Articles
64 articles
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The Texture Of Seeing
The texture of a Van Gogh painting is not simply the application of thickly applied paint but the relief and visible ridges of his inner life. -Dadaamericano, c. 1980
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The Transcendental Tangle
“I am large, I contain multitudes” bard Whitman (1819-1892) announces to the world in Song of Myself. Whitman saw himself not just as an individual, a single human being but as a vessel for all of humanity, nature, and the universe. “To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow.
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The Consequence Of Shape
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for. Georgia O’Keeffe The fascination for shapes calls forth certain invariant traits of the human psyche and gives insights into attitudes toward artistic creation. The Greeks and Romans transferred the geometries of shape in nature to their buildings and mathematically derived the construction from their calculations.
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Composition By Field
Composition is a map of sorts, a visual artifact of the continuity of the painter’s navigational surface and mundus interior. The schematic view relying on the idea that structure and layout as well as configuration is a placement by field. The symbolic representation of a system or process defined as open and as a continuity of units.
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A Hurry Through Which Known And Strange Things Pass
Notwithstanding the artist’s bag of tricks, there is a surreal terrain neither here nor there but in between where the pale fruits of introversion live in a foreclosed garden. The precarious Guest of the moment is our fleeting thoughts, visitors that arrive, stay a while, and then depart. That is the transient nature of consciousness.
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Beginnings
Beginnings (Watch well your beginnings. The many resurrections. Take the first steps as the heart names them.
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A Pilgrim of Meaning
A Pilgrim of Meaning Listen to me as I am when I am with myself A feeling for the thickness of things When flesh quivers at my call And life consists of burning up questions. A Pilgrim of Meaning digests the world by swallowing it in bits, chunks or whole. In a will-to-meaning that is the interaction of mental activity, social contract, the cold teeth of reality.
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Memorable Mutualities: Dialogues with Your Work
In his novel By the Sea, Nobel laureate (2021) Tanzanian-born British Abdulrazak Gural writes: "I speak to maps. And sometimes they say something back to me…This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. " The unknown within and beyo
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A Restless Openwork
Thoughts that slip like fish from the hands of a blind person. Creation is born out of restlessness. In so many universes saving us and wanting to smile.
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Inrushes of the Heart
And I am here to build hearts. Yunus Emre (1238-1320) Thought exalts the level of interpretation yet never scratches the surface of that timeless, wordless, primal sense. We flirt with points of departure but from our limited view it is a sequence of eve
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The Sad Still Life of Tulips
Still life painting was an established genre in Northern Renaissance and Baroque periods often valued for its detail and symbolism. Flowers painted in suffocating compositions at the peak of bloom kissed by impermanence. Flowers that gave their fragranc
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Driven by a Bright Clarity
…and, when we call him a maker of images,he will ask us what we call an image. Plato, The Sophist, 239-dPaint in order to understand. Understand in order to paint.
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All-Imagining - The Afterlives of Paintings
The best way to study painting is with eyes shut. The “afterlife” existence and identity postulated of an individual’s consciousness that exists after death is not what this essay is about. Not the continued existence that may take place in a spiritual
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Fermenta Cognitionis
Resonation Resonation is the production of a deep, full, reverberation. An evocation of feeling or recognition with the Work in a way that is poignantly meaningful, in which something corresponds to experience or belief. Specifically, the word describes
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Clairvoyance of the Small
Small works can be perfect, but perfection itself is not small. There is nothing insignificant about small works that have the spirit of detail, reference, and metaphor. Seeds for conclusions can be drawn from them and the advantage to which they can be
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Giving Voice to Image
One An image in the Garden of the Imaginal rests silently in the limits of its own form. In the studio it is a gestural pleasure linked to a pattern more than purpose. Despite its own history, it reveals itself as non-given, manifesting itself in a newn
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Coincidence of Opposites - The Nature of Correlative Thinking
To speak about painting is to translate it. The kind of translation that self-contextualizes a path to advance understanding. Communication with oneself is back to the roots, so to speak, beyond mere looking to see those characteristics that are the rev
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Plural Like the Universe
Obsessed, bewildered By the shipwreck Of the singular We have chosen the meaning Of being numerous. George Oppen, Of Being Numerous (1975) Consider this: the immensity of Creation that produced the elementary particles and our solar system. Now consider
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The Hand Holds the Night by a Thread
A Thousand-And-One-Nights & Twenty-Four Days by Josh Goldberg (Boulder: Albion-Andalus, 2020. ) Author’s Preface: Night-conscious. Striking a lunar nerve.
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Waiting with A Listening Heart and A Seeking Eye
Life’s splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will
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A Companion of Alternate Terms for Thinking About Your Work
Before you there is a set of terms. Use them freely, mutatis mutandis, to have a more expansive way to look at and criticize your work. They incarnate depth experience, re-imagine larger possibilities of understanding.
