A Painting Journal

Aurorae, acrylic on paper, 2012

A painting journal

Trying something semi-new. Keeping a journal as I paint. Writing down thoughts in the pauses between painting during a session. Just as a record of the creative process.

Listening to music, while I paint, on random shuffle on iTunes on my laptop. Keep in mind that on my studio computer, my iTunes library can now play for over 190 days continuously, with no repeats. All kinds of music, truly random.

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Thursday, November 8
4:16 PM

Feel like painting today. There is sunlight streaming in for the first time in weeks. There’s one painting that I want to finish, now.

Don't be afraid to paint over something you liked before, but which didn't work for this painting. I am finding myself wanting to finish one of the “Lights” (Aurora Borealis) series of paintings today, after having it set aside for weeks. I have the iTunes music library on shuffle, listening to random pieces while painting. All over the avant-classical pop rock map. Copland to Patsy Cline to books on CD to Kate Bush.

Several layers of dry rush blue night sky, over existing backgrounds. Then the luminosity of the aurorae themselves. Lots of edge softenings, nuances, translucencies.

Even though I started this painting with bold geometric shapes, I've moved away towards something more fractal, more natural. Follow the brush. Bold and solid under layers yield to thinner, translucent, feathered upper layers. It looks better that way.

Because of the way I'm painting right now, or because of the abstract-realist subject matter, I find myself using large flat brushes. Angled strokes, really rather calligraphic. Sometimes the brushtrokes form lines and surfaces like geographic texture underneath the more visible layers.

Peter Gabriel to science fiction soundtrack creepiness. “He's got a ray gun!” Melodic punk Bob Mould. Zen shakuhachi.

The painting darkens but the lights still shine through.

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Thursday, November 8
4:46 PM

The next layers will lighten the painting up again. Let the dark over-layers dry for awhile. Then continue. Often I don't let the acrylics totally dry, because I do like the slight mixing that happens when you dry brush paint over a still slightly wet layer. The same kind of mixing that happens in nature, layers of sedimentary rock feathering and mixing together as they form, bleeding color from minerals leaching into the matrix.

Continuing to photograph each painting in progress, with the idea of using these closeups and sectional photos of color and brushstroke as painted stock backgrounds. Might even create and sell CDs of original stock on my own, of these my own materials. Why not? No one else has them, because no one else has these paintings in progress.

Photographing the painting in progress is also a way of looking at it, contemplating it, looking more closely.

Quick sunset of oncoming winter. There goes the last of the natural light. Even in the failing light, though, continuing to paint, kitchen lights turned on now.

Sometimes the texture of the paper still comes through, as do the lines of brushstrokes on lower layers.

Of course lighting affects mood. Color does as well. Despite what the neuroscientists claim, I don't think that's hardwired, I think it still has some culturally-bound factors. A lot of neuroscientists are not even aware that their own fundamental assumptions about what they observe are culturally-bound; unaware that their cultural bias is Western-scientific; as opposed to, for example, Inuit-mythic or Hindu-Buddhist-cosmological. Is a fish aware that it’s breathing water?

Color palette and language are not the same from culture to culture. What is held in common are the perceived colors of natural world objects. Red berries on forest plants around the world are poisonous often enough to humans to be of note. But there is no equivalent color in the northern Midwest to the color of young rice in the paddies, that unique yellow-green. So what we associate with those colors has at minimum some cultural input and conditioning with regards to how we interpret colors as emotions.

Yet I’m a North American, born on Turtle Island, and my roots for this kind of painting that I find myself doing are in Kandinsky and other branches of early Modernism, from the period before Modernism went ultra-rational, began to worship logical-positivism, and threw away all of its early vestiges of both irrationality and mysticism.

People forget that some of the key branches of early Modernism were deep explorations of the newly-theorized unconscious self, the realm of dreams and myths and archetypes; that got discarded in favor of rational utilitarianism. Not always an equal tradeoff. What the expressive color, the color of expression, in my painting means might mean what it means only to me, but as Kandinsky notes, if the experience of viewing the painting evokes an emotional, or mythopoetic, response in the viewer, all is good.

Laurie Anderson runs into Coldplay. Then 40s pop hits. A favorite slow movement from a Vivaldi cello concerto. Truly random music choices. The BBC Radio drama of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

Rest awhile. Make some more photos of the painting. Think about starting dinner.

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Thursday, November 8
5:16 PM

I'm not remotely tired of photographing these paintings as I make them. It's not really about recording the process, more about watching change. Each working period yields a new painting. The painting you start with is not always like the painting you end with, and it might change several times during the process. Eventually it tells you when it's done, and you stop.

That's something a lot of my non-artist friends never seem to understand: listening to what the work tells you it wants. Non-artists all too often think art-making is all a conscious act of will, as though it were all planned out, pre-designed, engineered to the artist’s willful blueprint. Well, sometimes you do start out that way, but it almost never ends up exactly as you pre-visualized. It moves. It always has a will of its own. The artist doesn't control things as much as people think. There's a lot of intuition involved.

