The Source and the Seed

Since then I have slowly learned to grasp how every thing is connected across space and time…

-W.G.Sebald, A Place in the Country

At the point of my brush, it happens – I live for moments like this – that I invent a mark [trait]. Sweetness, sharing: to recognize a mark!

-Pierre Alechinsky, Excerpts on the (Por)trait.

Let the forms arrive. Let them seek and find themselves. We will call it style. The design that designates. The trait that testifies, ostentates itself. The look that is unfolding, a certainty that can be followed. This and that, in your work, in other works. The way you think of painting, which is to say, its formation, reformation, and transformation. In short, its composition.

At best, style identifies both painting and painter. At worst, it reproduces ad nauseum, a clone, an episodic idea, a “new” dream. Like the last-minute guest at a party all eyes sees no one else. How grand! How visible! Without struggling at all, a type. Successful when it is identifiable. When it is so-called non-conforming, a form forms itself. A force, a dimension, where chance has placed our eyes. A swaying expression of luminous nerves, an embrace in the minor marshes of ecstasy as evidence to what gave rise to its particular evolution and expression.

If not authentic, that is truly spontaneous and conjured, style is a daylight lie. A pre-disposition, manner, or mode. In the gesture and its allure, the fantasy of a mammoth artistic life. But in the waking it is nothing less than acid in the face of creative life, ill-fated toward the decline of its trembling. Mannerism and affectation. The desperation of painter and paint. Shadows on rotten bark.

Generally, style is a way in which the work presents form and color. It has an arranged and recognizable composition. Along with the hopes and fears of its creator, a deep and often ferocious “subjectivity” hidden in the soliciting caresses of brushwork. A “don’t-tell-me-what-to-do” attitude that keeps change gliding along one’s thighs rather than stripping off the skin to see what is beneath the intuition, perception, inspired guesses. The relationship that connects one thing with another.

It is the “inner sound” of the work that is missing in what has become style. A song that advances a different form, energy, and color. A particular phraseology of paint that scrutinizes its own surface. Unlike the idiom of style that all too often lacks the natural, appropriate, and organic, particular to a revelatory work. Putting it in another way: how an artist understands what it truly means to be a creator. Someone that seeks to reflect the potential of human brightness rather than artificial light. The unconscious force that underpins the calling, the transformational power of our deepest understanding. “It is not we who imagine”, James Hillman says, “but we who are imagined”.

From detail to seizing the whole, from broken fragments to reassembled unity, there is a wanting to see, hear, and feel something beyond all bounds of sensibility. To reconceptualize the purpose, awaken the depths of soul to vaster and vaster horizons. Chopin’s “Etude Op.10, No.12 in “C” (the “Revolutionary Etude” or “Etude on the Bombardment of Warsaw”), the work of Caspar David Friedrich, the writings of Kerouac or Kafka, the paintings of Pollock, Rothko, Shih-T’ao are a few of the many examples of expressions that allow art to realize its purpose through them and are as natural as air, sun, fog and shadow. Putting aside the personal in order to fulfill the crucial and sacred duties to the collective.

Style delights in habitual shapes and forms, colors and compositions. The regularity of its order or the precision and persistent presence of its detail. But it can become a plaster angel separate from its intrinsic content incapable of epiphany. It speaks only to fashion, what is in vogue, a fad, dernier or the “latest”. It points to the smart, chic, suave, spruce, natty, nifty, posh, toff. Paltry affectations when spoken, virtuoso art-marks when visible on paper or canvas.

Instead of style, “attribute,” “characteristic,” or “trait” is called to service. “Trait” for instance comes from the Latin tractus, “drawing,” having the particular feature of the stroke of a pen or pencil; “character”, etymologically something “engraved.” Resisting all definition, these “dark angels” bring you to your destiny. Their transcendent visit is to show you The Imago, your deep image.

If something we see is “distinctive” – brushstroke, color, shape, composition or fragment - it implies a capacity for being distinguished by the eye or mind, sometimes in space and in time. “Typical” on the other hand moves from natural to generic and artificial, shallow and common without depth of meaning. Left to themselves like holiday decorations they become ordinary chatter, broken, understood only on the literal level.

Attributes, characteristics, or traits are forms of the fractured language of seeing. They need rectification and focus with a cultivated awareness that raises them “up to their roots”. Transforms them from a random combination of forms on a two-dimensional plane into a primal point that include other elements, the building blocks of composition. Principles that include balance, emphasis, harmony, movement, pattern, proportion, repetition, unity, rhythm and variety. Although they may be characterized by mimesis or representation, narrative, or communication of emotions they can also be symbols and metaphors that pertain to the soul’s cavernous treasury.

By this measure we can say this essay is the study of appearance and a phenomenology of intention as expressed from the first-person point of view. A dynamic that contains qualities and opposites underscores composition: active forces, intermediary movers, creative energy. As a concerted ensemble they can express a transformation of the work that grows out of visionary awareness. With mindsight that eliminates the inessential and achieves breath and identity by transmuted perception, we re-create the world . Like Wallace Stevens’ jar on a hill, we shape the cosmogenetic point that is the hub of our universe.

A sui generis force driven to be ourselves. Arrested in the stream of consciousness setting in motion an arche-trope of various and distinct forms. Psychological qualities in human perception as essential properties to creation. Paradigms of psyche, archetypes of creation, firmaments of values that interpenetrate, correspond with phenomenological stages of the creative process that declare your name, your birth.

