Spiritual Art Juried Painting Exhibit 2013

I have four paintings, one of them a group of four smaller paintings that are a series or cluster, in this juried exhibit of "Spiritual Art."

I was encouraged to enter my paintings in this show by a friend, although I had hesitated at first. On one level, even though I did a lot of acrylic paintings in my youth, I hadn't put paint to canvas or paper for almost thirty years till I began painting again last year. So I am both a total beginner at painting, and a very experienced visual artist with years of design, composition, and photography under my belt. In the past I've won awards for my visionary visual artwork, and photography. So, I had mixed feelings.

The call for entries of this show of "Spiritual Art" left their definition of Spiritual very open to interpretation. Being that this is a fairly conservative small town region, I expected that they would receive many entries of frankly sentimental religious art—for example, pictures of angels, and of people praying in church. So I hesitated to be part of that.

Frankly, sentimental religious art makes me cringe. I mean no insult to any artist who paints that kind of art, and I mean no insult to anyone's belief system. The problem I have is not with religious subject matter, but with thoughtless sentimentality. There is so much imitation rather genuine in bad religious art. On the other hand, finding a piece of religious art fresh and filled with life is rare enough that it ought to be celebrated.

My own spiritual tradition lies far outside the mainstream of organized religious worship. The details don't matter, what matters is that the points of convergence I have with the organized religious tradition are all normative to the mystical threads of tradition and usually controversial to the mainstream. As for painting, if you want to see a genuinely glorious and praiseful depiction of Creation, I recommend you take in a van Gogh exhibition.

Painting for me has become a form of personal therapy. I mostly do it for my own needs, and not to illustrate or depict a theme or subject that I want to present to an audience. I use a lot of vibrant colors in my paintings, often in many built-up translucent layers that create depth and subtle lighting effects. Most of what I paint is very abstract. Since I've been doing brush calligraphy for a long time, I have made a few paintings based on that kind of brushwork, even an enso or two, painted rather than ink-brushed. I "follow the brush" when painting, and it is expressive for me, but I don't particularly feel like I am in any school or have any purpose. A lot of what comes out is big bold fields of abstract color, with sometimes just a hint of form that might be a hint of subject. I feel like what I am doing is closer to what Kandinsky originally described in his theories of expressive color, than any more recent school of painting. I know a lot of art history, and I don't want to be part of a school or -ism, I just want to paint. Less theory, more art.

Even though painting for me is a personal expression, mostly, what comes out is abstract enough that it's not a journal entry, or overly personal. People can look at these mostly-abstract paintings and read in whatever meaning they wish, that is their own and not mine. I've talked many times of what I call abstract realism, which is abstraction from nature, but also abstraction not divorced from the form that inspired it. In painting, for me, this might look like an abstract painting that for me evokes a memory of the aurora borealis; but I'm okay with another viewer finding something else in it, or just looking at it purely as abstraction. If they get some kind of emotional or aesthetic response from the painting, I feel it's succeeded.

With all this in mind, I also knew that anything I submitted to a "Spiritual Art" show would probably be quite far outside the box, different from other entries, and quite possibly beyond the pale. I did end up submitting four paintings to the juried show, with no expectation that any of them would get in. I deliberately chose paintings that broke convention, and are very much experimental. One of them is even a three-dimensional work, not a traditional painting. The joke is on me, because all four got in. So what do I know?

Here are thumbnails of the pieces I will have in this show, all of which were painted in 2013:


Void: Emergence


Earth and Sky II


Enso (Meditation in the Marketplace)

This depicts for me the classic saying from Zen meditation practice: "Anyone can meditate alone on a mountaintop. The real test of your meditation practice is when you return to the busy, noisy city, full of sound and lively action, and try to meditate in the marketplace there."


Paleo-Icons

A group from an ongoing series of paintings inspired by prehistoric cave art, petroglyphs, ancient civilizations, and the colors of the rocks and land where such art is to be found. The other source of inspiration here is Byzantine icons, with their formalized styles and color palettes. I'm really enjoying this series, and have done a few more since submitting this grouping to the show. The icons are all the same size, and can be displayed in several different ways.