One of the things that makes a lot of current postmodern art so dry and emotionally flat, and often frankly boring, is precisely a lack of intuition, with too much conscious intent and control. Trust me, I've worked in advertising art and commercial design and illustration, where you are in fact working to a goal, an outline, a conscious intent. Art with a purpose, art intended to pass on a specific message. It's often still creative and fun, and sometimes even nuances, but it's not art that’s meant to endure. It’s meant to be seen once, clearly convey its message, then the reader moves on. Most art you see in magazines is like that. You don't desire to keep coming back to it, to look at it again and absorb it.

When I look at a Jeff Koons piece, for example, it's often very clever and flashy and interesting, really eye-catching and fun. But once I've seen it, I’m done with it. There’s no lingering. Looking at it a second time, I shrug. There is no desire to come back. It's commercial illustration writ large, and what it lacks is precisely that emotional intuition (Kandinsky again) that I find myself seeking from my own paintings. I don't tire of looking at them, or making photos of them.

Probably most artists feel this way about their own work, so it's hardly a revelation, I imagine. If it didn’t interest you as an artist, you wouldn’t return to it, or to doing it.

October Project. A movie soundtrack. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Cowpunk ditties. "I hate to wake up sober in Nebraska." Music rolling on.

Pause to make dinner. Ravel solo piano music.

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Friday, November 9
11:45 AM

Now we lighten up the colors again, so they emerge from the dark, glowing. Red glows over green.

Thinking ahead, planning ahead, envisioning in advance with the mind’s eye, what photographer Edward Weston called “pre-visualization,” is something I learned to do years ago as a graphic designer. You keep the goal in mind. You can hit the mental undo button to go back a step if necessary. You visualize what the end result will look like, and you approach that visualization even if you never quite match it in the real world. Imagination remains more malleable, in the end.

Working in layers on a painting, adding layers over layers, is for me analogous to working in layers in Photoshop. You know what's above and below, what masks and what shows through, how they interact. There is a similar sense of happy accident, the indeterminacy I often like to see in all the art I do. Being surprised as the artist is one of the things I love about the process. Discovery. The mystery of an unplanned but even better outcome.

Thinking about this further, layers are natural to me because they are prominent in my music, and the music I play and listen to. All those years spent playing Javanese gamelan, which is layered cycles of melody and heterophony. The influence of the Indonesian music I've studied and played on how I play in a jazz or rock combo setting, in which I also tend to think in layers. Avant-garde classical music and jazz, often structured similarly. I'm thinking of Steve Reich's cyclic gradual process music, and also more recently of Nik Bartsch and his ensemble Ronin, in which the tension between layers of melody and rhythmic cycles is integral to the music.

The underlayers of the painting show through in parts, in textures underneath, even when the pigments are covered over or mostly so. Remnants. Memories. Little bits of the past. Every painting is a history as well as a fact.

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Saturday, November 10
12:34 PM

Recently acquired the special edition DVD of Ed Harris' movie "Pollock," which is an excellent biopic about the artist Jackson Pollock, unsentimental and deeply moving. It’s not a psychoanalysis of Pollock, it’s a presentation of his life. The most interesting and intense parts of the movie are the scenes in which we see the artist at work, creating. To do this role, Harris learned how to paint. He built a studio behind his house, and began to learn. The paintings seen in the film are re-creations of Pollocks, made by the film studio art department, but also worked on by Harris on camera. This is one of the most realistic depictions of a painter in the films: there’s no faking it.

Watching Harris paint as Pollock painted, in character but also DOING the paintings is enthralling. You can see that the actor has absorbed how the painter moved, physically, which gives a strong clue to how he painted. This is a simply terrific film. It inspires me to take up the brushes again today and work some more.

Painting is becoming something that, once I've started doing it, becomes self-sustaining. I still have trouble with all the labels around art: painter, artist, etc. I'd rather than just do it than have a label I have to wear like a name badge. So I still don't think of myself as A Painter, I just paint. I’m happy to say I paint, and leave it at that.

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Monday, November 12
2:07 PM

This painting is now finished. No title yet, though I do know it’s part of the aurora borealis series. Call it simply “Aurorae” for now. I’ll put it up on the bedroom wall with the other painting, and continue to grow the cluster of paintings there, adding color to my room’s most empty wallspace.

Finished. Rather, I don't know what else to do with it. The end result is a bit darker than I had envisioned, nonetheless it's saturated with rich color. There are a lot of details here I like. Brushstrokes like waves of light and air.

Poet Paul Valery once opined, "A poem is never finished, only abandoned." I feel some of that now. This painting is abandoned. I feel the need to go on, to work on other paintings. To do something new and unknown. To improvise.

In painting as in poetry, there comes a point after which more revision won't fix anything, and often makes things worse. I once was boggled to hear that a poet was teaching her writing workshop students that she sometimes revised a poem sixty times. I frankly find that either unbelievable or pathetic. If it takes that long to "fix" a piece of art, chances are you never will. Either it has defeated you already, or you've gotten stuck.

I don't feel that way about this painting, it just feels done. Abandoned, maybe, or perhaps it’s just telling me that it’s done. I don't know what else to do with it. I'm satisfied. I'm ready to move on to the next piece.

