Beginnings

Beginnings

(Watch well your beginnings. The many resurrections. Take the first steps as the heart names them. Beginnings that carry no implication of endings. In dark convolutions of the brain’s blossoming. Only where Light comes to rest & flesh brightens is the perfect loop of endless renewals.)

The function of a teacher is to bring each person to their own beginning. Beginnings that reach out to us from before Time to the unfolding wonders of painting’s dispositional power. The willingness to bring ourselves into the free domain of two-dimensional hereafters. Drag astray everything thought and said from pattern to placement and simply let go. Without comparison, without judgement as an event from the perfect matrix of creation. Anything else merely re-feeds the illusion of thought being real unto itself. The nearer focus burns at the edges of logic.

To initiate change or a new start an approach is necessary. Overcoming apathy or prior failings is not enough. It has to be without the forced clatter of concepts, the misinterpretations of one’s oeuvre, or further embellishment of ego. Not mere vanishment and expiration but with the preservation of the creative spark. A few fragments and focused images. All the paraphernalia and techniques merely details or vehicles between the in-breath and out-breath. The clearing of all thoughts and desires to the full fissure of one’s being.

Opening the expanse of concealment of what is assigned to us – and perhaps refused or not understood because of calculative understanding of the temporal-spatial playing field of the “there”. The event of painting where everything is true, simultaneously decided and grounded. Even in the remoteness of undecidability where the process of painting is the only truth present, the last god hidden.

What is more original than first beginning? Why anticipate resolution? Also consider transition, the middle work between beginning and end. Unexploited energy is secluded in the richest possibilities. Indeed, but the flute of felicity is at the end, which is the reflection of its beginning. Looking back inceptual painting is necessary as daylight’s path between the first beginning, still to be won, and what is unfolding. Like the broadest most acute and constant meditation carried through the crowded circle of the color-wheel.

The occurrence of beginning traverses the imaginal more than so-called representation, faux aesthetics, or silence-bearing utterance. If the painting lacks a “coming from afar” in the beginning of the process, finding or re-attaining itself will simply not happen. To repeat, there must be a repetition of the first beginning as a necessity all the way back in order to understand the path forward. Resonance, interplay, leap and grounding in unity measured against conceptuality and cleverness is empty opportunity. What is grasped will be essence. Arbitrary at first then pervasively determined it becomes a new clarification of the unfailing hand bypassing the current mode of thinking. A guiding disposition of the image arising out of the first unknown.

Beginnings self-grounded, though hesitant yet ascendent over uncertainty, shelter un-concealment of the concealed as well as the refusal to be shocked, exalted, or foreboded. In the domain of stillness, by way of its own nature painting, that is process, lets the place of openness (the clearing of “there”) happen. The essence is reserved only for this moment. The power to enchantment is strong where it was most decisively hidden.

The beginning is the transport temporalizing. Opening up and granting an originary space as a clearing for something not yet fully grasped. Consistency comes forth as Presence. It is this change that is filled and in most constant readiness. Interestingly, the truth of beginnings that constitute a grounding is projected on the shortest path. The leap from beginning to end is an oblique and cunning guide within the process.

First beginnings encompass the entire history of the painting. Its attendance becomes fixed for what is to come later. It is a leap at the beginning (or at all beginnings) that is a readiness for the event of painting. Preparing an open realm which is time-space (the site/composition of the moment) makes the gap accessible and endurable in a variety of potential modes of determinability and commanding demeanors. We leap from just about anywhere inasmuch as we are appropriate to the call. Springing forth at the site of the moment is a fundamental manifestation already decided and gathered we dare say as amazement.

The broadest leap is one of non-thinking or non-linear action. The event of painting is penetrated to further the possibility of gauging, weighing, and subsequently carrying out at the site its essential occurrence. The task of the original projection and the leap draws its necessity out of familiar and ordinary studio practices. In a sense, it is this transcendental act, though provisional, that prepares the turnaround and the empowering jump.

We must understand in a corresponding way the need to make visible something that belongs to an essential truth and how it stands or “recites” without dislodging the basic relation to the overall composition. To let the painting itself first arise and to remain in residence in its occupancy or “outward show”. Not simply as an expedient but as futural in the uniqueness of what is last.

This is the redemption of time, of timely opportunity (Gk., kairos, “right” or “critical moment”). Unlike quantitative linear time (Gk.,chronos), redemption is split-second qualitative. A perfectly aligned moment when conditions are ideal for spontaneous action. In the end it is not only how it begins but how it is understood. The resonating of the initial appearance that eventuates the painting itself also involves psyche that must undergo alteration. It must be able to know the moment that matters to designate the instance. To enter the depth of the beginning is to be far from every sort of facile self-critique. A readiness to paint prepared as here and now.

What do we care for the grease of failed undertakings. We bathe in fields where new days begin. Unfilled places where hearts take breath with typicality and transcendence. Visible contexts not in time and space nor outside of them. Slices of metaphysical reality, totum simul. Paintings giving birth to painters. Paintings not as objects conventionally analyzed but as modes of knowing.

Though we live in a world dreaming of endings, let us nourish beginnings.

Blessings are in its seeds.