Painting: Digital

Another aspect of painting that I've been exploring is digital painting, using various apps on my iPad. I find this to be very rewarding, in part because I can work quickly or slowly, save and come back later if necessary. There are some paintings I've been working on for awhile, some others made with the quickness of a Zen lightning flash across the mind.

At the high end of software apps I'm using, with amazingly flexible and editable tools, are ArtRage and ProCreate and ArtStudio, all of which allow you to create full art on your tablet. Another couple of favorites, which are a little idiosyncratic and less purely about painting are Flowpaper and ZenBrush. I have several other drawing and painting and sketching apps, but I find myself using this group most often. ArtRage and ProCreate in particular are the ones for painting using my own photographs as reference images. A lot of the images I'm creating are sketches, just five-finger exercises. I don't consider many things here to be finished art. Although a few are, particularly those new paintings I've made from existing photographs.

This style of painting, of painting-over, of making art based on photographs, is something that strongly appeals to me. I make new art from existing images, not by reproducing them but in fact by refusing to reproduce them exactly; rather, by creating a new version that is more abstract, more painterly, as if a plein air painting done on the inspiration of the place and time where I had made the photograph. Many landscape painters have used photographs as references for their paintings. In my case, I am using photos as reference, but also in some cases as source material: painting over the painting itself, sampling the colors, and working the image till it evokes a more abstract mood and style. A fresh painting made in a new mode. I feel that this mode is the best, most actually artistic, of what I'm doing with digital painting for now.


Moonrise, 2012

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A completely different kind of visual art that I'm doing is combining writing, calligraphy, and drawings of various types. Little visual haiku. Precedents in Japanese haiga, which are paintings with haiku, not really illustrations but a combined artform. Brushwork on painting, on photography. Blending media. Layered imagery and words.



Haiku are a quick form of poem, something that happens spontaneously and with clarity of mind, out of clarity of mind, or not at all. Likewise these little visual haiku.





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Since the ZenBrush app is specifically designed to emulate Japanese brushwork and writing, I find myself doing that with it. It's good for sketching, but also for writing a haiku, then combining that with artwork in a painting app. ZenBrush has some flexibility in terms of brush size, opacity, ink style, touch sensitivity, and so forth; it also has a wide range of virtual papers on which to write or draw. As usual, I often start a brush session by warming up by drawing enso.



An enso can then be erased, drawn over with new layers with different opacities or types of sumi-e ink.



Another app I use regularly converts visual images into images composed of words and type. This is fun to play with on the brushwork and Zen fronts: adding layers of meaning by adding randomized type-casting to the brushwork image.





Here's an example of a sumi-e style drawing, which I then experimented with in terms of both type and painting. Several different versions of this one idea yield different, even playful variations.


river, carry me home, 2012





A completely different kind of feel can be made with the same process in the same apps. (These were drawn on the smaller screen of the iPhone.)





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The aesthetic of this kind of calligraphic painting/drawing, even though it's done on the latest type of computer, is ancient in feel. I made that explicit with this morning poem.



These are all examples of the process of painting, calligraphy, and drawing using virtual paint on a tablet. They range from serious fine art paintings, using the high end painting apps, to small morning poems and drawings done quickly and simply. Different aesthetics for different moments and different ends. But they are all digital painting. I'm doing a lot of this work right now. I'm drawn to it, in part because it's something I can do during my morning meditation time. Not all of it, as I said, is anything more than studies or exercises; yet I feel there is a great deal of potential here for creating genuine art, real illustration, and more.

To be continued. We'll see where the road takes us next.

Zen Calligraphy and Healing

The last several days have been very difficult. The at-home nurses tell me, out of their extensive experience, that there is a trial-and-error period for new ileostomy patients like myself, while the stoma is still healing, changing size and shape, that involves finding the right appliances to use for the long term. Well, it has indeed been a trial full of many errors. In the past several days, the ostomy bags have come loose many times, leaked many times, needed to be replaced often, and I've lost sleep over it. This morning I really hit the exhaustion wall. I was so exhausted I couldn't even cry out my frustration anymore. Now, tonight, having rested all day long, I do feel better, and I'm hoping that I can get better sleep tonight, better than the past three days.



