes, a variety of ways of applying paint. Much of the area of the painting was laid down with a full brush, the paint thick on the canvas, dripping before drying; a few areas were flat and matte and these surprisingly effectively punctuated the work.

Many pieces that Hilda featured on her tour were huge pieces for public spaces. In this they were like the huge works Renaissance art patrons commissioned for churches and palaces in Florence, Padua, and Venice. Many of these works were executed by American women artists. I found myself thinking how modern art might be called post-modern. Through the centuries, artists gradually learned to give their one-dimensional paintings the illusion of three dimensions. Modern artists, on the other hand, knowing  well enough how to add depth and perspective intentionally create flat images, subvert conventions about light, volume and media, and on the whole create thrilling experiences for us who are inured to reality TV and mobile-device games.

Art, whether in photography or other visual media, often shows the extraordinary effort taken by the artist to create it. One video installation showed the artist trekking through sun-baked mudflat with his Fresno glass scorching lines on the earth. What an intrepid imagination! But doing this under the blazing sun for two days is artistic effort.

The museum currently displays Ai Weiwei’s latest works. One installation memorializes the death of thousands of Chinese schoolchildren in Sichuan after an earthquake. Weiwei collected steel rebars from the collapsed schoolhouses, straightened and heaped them on the floor to create undulating lines of shuddering earth. A database of victims’ names with their dates of birth covered the whole of one wall, a tape recording of hundreds of people softly speaking each victim’s name. Art uses circumstances like tragedy to fire up the creative process.

Art seems to require an organic connection to an actual object or event that the artist transforms through his vision into its equivalent, the equivalent no longer constrained to its figurative representation but presented in the artist’s own artistic vocabulary. While artists before the 19th century worked to try to capture verisimilitudes of reality, modern artists use reality as a springboard to release their own creativity to represent the energy of that reality.

To appreciate modern art one has to cultivate one’s own capacity to listen to our own inner voices, see with our own inner eye, feel what the artist feels that we experience the artist’s experience in our own language. This link to an actual object, an actual event, an actual voice or sound or feeling seems necessary to bound the artist that he does not wander in structureless space. The artist’s native culture or cultures that he acquires of necessity add shape to his work and the sum of these and many other dynamisms pour into the final product: a piece of articulate, articulating art.

Maybe because I’ve come to art so late in life I like experimenting with lights, lines and hues. Someday, maybe when I’m the docent’s age, I may find my own rebar vocabulary. Meanwhile I’ll enjoy discovering art’s rules and breaking them when I need to in the service of creating something fresh and new.

In Search of Spring

It is nearly one Monday morning. I spent the afternoon at the art museum in search of the wild flowers that this time of the year begin to make their secretive appearance in the nooks and crannies of the museum grounds. Since I spent the evening processing some of the photos I took instead of doing tutorials that I know I should be doing, instead of writing much I am sharing these photos. 

 

 

This is a view of the main museum building housing the galleries on three floors, my favorite the contemporary arts galleries.

 

 

This is the mansion of J. K. Lilly who owned the extensive grounds on either side of the White River before he donated it all to the museum then housed at the Herron School of Art downtown.

 

 

This is a view of the landscape between the mansion and the stream that was incorporated into the canal system running behind the museum.

 

 

This is a view of the arches beneath the outdoor terrace of the mansion, overlooking the river.

 

 

These are Lenten roses, Helleborus, one of the earliest blooms to come up in the spring. The flowers are four inches from the ground so I had to shoot with the camera basically resting on the ground.

 

 

These are very fragrant flowers on a small tree behind the greenhouse. I know most of the flowering trees and shrubs in Indiana but these are so much earlier than the usual fruit trees like cherries, almonds and apples. I don’t know what they are!

 

 

Finally, the flowers that for many people signify spring – daffodils! These white-and-yellow flowers I call narcissus although both names are synonyms but when they have white petals I associate them with Narcissus, the Greek handsome youth who fell in love with his own reflection in the clear water and could not move away so he pined away and died, unable to tear himself from his beloved.

 

And that’s my first excursion in search of spring – on the grounds of the art museum.

