Process Does Not Self

Process Does Not Self

A path is the course or direction in which one moves. An action taken with a specified objective or goal. A course of conduct with an expected outcome. A surfaced walk or a path previously trodden: been-there, done-this. A going-over of a given route. This is not the path I speak of. The path or way I present to you cannot be traced hierarchically or in steps. You cannot file it away for another time. There are no subdirectories or lists of actions to do. You cannot make it a noun ending in“-pathy” with the general idea of one practicing a discipline. There is nothing to study, no pathology to speak of (as in Greek root meaning of “feeling” or “suffering”). No circumlocution of thought, maze or fog of ambiguity. No foot path, lane, crossing or crossover, touring path or tow path, bypath or byway. No paseo walkway, trail, or track. No defensive barricade of self-determination No position to stake out.

But there is a Way that is not a way. An Absence-action that supercharges Presence. Wholly indifferent, a non-desiring painting without exigency, devoid of success or failure. It is called Process Painting, or the Painter’s Non-Path. Herein, simplified as Process. Evermore open it does not close itself off or preserve anything. Understood in the active sense, it “absences”, empties into non-self. It arrives, waits for your decision without appetition, responding but not storing. It lets things come and go. Down to the last things you see as if it were nothing. Wandering, directionless, without destination, Process-ing is resistant to the stresses of painting as well as to the tea and talk of its meanings. Process is a different Dasein that is a-teleological, non-shrinking, goalless, and free to take your painting wherever it wishes to go. It is beyond the possibility of image-loss or creative blockage because it is a flow rather than a gathering. It sows new seeds and sends forth smoke from an unknown fire. It serves as guide with a calm that approaches a most private space. Just painting becomes a caring for totality and harmony.

Because Process has no specific indispensable value assigned to it, it can actually and with full validity represent whatever it is supposed to or wants to be. It neither violates nor constructs identity. It is not supernatural or supersensual. It doesn’t flee from immanence. It escapes definition as it has no functional interpretation. It simply flows, meanders, transforms itself and things. It leaves no trace because it is not a “subject”. The possibilities are child’s play, momentary or experientially enacted or engaged, without any essential commitment to them.

The language of painting has been the speech of Presence. We speak of essence and “whatness”, a “being-ness of painting”. But Process is not fixed like Presence. The directness and contingency that lie at the heart of Process and constitutes its empty center is an Absence around which it endlessly revolves. It is Absence that necessitates Presence. Absence-action that moves into Presence, not interfering with an open consciousness, invisible and originary. Absence (or mind “empty” of thought) allows the fullness of the visible. It results in image clarity as an independent entity that is dynamic and active. Linked to the coincidence of opposites it transcends rigid opposition. Co-dependent with Presence it is a reciprocity that defines all elements in painting.

Process is not linear though it may feel like it. It does not pull from the past and look forward to the future. Neither behind nor ahead the painter is always aware without the sharpness of determinacy. It rids us of the residual emotional ballast we carry into the studio. We move along with Process not ahead of it. Everything is tied to the situation inherent in the act of painting. Embracing the instantaneous the painter does not linger but hovers between sight and action. This is an improvisation akin to jazz extemporization. A composing on the spot, an “improcessization” that ends with something else on a different level. A “freeblowing,” freely ignoring what is already on the canvas that instigates a new improvisation to begin unrelated to the last one. Process gives the painter the ease in making interesting and complex transitions, surprising detours and inventive directions. Rather than a feeling of narrowness and constriction, fog or fugue, apparent delimitation creates the opposite: a widening clarity of space making way for other spaces, marks or brushstrokes, forms and shapes and shifting scenarios to emerge as from a dream. There is no final closure until the brush is put down.

In terms of designation, the unconscious vis-a-vis Process, active imagination, and effortless Absence-action create and arrange configurations which the conscious mind has difficulty in expressing or understanding. In the transformation of energy to the precognizant region that is beyond the reasoning portion of the mind, there is a setting-free, not from something but towards it. A stability in greater proportion to the magnitude and tension of its releasement. The unconscious as a built-in operation, in general, works along with Process. Vast and inexhaustible, the unconscious is a storehouse of thoughts and emotions. And like Process, the unconscious is in an extremely fluid state. Understanding their radical transitoriness and existential contingency is an essential feature that allows both a new autonomy and autochthony to show itself, or to call back the quickly disappearing into a new form. Process does not self but does have its own exactitude. Lacking nothing albeit transient, fragile, unassuming and on occasion imperfect, Process follows its own order connected by actions of occurring events in time and space. It comes alive in the alembic of transformation invigorating concealed paths only to unfold multi-directional free play. With heart-sight clarity it shades away the old and the habitual into a flow of unique and unexplained change in whatever form it takes. The work is coined by a renewed inner pattern and radical shifting. Seething with immediacy, occurrence-appearance gives its nod. Without pulling up archetypal roots, in precise instants of time, Process awakens painter and painting to a numinous and highly charged agency.