A few days into this trial, I pulled out the brushes and ink and brush pens, and sat down at my table on the porch to make some enso, to try and center and settle my mind. You can always tell how grounded and centered you are by drawing enso. Enso are circle cosmograms, that represent the circle of all things.



If you are grounded and centered, you will be able to draw a nearly perfect circle with a single stroke of the ink-filled brush. If your mind is not at ease, not empty, not in the state of no-mind, your enso circles will be imperfect, not circles, maybe not even round. I pulled out a stack of my good calligraphy cardstock paper, and made several enso. I started out poorly, and then gradually slowed down, took some breaths, and did some better enso. A kind of brush meditation.



Then it occurred to me that I also needed to do slogan practice. Slogan practice, used in both Japanese Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, is meditation on wisdom sayings. Slogans can be almost stereotypical, but contemplation of them can take you very deep, past the words, past the thought, into the being. So I took some of the enso that I had just made, changed brushes, and began filling them in with slogans and other sayings, and even a few drawings.







I realized that I needed to make art. But not just art to make art. When this healing process has setbacks like the drama I've been having around the ostomy bags failing for so many days and nights—setbacks that really frustrate, and more than once brought me to helpless tears—I thought I might take some of these enso and slogans and make them into a poster for myself.



I will put one or two of them up on the walls, where I can see them often, to remind me to find my center and return to my ground of being, when I fall off. Zen sayings as art posters to remind myself to return to center. To calm the mind. To let go of the suffering and just be in the moment.



Sometimes the frustration edges over into despair, and you feel like these trials will never be over. The nurses and doctors tell me they will, but not all of me believes that yet. I'm in the middle of this mess, it's my body, no one else's, and this has been really hard. My artist friend Alex, who has his own experience with bodily trials, reminds me that me feelings in this difficult time are legitimate and well-earned. He helped me today by validating what I was feeling, rather than trying to "fix" it.





So I will put up a couple of the most resonant of this Zen calligraphy enso drawings on my walls, where they will remind me to slow down, be patient, and go with the flow. Get through the process, don't fight it. Wisdom I very much need to hear right now.





I also remind myself that life will go on, even if right now it's not of very good quality. I will endure. I will not fade away. I will somehow make it through. How, and when, at this moment I cannot envision. All I really want right now is to catch up on the rest and recuperation that has eluded me these past few days.

Teaching Myself to Draw 7

Last week I went into the clinic for another IV drug therapy treatment for my chronic illness. I was anxious, and got little sleep the night before. Anxious because over the preceding two weeks I had developed a severe cough which had turned into walking pneumonia. I have a long history of bronchitis and walking pneumonia, and once you've had those you remain susceptible to them in future. I had also had a bad week personally, and was drained and tired. So I went in with some anxiety. The doctor gave, me some antibiotics, ordered a chest x-ray, and said I was okay to do the IV drug therapy. That had been in doubt, because the IV drug can aggravative pneumonia, and has the side effect of suppressing the immune system. But I got my treatment, got through it, and that evening I was able to play the Monster Jam gig in Madison. It was a long and tiring day, but I did better with it than I had anticipated.

While I was sitting there for several hours with a needle in my arm, this time out I brought my sketchbook/journal along, and some pencils. I was really tired from not sleeping the previous night, but too wound up to actually nap. I closed my eyes a few times, but I didn't sleep. Instead I made several drawings. On previous occasions I'd brought a novel to read, or spent most of my time talking to other patients receiving drug therapies. THis time out, for whatever reason, I was in the mood to draw.