Perfume from a Locked Room

I was going to the gym this evening when snow started falling, the brisk wind causing white-outs out my study window. We are expecting 5 – 8 inches of spring snow by morning. I decided to stay in and write.

I have not attended Christian services in years but each time Holy Week comes around the feelings from years ago return like perfume from the room of the beloved now locked shut forever. The feelings are magnified as I have been reading poems in Spanish by Federico García Lorca and his essays, lectures, letters and journal entries on “duende.” He grew up in a village just outside Granada so his imagination, his poetic self, is freighted with the spirit of Andalusia where Arabic, Jewish and Roman Catholic cultures came together in what scholars laud as a high point in European culture – when much of Western Europe was still in its Dark Ages.

Lorca extolled the artistic impetus of his homeland in his own unique way. His lyric images are grounded in the body and its sense organs. Unlike me he writes in sensual, sensory images. Describing a guitar’s songs, he writes:

• Llora por cosas
• lejanas.
• Arena del Sur caliente
• que pide camelias blancas.
• Llora flecha sin blanco,
• la tarde sin mañana,
• y el primer pájara muerto
• sobre la rama.
• ¡Oh guitarra!
• Corazón malherido
• por cinco espadas.

• [The guitar]
• Weeps for faraway things,
• A Southern desert yearning for
• white camellias.
• It weeps an arrow without a target,
• evening without tomorrow,
• and the first dead bird
• on the branch.
• Oh guitar!
• A heart mortally wounded
• by five swords.

(Slightly modified from a translation by Christopher Maurer.)

His poems were verbal paintings, his conceits tiny stories. García Lorca makes what I write look pale as smelly, dead fish. He knew how to paint feelings with words. He wrote poems, played the piano, and drew in a style reminiscent of Picasso‘s. He belonged to that era in Spanish art and literature peopled by the generation of ’27 which included his one-time bosom friend, Dali. Older was Picasso who was born in 1881. I think what this man could have accomplished if the Nationalists didn’t murder him for his liberal, anti-clerical views and, some researchers say, his homosexuality. Picasso and Dali hid out in Paris during the Civil War but García Lorca stayed on in Spain, proclaiming his views in his poems and plays.

If García Lorca (his father’s surname was García, his mother’s Lorca) didn’t write about outright religious content his poems mixed beauty with suffering and death, a combination I associate with Spanish Catholicism. Philippine Catholicism is likewise permeated with this dark version of Christianity. Just witness the focus of Holy Week in the Philippines. Even visita iglesia is about visiting the Santo Intierro in as many churches as one can go to. And the biggest crowds in church come not at Easter but on Good Friday, the men after the Calvario, the women the Madre Dolorosa.

Then again this is the paradoxical mix that is at the heart of my own aestheticism so I am a product, like Federico García Lorca was of his, of the land of my birth and beginnings. It’s the insight I later encountered in Zen and the Japanese theme of wabi-sabi, beauty in the fleeting moment; and the insight of encountering Baudelaire and the French symbolists and their admiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s dark, beautiful poems and tales.

Perhaps only the music of a dead yesterday can bring to life unspeakable beauty.

Through the Suburbs First

Has your computer ever eaten your CD and refused to spit it back out? If it has, you can try holding the C key while booting up your laptop. Your computer will try to use the CD as the start-up disk. When it finds that there’s no OS there, it should eject your CD.

Computers, or for that matter, any of the sophisticated technological tools we have e.g. LCD TVs, DVD players, DSLRs, computers, of course, are wonderful. They make short shrift of tasks that used to take hours or days or took several people to accomplish.

I remember when I was a child how our household required one person just to cook, another person to hand wash our clothes, another to keep the yard swept, etc. We had no refrigerator so Baye Tambok (Fat Woman – spoken with affection, not derision) would go to market everyday to buy staples for each day’s two big meals. Another woman spent the day at the artesian well rubbing and wringing clothes, heating water for the white sheets, dipping shirts into liquid starch, pinning clothes on the line to dry, then, in the evening, ironing piles of clothes for the work or school day in the morning.

But technology is great only when it works. Anything made by man is as finite as the day is short. Parts don’t work or the energy powering the device shorts. Any number of things can go wrong. When any of my devices – and I have tons of devices for my computer and camera systems – don’t function I about go crazy. I wouldn’t sleep until I’ve at least figured out what to do next. It is heaven and hell rolled into one glorious life!