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Fragments of Redemption - Further Notes to My Imaginary Self
The sense of transience is never far away… She lies on my soul like a molten morning heavy with the burn of silence. Daylight stars suckling in eyes softer than any fragrance. In an emptiness that pales in the light of uncertain hours and in the sun-fla
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A Modest Kind of Alchemy
No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy. -Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), French artist, writer, chess player Painting is a form of alchemy
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The Source and the Seed
Since then I have slowly learned to grasp how every thing is connected across space and time… -W. G. Sebald, A Place in the Country At the point of my brush, it happens – I live for moments like this – that I invent a mark [trait].
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Notes to My Imaginary Self
Notes to My Imaginary Self is a short selection of “journal entries” of personal yet universal meaning. A top to bottom movement to the center of being pursues communication with elusive aboriginal shadows as well as the necessary angels of radical imman
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An Infinite Context
There is no painting that does not have its gods and ghosts. Recall the stages and transformations of the work: images that vanish to the nether regions and those that spring transcendental. Images that shout but are devoid of the resonant stillness of
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Naming Paintings (Truth in Names)
Look deeply: every second I am arriving. Thich Nhat Hahn, Please Call Me By My True Names, 2004. A true name is an eye within an eye.
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The Sailor and the Angel in the Altarpiece
for Lisa H-L I The SailorSky opensSilver moonlightSpills across the waterA boat sails The sailor is asleep The seafarer smells the sea Strong on the windFirst spits of rainSoftly signalsThe returning gale He moves toward the portal Stares unseeingA differ
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The Importance of Latent Looking
There is the sum of a complex exchange of influence back and forth among different domains of the work. It determines the face and form and serves as focal points for all processes. It is the background in which forms function, connect, and converge.
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Aspects of the Imaginal and Metaphorical
Like a black cat uncurling from deep slumber the ego yawns to be known. Perhaps this is the great descending desire of the unconscious. The egoic identity that invents something important we do not know.
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A Natural History of Art
Not so long ago I came across a passage I had copied in longhand from one of Loren Eiseley’s (1907-77) books written in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
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The Necessity of Repair
Walter Pater (English essayist, art and literary critic, theorist, fiction author and contributor to Aestheticism in the late 19th century) in his “Preface” to The Renaissance wrote: (I paraphrase) to see the object as in itself as it really is, is to dis
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The Process-Actualization of 'Just Painting'
In the previous essay I have suggested reflection on the transcendental dimensions of painting. Rather than a radical departure from those thoughts, I want to focus on “just painting” as a natural continuity or parallel revelation of depth experience and
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Metaphysicum Abstractum
“Metaphysicum Abstractum” I am large, I contain multitudes. Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (1850). Metaphysical or intrapsychic domains can expand consciousness through the use of symbols, metaphors, and dreams.
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Concealment and Configuration - A Meditation
Concealment and Configuration: A Meditation I move beyond sensuous apprehension to investigate the work outside the seeing. A downward gathering to the roots of human response to seek what it is that receives its directive. What releases itself toward m
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Process Does Not Self
Process Does Not Self A path is the course or direction in which one moves. An action taken with a specified objective or goal. A course of conduct with an expected outcome.
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Asymmetrical Imagining
In Buddhism there is the idea of reciprocity (literally “waiting for each other”). This happens because that happens; this is present because that is present. Where there is darkness there is light, where there is wisdom there is ignorance, where there
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August 2023 Blog Was Laozi a Painter
Was Laozi a Painter? Five Fragments for a Future Scroll In the sixth century BCE China there was a person called Li Er, Li Boyang, Li Dan (hor Lao Dan), respectfully known to us as Laozi (Lao Tzu), the “Old Master” of Philosophical Daoism. He was Keeper
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July 2023 Arete or Quality of Painting
Arete, or Quality in Painting For Dan In the Iliad Homer has Achilles’ father Peleus urging him to “be the best”- to possess arete. (“quality”, “excellence”, or “virtue”). In the Odyssey, old Laertes rejoices when his son the legendary hero of the Troja
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In Your Eyes, The Light
In Your Eyes, The Light With thanks to Peter Gabriel I Reach Out From The Inside The retina, which is the size of the thumbnail, has approximately 150,000,000 light sensitive cells which send impressions to the brain. In all the sensory receptors you hav
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Language of the Face - The Revealed Abstraction
May 2023 - Language of the Face: The Revealed in Abstraction I witness the Face as it emerges from the void of my creation. I see myself clearly as if in a calm afternoon sea. I sink into myself, deeply looking inward and outward at the same moment.