For a few weeks now, I've been getting lots of images arising in my mind of iconic and shamanic beings. The kinds of images you see on the walls of the ancient caves of Lascaux and Trois Frères, caves in France full of the earliest known art made by humans. This suits me, as I am more interested in this kind of iconographic art than in being just another colored pencil artist who does photorealistic drawings. I am moving more towards iconic, mythic, and shamanic artwork as I continue to learn to draw with pencils. I've made several drawings from nature, which are indeed more realistic drawings, but mostly as exercises in technique, not as finished pieces. On this day of making drawings, I drew entirely on imagination, on the images I was seeing inside my own mind. The gods have been talking, and I've been listening.



This pair of drawings was made back to back. First I drew the stylized stag, then the drawing of The Wild Hunt. I am interested in exploring drawing the stag, the horned king of the forest, for its mythopoetic strength as an image. I've been feeling the presence a lot lately of The Horned One, Herne the Hunter, the Horned God, leader of The Wild Hunt that rides on Twelfth Night to chase the winter dark back to its home in the distant lands at the back of the north wind. The stag is a symbol of all that, and of the Horned One.

It came to me while making this drawing that the stag was standing knee deep in a quiet northern lake, reflected in the still water. So that's what I drew.

The drawing of the The Wild Hunt, which came next, was all about action, stylized shapes of hounds hunting across the turbid sky, under a fitful waxing moon. Again, not trying to be realistic here, but trying to evoke an archetype.


moon water haiku

This and the next drawing were warm-ups, calligraphic haiga made with a Japanese brush pen. Enso becomes moon becomes scene. Following the brush, wherever it leads.


moonrise

Finally, I made this stag and moon drawing, while still of thinking of iconic cave-painting style imagery. I drew it with the Japanese brush pen I usually carry around in my pants pocket. I was thinking of a sculpture made of driftwood in the shape of the wild stag of the hunt. This is the sort of sculpture, made of natural materials, that transforms one thing into another: truly transformational, liminal, shamanic, alchemical. Changing shapes.


waning moon
driftwood effigy god

Then I was moved to try something new. I had the time, after all, sitting there with a needle in my arm. So I pulled out the colored pencils, and added to the brush drawing.



I haven't experimented much with this type of drawing before, mixing ink and pencil drawings. This turns a corner for me conceptually, in terms of drawing technique and of subject matter.

Again, I am more drawn to iconic, shamanic imagery for making these kinds of drawing. I'm not really interested in making photorealistic drawings of dogs and children, or of anything else for that matter. I can always make an actual photograph, if I want to. So for drawings, right now anyway I am interested in drawing not only what I see—trees, the land, rocks—but what I see in my mind's eye—those archetypes and mythopoetic images I made here.

Teaching Myself to Draw 6

I was supposed to meet a friend for tea and conversation at the local Starbucks (of all places) this morning, just to hang out and catch up. Well, I got stood up. But it was a lovely morning, not a cloud in the sky, not humid, not too warm: a pleasant summer day. So I took my Earl Grey tea (I don't drink coffee, which is why Starbucks is not my usual hangout) and sat outside on the patio, at a table shaded by one of those big umbrellas, while I waited.

It was not a waste, and I wasn't upset about being stood up, because it was a pleasant getaway from home for an hour or so. I sipped my tea and wrote in my journal.

And I made a couple of drawings, and worked on a couple of poems.

This ash tree was the best drawing of the morning. Made my with my Japanese brush pen, it's a depiction of the ash tree across the parking lot from where I was sitting. The long fronds of the leaves were blowing gently in the breeze, making patterns of pale green over the dark shade of the tree's branches, against the pale cloudless sky.

This is a pretty good drawing, I think. It captures the subtle movement of the breeze in the leaves. It seemed proper to sketch those leaves as pointillistic dots, following the curves and lines they made while moving in the wind. I also think the relative thicknesses and forms of the branches came out rather well. I'm learning to control the thick and thin strokes of the brush: the main trunk was drawn in one stroke, from top to bottom, across the length of the page.

So I'm still teaching myself to draw. I'm liking the results more, now, when I attempt to depict something natural and real, rather than an abstract drawing or brush-calligraphy piece out of my imagination.