PBS tonight had a program on the two superpowers after World War II racing to make the most powerful nuclear bomb. The scientists mandated by both governments to mathematically create the behemoths couldn’t predict all the consequences of their project because they were in virgin territory. America’s B bomb was meant to be 15 megatons but an unexpected chemical reaction involving lithium 7 magnified the blast threefold. Dozens of natives of the Marshall Islands where the test blast happened suffered from radiation sickness and many died. To this day Bikini Atoll is still uninhabited. The atoll lost its bikini! Where there was land there is now a deep lake. Sakharov, the Russian scientist who devised Russia’s mega bomb went against his orders and reduced the strength of the bomb from 100 megaton to 50 but the destruction was still so massive that he became a vocal opponent of nuclear bombs. In the 1970s he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

We’d like to think we know what we’re doing. We’d like to think if we did A, B would follow. But in everything we do there is  always the element of surprise – especially if we are venturing into new territory.

To my mind, art should never stand still. An artist can’t follow a formula to produce work after work. He has to always aim for something new, a new vision of the same old things we’ve known through the centuries. For me this is why art is so exciting – and scary. We do learn techniques and over the years acquire a core of tools to use but we have to put these to work in a transformative way each time we start a new project. At least that’s my idea of an artist.

The same works in our plans for our lives and careers. We know patterns so we can project into the future what to expect from steps that we should take but what materializes is seldom exactly as we planned. The element of surprise is always present. This to me is what makes life a constant challenge, a terror and a joy!

My young nephew wants to come to America and earn his living through his painting. He doesn’t think his savings would last him while he established himself in New York City’s congested market. I told him, if you really want to come to America and live here you may have to modify your strategy. Get your green card as soon as you can. Once you have that you can take an art-related job to support yourself while you’re building your art career.

Sometimes the road to Rome is not direct but meanders through the suburbs before making it to the Palatine Hill. Technology notwithstanding, in life as in art, we have to make elbow room for surprise, for virgin consequences.

Mother of Ten Thousand Things

It’s half past midnight on Sunday. I’m having one of those days of magical energy that I get maybe once every six weeks. There’s no accounting for how it comes about, the only response one could have is gratefulness when it comes.

I went to bed last night after one, woke up at seven, went back to sleep for what I thought would be just another hour or so but when I did wake up it was one in the afternoon. I had slept twelve hours!

Maybe the body was making up for the previous two days when I shorted myself on sleep but I think it has more to do with some mysterious cycle in the brain related to energy and creativity. Energy goes up and down, like circadian rhythm but that is more lunar in both scope and length. I liken these cycles to the cycles of a woman’s fertility that waxes and wanes with the phases of the moon, the tides and the tilting of the planet on its off-center axis.

Whatever it is the phenomenon has always intrigued me. I wish I could predict when the cycle goes up so I could accept when it falls but maybe it is simply the human condition that we go must through these ups-and-downs willy-nilly. Change is essential to our nature, essential to the very nature of what ancient god-believing peoples called “Creation.”

When energy awakens like this I feel a cornucopia of possibilities. There are countless things I want to do and doing them feels absolutely feasible. The feeling is fantastic because I also know there aren’t enough hours in a day, years in a lifetime, to do them all. Maybe the lesson it pushes me to learn is how accomplishment is not the high point of my life but that all possibilities exist within but I am not the sole realizer. No one owns possibilities; we borrow what we can but the totality belongs if they belong at all to all living things, through multitudinous aeons of lives.

In the ancient Chinese collection of aphorisms we know today as the Tao Te Ching (“Book of the Way and the Power”), the very first section refers to this profound mystery:

• The Way that can be spoken of
• Is not the Way;
• The name that is named
• Is not it.

• The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth;
• The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.

• Rid yourself of desires to know its secrets;
• Allow yourself desires to see its manifestations.

• These two are the same
• But differ only in how we call them.
• Being the same they are called mysteries,
• Mystery upon mystery -
• The gateway of the manifold secrets.

(I have modified the 1963 translation of these verses by D. C. Lao based on the many translations into English that I’ve studied through the years.)

