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 newness irreducible to any prior condition. Authentic, standing upright in the heart a depth without ground, it is open to all senses, sentiments, sensitivities, and sensualities in the unfolding of formative forces. It desires to rise and as it arises in consciousness the image brightens the ascent. It interrupts itself the moment it is summarized, the consequence of being interpreted. The image becomes something new, something dramatic like a holy covenant or promise only when form crosses all contour. A wide gaze flashing black in solitude, the weight within it opening the circle of imagination on which everything depends.

We search in old corners for new lights. In the drips and gathering of paint. In the froth of vision that is so many spinning rounds of stars. In the wrap of the hour that isolates and marks the butterflies of our infinities. If it depicts our sadness it is like the living dead left over from a war existing between shadow and substance. If it allures and designates, as it should, it is without project, plan, or intention.

A mature Image is a faith statement much like a child’s beckoning hand. But the will is necessary for seeing; and both the end and the means of this willed seeing is the image itself. As with the light of the desert it marks our acquaintance with ourselves and others.

Ruling the thudding heart, an image longs to move from the abyss of silence. An honest image will depart from the quick and easy that chews the creative seed until it curdles. Trusting the namelessness, the image requires our inmost life to rush louder. Poverty of representation and constituent craft is taken to task when it falls short.

The “correct” or “right” image is a flag surrounded by distances. It spreads itself outward as it signals the artistic truth toward which it gravitates and which directs its desire. The true character of an image is to be without model. Something similar to the energy of a burgeoning storm. Face to face, in potentia, we wait. Womb-eyed, salt for the unborn. Captivating in a reverie to which nothing else calls except an invincible attractiveness.

Where shadow draws an end, the light descends our bones bringing the heart into some semblance of symmetry.

Two

Joining “to say” with “what is said” takes on the meaning what is said to someoneor about something.

In our quiet way we delineate a vision.

The studio is where time’s flow ends. Where we follow the image out of grace. A flame of night by day. Along with the rage of psalms, a place where God hoists rather than affixes us to the common wall of the self. Away from fields of praise and quivering tomorrows toward the Divine Orchard with its benediction breath of even-time burning far from the chill of the window. Darkness may be the dam of pain but only sometimes when the sky is simply too dry, too bright.

The image moistens the weight of our dreams. As it tends to us, we reflect the summer’s golden turn.

Our power to imagine is more than the baton of existence. At the silence of boundaries, we trace the chalk circle our arms seal. The spots of paint between the fingers in the red evening when heaven is cut. We shudder and stretch ourselves tightly over wide-ranging resonances regardless of whatever we put out in the world falls. Between potholes and the abyss, our souls are renewed.