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Here's my usual enso warm-up drawing. I've made it a habit, when starting out a brush-drawing session, to warm up, or loosen up, by filling a sketchbook page with enso. Sometimes something emerges from that, most of the time it's just a sktech page. This session I started out with a bunch of enso, as usual, and it quickly turned into a set of raindrop circles on the still water of a pond. The still moment when the rain has only just started, the drops just beginning to fall. That smell of fresh rain in the air.

Brush Mind Drawings

Sitting at the auto repair place waiting for the mechanics to finish fixing my transmission, completely bored with the TV wasteland drone, take out brush and journal, make a few brush-mind drawings, a sunny pleasant afternoon for meditative art-making. The rains, the rains will wash them all away.

Woodcarving 2

As a first set of projects with which to learn my woodcarving tools, I made a series of enso relief carvings into small slabs of wood. I used my Dremel rotary tools to make the reliefs, shaping them after brush-stroked circles brushed onto the wood. The wood is scrap pine, stained with a redwood lacquer, then carved out.

I made six or seven of these pieces, and gave most of them away as Winter Solstice gifts, keeping only this one, which I thought was the best of the set, and my favorite. This one is currently hanging on the wall in a corner of my kitchen. The first one I made I gave to the friend who encouraged me to start working with wood, and working in three dimensions rather than continuing to work in two.

Consider them practice pieces, sketches for later woodwork sculpture, small little practice pieces that develop skills and might lead towards something more like actual art. I don't view these as finished, accomplished carvings; rather, something to work out technique and learn from doing, on the way to making something more substantial.

I made these enso carvings starting in November, working out in the garage while the weather was still warm, and worked into December, to finish them before mailing them off as gifts. I have a few more wood pieces prepared on my basement workbench now, it being too cold to work in the garage. I really need to get a table saw, which will make sizing the wood blocks much easier. At the moment I have borrowed a friend's scroll saw, which is fine for cutting smaller pieces, but limited to that; although it might be interesting at some point to play with the scroll saw's ability to cut curved shapes. I still have to figure out how to deal with the sawdust; although I saw a woodworking article in a magazine that suggested using an ordinary box fan with a furnace filter strapped to it, to suck up the sawdust. So that might work. I cannot wait until spring to continue working, I need to work right now. One of my Dremel tools is rechargeable and cordless, so I plan to take it along on my next roadtrip, and do some carvings along the way. Driftwood or found scraps as materials.

This evening I made a drawing of a bonsai tree. I did it from memory, from the bonsai room at the Conservatory in St. Paul, MN.

I'm thinking about what forms and patterns I might trace or stencil onto woodblocks to carve out.

I was thinking earlier this week about what images I might like to make, such as bamboo stems and leaves on a longer piece of wood. I've been choosing my scrapwood for interesting knots and patterns, things already in the wood that suggest what to do with it. Each piece of wood gives you a sense of what to do with it, if you spend time holding and looking at the wood.

Then suddenly I had the realization that I am developing skills separately that are eventually going to converge. I've been learning how to draw. I've been learning how to work in wood, both relief and more three-dimensional sculpting.

It occurred to me, therefore, that what I'm teaching myself to do, eventually, is to take up woodblock printing. Perhaps even woodcut illustration. I now have the tools in hand, and am learning the skills, to do relief carving that could lead to woodblock printing. I'll need to look into hand-press inks and wood type. I might try carving type into a woodblock at some point, too. I've done handset type before, but I haven't carved type into a block of wood. That might be an interesting challenge.

Meanwhile, still learning these new skills, still developing craft and technique, still only beginning to get better at each.

Brush-Mind Book

My sister, artist Pam Barick, makes handmade books. She finds good paper stock, interesting art-paper for covers, then creates handmade blank books, to give as gifts. I use some of these books for my handwritten journals, from time to time. I use others for gathering random thoughts in one place, notes, ideas, even recipes.