The Tao Te Ching (Dao De Jing in modern Pinyin) is the equivalent of the Bible in China’s indigenous mystical religion, Taoism. It does not speak of God as instigator of the ”ten thousand things” as the Torah and many other Middle Eastern scriptures do. It goes instead into the heart of what fascinates men and women through untold ages: the nature of being and how it is manifested in our experience.

The part of this mystery that most concerns us as artists is the nature of creativity, bringing forth out of chaos something that we can name, a product of our living force that others likewise can experience. To create something of beauty or truth is to enact what deists believe God himself does – bringing forth from nothing something.

To create is to cut a piece of seamless reality that our senses see it as a piece apart from the Whole though in reality it never leaves its mother, the mother of the ten thousand possibilities. As humans all we do is borrow for a moment what we can never own but in the magic of desire we name and call it our own.

As indeed it is when we come to realize we too are a part of the Nameless although having learned Words we come to believe we know and therefore exist. Just because we give it a name does not change what it really is ; Reality defies our meager attempts at understanding.

So we work at creating Art or Literature or Science or Philosophy; we put our hearts to work and materialize possibilities – because it is in our nature. We act in finite time with infinite hopes.

Without Beauty, without Joy

Locating beauty in human experience and creativity is an immemorial conversation in the world’s history of thought and one perhaps that only becomes relevant when an individual or society succeeds to a level of independence and maturity; otherwise its consideration is mere speciousness. Or is it?

Is beauty the same from generation to generation? Is it the same for all individuals in a society at the same instant in time? Is it even the same in an individual from the time his or her mind begins to recognize and generate concepts of beauty?

Is beauty based on our experience of nature only or does it occur solely in what we as artificers create from those experiences? Is beauty intrinsic in objects outside us or does the mind create it from templates the organism inherits from culture and modifies through experience and contemplation.

Is beauty what makes us like or love an object or is it nothing more than a fable we consume because authorities tell us something is beautiful or not? Is it the same quality in an object of the physical senses as in a psychic experience, in a sunset that everyone experiences or a gesture from a friend or lover or a thought that elevates us momentarily to noble action or inaction?

Is beauty of the intellect or of emotion, of both or neither, of affect and conation and a simple statement unadulterated by an impulse to act or desist from acting?

Whole libraries can be founded on works devoted to these questions and more questions about this strange puissance we call beauty. The subject is compelling as I grow older. Is this because beauty is something that like wine mellows and grows complexity and subtlety with age and experience?

Or because we realize that beauty and happiness are conjoined like Siamese twins, happiness consisting of finding beauty in tiny moments of each day as we navigate with growing awareness the temporality of lives, of endings and beginnings and the exquisite plurality of thought that must cease if we are to know what we are?

Tonight, as I write these words down, I want to run recklessly with Plato and Aristotle, with Baruch Spinoza and Kant and Hume, ponder points from the Buddhist Abhidhamma and Islam and join the swirling flood into profane words about the unspeakable, the indefinable, the mysterious.

But seriously, a dialectic on beauty is too formidable an undertaking with morning just hours away. All I can do is locate a bench on my private island where I can sit down again to see into sunset or this wilting flower, a bit of unrhymed poetry, this piece of stolen pie.

Maybe beauty becomes a natural object of meditation when we begin to lose our way from the way of the madding crowd. We can think, feel and act for ourselves, and life is too precious now to live it without awareness, without beauty, without joy.

Instinct for Joy

I came home from the gym at five this afternoon. The sun was still high in the winter sky but the shadows have already lengthened to cover much of the small garden outside my house. A shaft of sunshine shone on a drift of purple croci whose buds have loosened slightly. They will be open by  morning.

After putting my workout clothes in the drier, I started preparing dinner. A simple meal, by the time I finished eating it two hours had passed. My initial reaction was irritation and regret. I could have spent that time working on my photographs or writing or practicing the piano.

Then I thought back on the last two hours. I had washed lettuce and spun the leaves dry. I had sliced a ripe Roma tomato into neat red wedges. I had taken a zucchini and cut an inch-long piece into similarly sized pieces. A piece of creamy feta cheese, a handful of Kalamata olives, a dash of white balsamic vinegar and fragrant Italian extra-virgin olive oil. The salad was done.

