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? Is it a matter of figuring it out? The simple power of observation and the drawing upon an ever-growing storehouse of accepted working methods? Without the risk of chance, the plan likely involves an unimaginative process of elimination, warmed-over aesthetic measures, or the vague remembrance of something they saw in someone else’s work. This approach, call it calculative looking, at best might advance technique. At worst, it accrues rational thoughts left in the wake of intuition, displaying them like precious gems fixed into a glittering setting of certainty’s expectations. It tends to treat the whole as though it were onlycomposed of a virtually infinite number of separate parts. Instead of being one faculty among others it casts a shadow over all areas of painterly activity. It may be helpful to understand one’s practice, but it is helpless in penetrating the mystery which lies at the heart of the work.

The most fertile images derive not necessarily from an allocation of intellect but from a connection with more universal mental substrata that Victor Hugo called “the mouth of shadows”. This meditative attitude toward ingenuity can go beyond the insufficiency of casual consideration. It can be a direct means of achieving a “new way of seeing”. An open looking that enlists the whole work as it engages the whole person. The immediate separation between what is in the student and what is before them loses its validity. It acknowledges the “I don’t know” not as a failure but as a newly discovered unknowing. Freed from the pretensions of their vision they are receptive to the visionary. It is an experience made vivid, a flash of attention. A sudden insight like Joyce’s “small epiphany” or Melville’s “shock of recognition”. Fired with intensity but liberated from the turbulence and compulsion for results, what is revealed to them is the authenticity of their visionary recital. An act of seeing in which they inhabit and claim the work as truly their own.

Deep in the bone

there is a house

a yard with waking trees

and an ebony life of dreams

waiting for the nightingale’s signal.