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My Soul Is Not Only a Dark Inland Sea
My soul is not only a dark inland sea A night-center's impenetrable depth It is the single breath ordered by time Star fields and hourglass roses Naked beneath the flesh. The thought in a dream Behind monotone sorrows The reality that transcends multipli
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Luminous Incubation
Luminous Incubation Acrylic on paper, 22”x30” I don’t understand how it came to be. I take in the painting as I take in a breath. Not with intoxicated sanctity but with a dose of pale trembling.
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Seeker of Affinities
I am a seeker of affinities I am a seeker of the light’s uncertain hours I am a seeker ignited by the deepest sleeves I am a seeker discharging small storms I am a seeker dreaming between divine debris I am a seeker before the candle’s darkened face I am
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City of Imagination
On the darkest days trapped within the epicycles of thought I enter the City of Imagination. Leaving behind measurement, data-capture, with an eclipse of image-speak I follow the stony way to the beauty of my daybreak. There’s a shift in consciousness,
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A Meditation on Color
for Steve Joseph Everything begins and ends with the eye, within the eye. Before the object there is an image. Before the image there is a color.
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Immaculate Perception
Kafka wrote that the act of reading is “an ax for the frozen sea in us. " The same may be said of the act of painting. For that matter, a blow to the head or a great kiss may be necessary to bang the blind side of possibility.
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Nightingale’s Signal
Watching students work on their paintings it seems that there are two distinct approaches. Ordinary visual information retrieval is the most common. But what happens when they come across something never encountered in their work?
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The Wonder of Art Episode 37, Art2Life Podcast, Ft. Josh Goldberg
Find the latest interview and more about the artist Josh Goldberg on the Art2Life website
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Comparison 3 - Dein Goldenes Haar Margarete - Dein Aschenes Haar Shulemith and Eva Hesed
Listen as the artist compares Dein Goldenes Haar Margarete/Dein Aschenes Haar Shulemith and Eva Hesed.
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Comparison 2 - Cycles of Visionary Recitals and Reveries of Rain
Listen as the artist compares Cycles of Visionary Recitals and Reveries of Rain.
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Comparison 1 - Mundus Imaginalis and Fall Into Time
A link to the SoundCloud recording
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What Is Tightening and Loosening
Tightening your work is to make your imagery taut and concise, precise and compact, refined and essential. Loosening your work is to allow your imagery to be open, free of confinement, unbound, unpackaged, and inexact. Realization and concomitant insigh
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One Painter’s Credo
To see the work as a mode of being in the world. To court naufrage (“shipwreck”) as part of the creative process. To tickle out all that is hidden and make it manifest.
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Collage Notes
Following are notes from Josh Goldberg’s collage workshop. Collage** – Seeks interesting effects True collage – Seeks poetic ignitions, lends itself to randomness, displacement and faith in chance. The intention of true collage is the disruption of the a
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Wandering at Ease
Full function painting depends upon self-disclosure. Self-disclosure is working with an authenticity, a genuineness. It is working from the ongoing “field” of your experience.
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Looking and Seeing on the Painter's Path
Seeing nothing one sees everything. Paint less and less until you’re non-painting. When you’re non-painting there’s nothingyou can’t paint.
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A Cup of Emptiness - Contemporary Abstract Painting
I am nothing; I see all… (Emerson) As the borders of the ego dissolve there is a higher state of “indifference”. A no-tone, or a single tone (“It rained all afternoon in a single tone” – Garcia Marquez). It is a stripping down of habitual thinking towar
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My View of Painting
For me painting is a mode of being in the world – a koan not to be solved, but lived. And like working the koan I have to “shipwreck my own thinking” about what painting is – in order to make painting an act of authentic choosing. I also have to have en
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Painter's Path IX - Three Short Dialogues
Student: How do we escape the false way of viewing painting? Teacher: How, how, how! Always wanting to know how!
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Seven Vitalities for Full-Function Painting
Allow the brush to “wander” without conclusion above the realm of conventional judgments & practices. Critique your thinking in terms of “good” & “bad,” “right & “wrong,” “success” & “failure”. Nurture the “knack” of painting spontaneously, remembering
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The Painter's Path III - Making Abstract Art in an Age of Artifice
Five Positions of the Essential and Contingent in Contemporary Abstract Painting:1. The Contingent within the Essential. Looking at the overall composition see all the components of the painting.
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The Painter's Path is Nothing Special
Create: then disown. Theo. Roethke Painting is so close, so personal, so immediate, and so ordinary.
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Selected Principles of Rapid Collage
The intention of rapid-collage is to disrupt the manner of working in what the artist normally calls “style”. Rapid-collage is a “non-thinking” creative act where the sudden revelation of image and metaphor marks the consent of things chosen. Because th
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