Attributes, characteristics, or traits can only be meaningful in the context of the composition containing them. Unpacked they speak of the personality, the previously unheard locutions of the psyche. Each one or taken as a field opens a new door to the relationship between painter and painted. No longer requiring worn-out interpretations and definitions, rigid systemization, or a taxonomy that follows a singular design. But an inquiry into how “forms form” and why they do so in such a manner that initiates a pre-attentive process where images exist and operate from a new logos of meaning. The World of Form and the World of Thought, the World of Action and the World of Creation that become cantillations, sacred melodies guiding and revealing sublime hallmarks. Insights beyond the normative framework of art interpretation.

To paint is to “translate”. Thoughts, images, words, feelings as part of the communicato of an unfolding discourse that pulls on both brain and its emissary’s propositional logic and personal mythos, sense and nonsense. Communication as an exchange of information, sending and receiving, sharing in a hypostatic unity. Unchained from its conventional mooring the mind can convey the sublime origins, inform and enrich the work. Grasping the inner composition is to discover its ineffable core, the expansive view of imbricated expressions.

Identifying and summarizing attributes, characteristics, or traits inherent in the work can be a struggle. Obstacles of convention, learning, culture, language, and habitual ways of seeing take hold of how you think and see. There is a way of seeing something eternal and new. Step back from work. Empty yourself in order to explore the way in which you form shape, color. Rebalance and renew composition. The manner in which you give birth and nurture them into existence. Seek out words that describe the origins that lie in silence waiting. Stirring any new idea in the freshness from the void of nowhere. It is not unlike the actions of the alchemist’s solve et coagula. Isolate the attribute, characteristic, or trait. Go over it, find where the energy or power comes from. Mentally break it down, then rebuild it. Give it wings. See where and how it flies.

All things grow inside out. When you embrace the entrails of the work, you are self-immersing. This is what Rilke meant by “innerlife” (Innerleben). It takes up a human position, like a mysterious crystal used for scrying. Keeping in mind that the work you are looking at is made up of contraries. Elements are mirrored and reflected and hence, paradoxically present in each other creating a complement of opposites between unity and multiplicity, sameness and difference. The work will progress through a series of viewpoints. It will show how these oppositions can be understood as interdependent forms, marks, potential symbols and metaphors, brushstrokes, compositional fragments, or ideas.

In all of this, attributes, characteristics, or traits understood will remove any occlusion so that the vision of the work appears in a new light, open not closed and sealed. Entrance can be as simple as intimate communion. The realm of cognition is beyond issues of aesthetics or criticism. It does so by exploring the power and importance of the inner life of the work.

The indwelling aspect of the work, the painter’s self-transcendence, and the use of language as an autonomous faculty is a way of receiving its presence. One need only to recall Ibn Arabi’s “polishing the mirror of the soul” or notions of kenosis in Meister Eckhart and San Juan de la Cruz. Cultivating an attribute, characteristic, or trait as a vehicle to stir the mind and heart gives work the potential for a highly original interpretation. The work becomes more than work of art (German, Mehralskunstwerk). It becomes an absolute event, vividly perceptual, wide-awake, a “near-bringing” and a “there-bringing” of multifaceted realities. A hallowing that is priestly as it is prophetic. A re-ordering of creation: parts to whole, spaces to points and lines. An entire composition and its fragments with individual narratives to be known. Much more than the raw force of individual performance. Juxtapositions and perceptions unmarried to any literal interpretation. Free-spinning and child-like spontaneity that allows more ancient systems to bubble over like Jung’s boiling cauldron of contradictory impulses and its effects.

Looking at the exterior appearance of the work we need to understand how what we see appears as what we think, and vice versa. To break the surface of outer appearance and penetrate to the core of the work proxy to our own being. This is not a reductio ad absurdum because the interaction with the work arises out of a harvest of conditions. Assumptions about forms and shapes, lines and colors as well as emotional reactions, whether or not “memory awareness” to use D.H. Lawrence’s phrase, that live within moments of representation. Spanning discontinuity. they exist in the world of painting and the world beyond painting with the exhilaration of change.

A transformational process of seeing deeply into the work that is an “extraordinary impregnation” (in Brassai’s words to Picasso about image-making). The free scope to find sustenance and union for the imagination unanticipated. A perception that recognizes and re-cognizes. Attributes, characteristics, or traits deforms, changes, fragments, and finally reassembles with other elements to re-form the mature work. Most importantly, the initial deformation is the faculty of liberating the root-image, the imago. If there is no change in the work, there is no imagination, no potentially reperceived imaginative process. As conductors of flow, they allow stepping outside systems of studio working. As ladders of ascent, they are mysteries that demand first sighting, secondary ascents of unfolding and attunement. Sensitivity to their immanence becomes the uncanny site of incarnational sight.

The Romanian-born French poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan (1920-1970) described poetry as flaschenpost, a message in the bottle on the way to someone. I would add on the way to oneself. A bottle-post. Floater with a personal kind of on-demand destiny. Uncertain of direction and transformation, developing according to its own logic, source and seed. We, too, convert the material of what is into new perceptions. We paint, scrawl, and doodle in possible way imaginable, in a dialogue with the Unseen, the “other within”.