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. Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Anselm Kiefer to name three have had their magna opera shape the living present and future of art history and artmaking. Great Works that express a collective subconscious and virtue of access to the desire for self-change. An alchemy that exists outside conventional pronouncements, aesthetic articulations, and visual proclamations.

According to Rabbi Aaron of Starroselje (19thC.) “Everything that exists passes from one nature into another. The linking of these natures is called Wonder. In the language of the Kabbalists, it was known as Keter (“Crown”), the power that links opposites and joins them in wondrous unity.” In our modest studio practice it is an alchemy of effusions of lines, patterns and forms, mandalas of wholeness collapsing and rebuilding - solve et coagula - dissolving and reforming at different levels claiming our consciousness. A co-arising through working and reworking of the coincidentia oppositorum.

In combination and transformation, a process that can take the ordinary turning of an artwork into the extraordinary work of art. An activity of disparate entities, colliding Hegelian contradictions, and maps of misreading “together feeling” [Gk. sympatheia] as one part of the whole affects another. Returning to itself through rupture and rapture, juxtaposing pre-existing, unrelated elements and dislocations in a “chemical wedding”. The coupling of two or more realities, at first, seems irreconcilable in appearance. But what looks arbitrary is in fact the transmutation towards an open vision where nothing is predetermined or solid. A substantiated practice of psyche and physis, mind and body, unconscious and conscious, awareness and integration, painter and painting.

We painters as petit alchemists harmonize the disjunctive, the “breaking off and leaving”, to discover congruity in incongruity. The world and the worldly-other. Our unassuming alchemy tracks these overtones and intuitional clues which fire self-examination. Through a regenerative process we give new life to our pebbled thoughts. What may appear as contradictory disappears when integrated into an aesthetic performance to follow our own mindsight. It is a quest for personal sovereignty as it is a search for horizons of possibility.

It is through defamiliarization and recontextualization that unexpected meanings and perspectives appear. A new matrix of meaning maintained by continuity and constant change and trajectory where one fragment is joined to a previous one by cause and effect, narrative direction, actio in distans. We follow each trace of the brush, line of charcoal, by its own blessed moment. Compositions directed and driven welcoming our labyrinthine entrances and exists. The Not-Yet enabling the light of the living Now being arranged along a line of effortless action.

We shift from static representation to a spontaneous, intuitive fragmentation. We temporarily free ourselves of association and allusion that may hamper the reincarnation of the work. In the language of alchemy, we perfect the substance not the subject of the work. We treat materials with regard to their properties, whereby they entrust to us their innate potential. We recognize that each work heats in its own way. We know our fire as we know our material because we, the cook, are the cooked. We yield and let our work belong to the process. Rational analysis waits for emotions to flow, reveries to float. Transfiguration is the salt of our theurgy. Refining, clearing away the dross, our divine agency. Evolution of the work from low to high grade.

In our twilight vision we half-glimpse the undiscovered. No single overarching perspective, no assurances. Just the tenebrosities of our own unclenched dust that breaks the rocks of stagnation. The felt experience of raising the “dead”. A symbolic death drenched with miracles disconnecting head from body that separates us from negative and opposing ways. We lift the weight that holds us down and resurrect ourselves. Darkness kindled back into beginnings. Essentials laid bare; we move from a monocentric universe to a cosmos of complex perspectives. From paper sheet or canvas to sky that is a transformation of imagination with grace accorded by alchemical attribution.

With nightingales and psalms we follow the trajectory of our self-shaping. But there is something else, something more profound yet exquisite. A reality that transcends our multiplicity, and through which seer and seen are united. We seek out new associations and new perspectives, a newness in perception that discovers and reveals the hitherto overlooked, disregarded, or unnoticed.

But we need patience to disengage difficulties until matters disclose their essence without opposition. To know at the soul level to bring something to its final perfection, the most subtle understanding must outweigh mountains, and the world must appear as nothing more than a line drawn between light and shadow.