I have one particular book my sister made that I use for brush calligraphy drawing and writing. I may only write or draw in this handmade journal a few times a year. Gradually the book is becoming a collection of artistic thoughts, images, drawings, and sayings, mostly Zen-related, in the calligraphic haiga tradition, and mostly inspired by and following in the footsteps of Western Zen artist-writers Paul Reps and Frederick Franck. I reserve this handmade journal for this particular body of work. I keep the book close at hand, most of the time, even though I don't make marks in it very often. Sometimes I go back through it, to remind myself of an insight I may have had a year ago, that I have since forgotten and need to remember. Sometimes I pick it up and wonder, who made this? certainly not I! It's not an artist's sketchbook, it's not full of technically-perfect drawings, it's not not full of private journal entries. (There are one or two, that's all.) It's a handmade book full of handwritten jottings.



It's a brush-mind book, a book in which the writer is following the brush, often starting with an enso that becomes a drawing. A thought that grows into something more. A quiet book, a contemplative book.

One day it will be finished—only in the sense that there will be no more blank pages available to be filled. One that day, I will open another of my sister's handmade blank journal books (I have a stash I've set aside just for this purpose), and begin again this brush-mind work. Or, rather, continue it, in a new volume. The brush-mind book doesn't end, it doesn't conclude, it goes on.

Brush-mind happens in my other journals, too. My journals used to be written thoughts only, my inner strivings, my figuring it out by writing it out journal, my thinking-is-linking journal. Poems have often been begotten therein. Now those "regular" journals also contain brush-mind drawings, sayings, enso, and things that could easily fit into this brush-mind book. I don't try to contain it in one place, one arena. Following the brush, wherever it leads you, is what brush-mind is all about.

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I recommend that writers, artists, and other creatives make and keep some version of a brush-mind book. If you keep a brush-mind book, there are a few things to remember.

Keeping a brush-mind book is not about "making art." It's not about craft, or perfectionism, or brilliance. It's a very small, quiet book, which you keep for your own contemplation. There is no-one to critique your brush-mind book, not even yourself. Get out of that artist's mind, and into a mind much quieter and simpler. Don't edit yourself. Be spontaneous. Let a drawing be less than wonderful, because even though it's not a perfect work of art, it contains the spirit and feeling of the moment you drew it.

Keeping a brush-mind book ought to be a sensual experience, as well as a contemplative one. If you make your own book, make it out of fine paper, exquisite cover-imagery, and good materials. Make it durable, make it lovely to hold in the hand and page through. Don't skimp on your personal satisfaction. There is nothing wrong with purchasing a journal-book to use as a brush-mind book. Just make sure that's it a beautiful book that you love to hold and contemplate. Find an interesting blank book at a bookstore or art-supply store. Maybe it will have on its cover an image from your favorite artist, or a saying by your favorite poet.

You can copy aphorisms and poems into the book, to gather together the wisdom that inspires and directs your life and work.

Use a fine pen. Go out of your way to purchase the most beautiful pen you can find. That pen or brush you always wanted, but never gave yourself permission to own before now. Writing with a fine pen or brush needs to be a sensual and pleasurable experience in its own rite. I use Japanese calligraphy brush pens for my brush-mind book, especially one particular Pentel refillable cartridge brush-pen manufactured in Japan and only available in the USA at Japanese stationary stores that import Japanese writing materials. I could buy this brush-pen online, and yet I enjoy shopping for it in person. Whenever I'm in San Francisco, I stock up. I go way out of my way to find and use these kinds of pens. I turn my pen-hunting into its own adventure, and make it into a meaningful, pleasurable experience in its own rite.

All these side-paths and by-ways turn your brush-mind book into something special, something unique, something to be treasured and kept for years. We value most that which we have worked to attain. We value most that which we have sacrificed our time and effort to obtain. Be consciously aware of this when you go looking for materials for your art. Don't be casual, and don't be callous, and take it for granted. Be mindful.

Becoming mindful is why we keep a brush-mind book. Making a brush-mind book, and drawing in it, and writing in it, is a form of mindfulness practice in itself. A form of art-as-meditation, art-as-mindfulness. You're not making great art in your brush-mind book: you're making your self.