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 have in your body seventy percent are in your eyes. A flash of light on the retina is the crude beginning of your seeing experience perhaps like the first application of paint you place on canvas. Not yet knowledge but a prolegomenon in space and time what becomes in perception a taking of shape and form to sensation. What arrives at the visual center of the cortex bears no more resemblance to a detailed portrait of your mother than does a map of the city where you live represent the place where you are reading this. The image in your brain is enthusiastically non-objective. The cortex transforms these receptors into a mysterious code-language firing into existence in what I will call vajra or “diamond” seeing.

Who can say if we hold this light in lucid stillness? Or, if it merges in the mind more than in the eye? Can we speak of a before or afterlife of light? All I can tell you is that a deep awareness of the light can radically alter your perception of painting. Seeing not in bits but of the whole movement of painting. Seeing as a phenomenological fact. Without meaning, success, or failure. Without an imagined future but seeing as an act in the present.

Seeing requires the heat of inquiry. Not only in the outward perception to see what the work demands of you but seeing inwardly. Not memory that is identified as experience which through thought is associated with an image already in mind or labeled with a word. A seeing that is not the thought of seeing. Otherwise, seeing becomes static, mechanical, without movement or freshness.

Perception of the whole work means taking yourself out of the painting and giving complete attention to the process of painting. In that attention, the particular and the general will reveal the full meaning of your work.

Direct perception changes brain cells. It breaks conditioning and the cycle of “old” ways and methods, techniques, and approaches. Pure observation or choiceless awareness results in no-effort painting. Determination or necessity need not apply. If you understand this point you will “see”. This is what is meant as having a unified vision.

The most important metaphor of your relationship to your world is that of sight. “Knowing is seeing.” It is your first language and the way you understand your world and work. “I see” means “I understand”. This seeing is a knowing not only through the impressions we receive but going beyond the re-cognized model in your brain.

Your eyes go further to enter into the object of your attention in a new way. This miracle presents itself to your sight. Herein object and observer alter consciousness, scratch at the heart of your life.

I Wanna Touch the Light

Light of day succeeds night. One cannot speak of day without night, light without darkness as two alternating opposites. By their nature they cannot exist separately. However, I will only explore light. Nor will I discuss the boundary, the in-betweenness of the two, twilight. No longer day but not yet night, no longer night but not yet day. This will be left for another time, another essay.

The grace of radiance in your work has a stabilizing effect. It can be a complex unveiling of objects that you find in a flash. A ripening possibility of crystalline reality, or the light-filled dilation in the work that can unroof your world, give it distance and gradation. “The things of light file through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones,” writes Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (d. 1953).

Light is the pure passage into your work. Its dyophysite nature is both sign and background that moves from the particular forms, shapes, and objects to universal or spiritual constructs. Open your outer and inner eyes. Hold your gaze. Eyes respond when perception is full or effective. Not in time and space but not outside of them either.

Complete visibility is the result. It will pivot you with an emplacement that transverses what you call studio work. Light actualizes its own matter, makes itself apparent. A presence that will cause you to see the never-been seen.

The visualization of light feeds into your motor imagery because it allows you to see before you move. You move towards the light. You depend upon its rhythm and emotion, its interiority. You see the terrestrial reflection of it in the heavens. You begin to understand that light makes darkness conscious. It is the same light that tilts the broad sunflower toward the sun and draws the child to the water’s sparkling edge. In obscure places it is crowned like a wing hanging on a cry.

A Doorway to a Thousand Churches

The Ancients believed the seeing of an object’s intrinsic light came through the eyes, drawn in from the actual object seen. What was inhaled or “breathed” through the eyes was the object’s light. This may explain the Latin use of aura of a ray or gleam, that is, of radiance. According to Plato sight was the result of a fusion of rays. The light of the eyes flowing out to some object and the light from the object meeting it. The ray-like breath of the eyes mingling with the light around the object.

There is the mistaken tendency of painters to stretch out the light like a curtain. Although the intuitive use of light can be described as foundational or subtle, the light you create is not simply for clarity. Light is a powerful primordial element in the collective unconscious. It is the psychic residuum of our ancestral history.

The fourteenth centuryZohar(“Splendor” or ‘Radiance”), the foundational work Kabbalah, speaks of the original light:

It is the primal light

the light of the eye

the light which God

showed Adam to see

from one end of the world

to the other.

The created world was filled with a sacred light. It was not the light of the sun. That came later on the fourth day of creation. The Zohar says that Adam possessed a body of light which shone from one end of the world to the other. A similar light, according to Jewish myth, is shone to the child in the womb by the Angel of Light. Both these enthroned glowing is a nakedness, cosmic size. It diminishes all other light.

Without a Name, Without My Pride

The originating light you discover by accident or naïve cognition is not one type, for example, a spiritual or divine light. It can be a light of other depths and dimensions, the light of lived experience. Transparent, translucent, or opaque may be layers of non-coincidence. They are at certain slants the clarity of expansion and substance while remaining immutable without depriving themselves of anything. A light that shrouds the mystery of unicity and at the same time unfolds it. In its outwardness an eternally airy distance that coincides with infinitude. Yet a lumen naturale in the way it explicitly illuminates the physical. The easy respiration of the co-belonging of corporeality and the preternatural. Light is the eternal question at the core of your gaze. You are, either way, a species that can realize the fullness of its own archetype.

Oh, I Wanna Be That Complete

Light is at the luminous center of Creation. Likewise, it is the underlying essence of your work. The understanding of light, its transcendence and morphology, incarnates as a radical reimagining of the work. It reaches deep within without closing the eyes. It is the hintergrund, the “background” metaphor of veiled realities or meanings behind or below the surface of the work. It attaches boundlessness to weary being.

As a consciousness-altering space, where promise is foreplay, your light will penetrate the work in a split-second dazzling that is an eye-kissing unfolding. In the fast-numbing idle of current darkness, in infinite configurations, your work will newly emerge to the “jubilation of assenting angels” (Rilke)