Meanwhile I had pan-roasted an inch-thick slab of farm-raised salmon with scallion and garlic and steamed bright green broccoli flowerets and orange squash cubes in water. I had heated a cup of aromatic jasmine rice to mop up the juices in the pan and molded the rice unto the plate with a sprig of Italian parsley on the side.

Dinner was delicious! I had enjoyed every minute not only consuming but preparing the meal. This was no wasted time. Every minute had been a minute spent creating something and it was not just the dinner I had just eaten.

When I lived in New York City I spent every free moment I had visiting museums, attending plays and lectures, going to concerts and recitals that I could afford on my then meager income. I loved getting together with friends to discuss poets or cabaret singers or the new Filipino restaurant on Roosevelt Avenue. That was living immersed in the varied arts available only in a great city like New York.

I missed all that when I moved to Indianapolis. Here in the heartlands no one had heard of Cavafy or was interested in discussing Hesse’s novels. There were no ethnic neighborhoods. I had to drive the two hours to Cincinnati to eat Indian food!

I was depressed for several years until I started using my time to explore the surprisingly varied religious experiences available in the area. I spent weekends at a Benedictine monastery, St. Meinrad Archabbey, a few miles north of the Ohio River that divided the state from Kentucky. I spent time with new friends in Bloomington and Nashville discussing New Age spiritualities. I danced around bonfires with New Men redefining masculinities and sweated in makeshift lodges in the cold of winter while chanting Native American songs. I apprenticed myself at a Friends’ meeting in downtown Indianapolis and was assigned to teach yoga to the teenagers. I had found another way to waste time!

Ten years ago, on a trip with my sister to the American Southwest, I took a new Minolta 35 mm camera and discovered photography. I left that first camera in a restaurant on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. It was four years later that I bought my first Canon camera and started shooting again. I was hooked.

In 2007 I spent a vacation in New York City attending a weeklong workshop on film editing. I was seduced by the power of digital images that combined created a sense of movement, a sense of time passing, right there on my computer screen. The following year I decided to take a “sabbatical” from work and learn how to make digital movies.

That same month, May, I hired a young man from Bloomington to pose for me in a makeshift studio at my house. Kneeling on the floor, climbing on a stepladder to get overhead shots, twisting my body this way looking for another perspective to shoot, I realized I loved what I was doing! Instead of delving into video editing I found myself buying a more sophisticated Canon camera and shooting 60 more models!

Last year I decided I was not going back to work. I would live on what little money I had and keep working on improving my photographs. In the fall a nephew from a branch of my family that I had lost touch with came to visit me in Indianapolis. Jojo was living in New York City and spending his time painting in a one-room apartment in Queens. As he told me his story I resolved I would follow through with my own idea of shifting my photography work from shooting models and doing portraits to exploring artistic images using photographs as starting points.

Since then I’ve met another painter, a man a year older than Jojo who has been painting for five years. We met at the art museum where I had gone for a docent-led tour of Gauguin’s works in Brittany. Visiting his studio I was impressed with the paintings he had done but had not shown anyone else. At art shows around the state he has been exhibiting landscapes because his parents had told him landscapes sold. Now he wanted to broaden his field of work. Years of doubt were giving way to new light and clarity.

This obviously is a severely truncated story of my life meant to illustrate how life often goes in a spiral like the cycles of birth and rebirth that Hindus and Buddhists say is how the worlds come and go. I remember how in my final year in graduate school I took the summer off and took classes in British and American writers, the French symbolist movement and the philosophy of literature. I then went back and finished my degree.

Thirty years would pass before I would go back to those accidents of interest that surfaced that almost forgettable summer when errant sunlight lit up a figure in my psyche and it stayed there while I went on with another life.

Art for me is the creative aspect of a human being. It is called different names — music, visual art, architecture, dance, theater, film, cuisine, literature, religion, mythology, even science and philosophy. It springs in the dark fallows of a man or a woman bringing with it in the physicality of body, in its psychic representation in the mind, and in the heart which is another name for soul a feeling which for me is the real product of its prodigious activity – joy.

Art is the human instinct for joy.

“… And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” Gospel of John 1:5