Art Therapy and Art Not Therapy

Spent the night last night mostly in a turmoil. Personal fears, medical fears, the uncertainty of the future. Not knowing anything more than I do now about outcomes. Some part of you always wants to control what can't really be controlled, or even known. Wants to put a reconciling face on chaos. Wants to find predictability as comforting security where there is none.

Life's too unpredictable. I'm worried about things in the future, while I could die today in an accident. You never know. Every little setback seems magnified to giant proportions in the face of my recurrent fears about my own future.

You don't know what's going to happen. You really only have mastery over today. The rest of it, no matter how upset we make ourselves over worrying about it, isn't really in our power to control, no matter how dire, no matter how graceful. Faith and trust come into play at just such moments. I don't hope for anything. Hope is a toxic word that lets you build castles of expectations in the sky, which are doomed to crash on the mountains of inchoate reality. Faith is the irrational belief, sometimes supported by experience, that no matter what happens, you'll be all right in the end. Trust is the irrational sense that things do mean something, after all, even if you don't know what, and never do. That things mean something, that there is a point to all this random suffering, that somehow it does all mean something. Even if the only meaning to life you can ever grasp is the meaning you make for yourself, the meaning you invest in whatever seems random and meaningless.

I only mention any of my personal dilemmas because it leads to a discussion of art and therapy.

I hope, no doubt about to be disappointed, that art-making is not only therapeutic. Certainly making art can be therapeutic. "Art therapy" as a practical psychological discipline has a long history, and has helped many people. But there's more to art than therapy.

I grew up being taught by my birth-tribe (the Norwegian-American Lutherans) that expressing any strong emotion, much less anger, was forbidden. Even expressing too much joy was looked down on as aberrant. The ideal man was laconic and stoic. But I was always a passionate person, with very strong feelings, who had a problem with conforming to those expectations. I bottled a lot of anger in my youth, which came out very badly. When pushed too far, I lashed out far in excess of provocation. I scared myself with the intensity of my own emotions, which led to a renewed cycle of suppression.

As an adult, I learned and now still believe that expressing strong feelings directly is not only good, it's healthy and necessary, and can be done in appropriate ways. There are appropriate ways to express anger, and inappropriate ways. Most people, it seems to me, get tangled up about how to express their feelings, not whether they have them or not. Many people have a lot more emotions than they think they do, because they live in their heads, disconnected from their soma, living life virtually rather than immersed in it.

The stoic and laconic archetypal hero is sometimes afraid of his own feelings; he might be able to kill the monster with dispatch, but he has a hard time saying "I love you." The entire genre of popular "action" movies can be framed as artistically-sublimated male rage, in which blowing things up and cracking wise are deflective substitutes for genuine personal expression of one's feelings. Far easier to watch someone else fight the battles onscreen that you are fighting internally; it's supportive of one's fragile ego, attacked on all sides by life, to see the hero win the battle onscreen, when you feel like you're losing it in real life.

I learned through hard personal work to express my anger in the moment, and then it's done. I have ways to do so that don't cause problems. Many of my friends have mutual understandings and agreements about venting. Sometimes you just have to vent, to get it out of your self, and blow off some steam. Blowing off steam, reducing the internal pressure, keeps you from blowing up, later, more forcefully, and more inappropriately.

Of course one can do this with one's art, and I occasionally do so. I write the occasional poem that is nothing but emotional dumping. I write the occasional piece of music that expresses strong emotion artistically.

But I'd hate to think that art-making was only therapeutic. And in fact I don't think that for even one minute.

I have no problem with the occasional poem being used for deflecting anger, or blowing off steam, such as my own (controversial) poem "Kenosis." But I don't think it's something one can build an entire poetics on, no more than one could build on any other form of purely therapeutic behavior. Of course, that is exactly what many who practice the poetics of the post-confessional lyric believe that poetry's major function is: therapeutic. But this turns poetry into just another tool of (therapeutic) self-expression, and that narrows and limits poetry's scope unnecessarily.

Poetry must express all of the conditions and experiences of life, even beyond just human life, or it becomes too simplistic, even reductionist. Art must joyfully praise as well as be a source of solace. I think Robert Lowell, the poet most associated with the origins of confessional poetry, was unable to make this leap out of pure self-expression; although I think Philip Larkin started from a similarly splenetic place, he occasionally did make the leap past the purely confessional into something more universal. I'm not a big fan of Larkin, I find him generally too dour and misanthropic, but I do appreciate his ability to take nasty bits of life and make art from them. By contrast, I view Robinson Jeffers as not misanthropic, but focused, rather, beyond the human drama, onto a larger canvas, in which human drama plays a part, but not the central, most important role. Confessional poetry leads all to quickly to narcissistic mannerisms, whereas the poetry of Jeffers—and of some who followed in his footsteps, like Gary Snyder—leads us towards transcending the human tendency towards self-regard with the knowledge that we are part of a larger world, and not always the most important part.

There are some performance artists who, in using themselves, their own bodies, as part of their artistic process, who speak of stepping out of themselves into a kind of trance, or other transcendent state. When you watch one of their performances, when they are totally engaged with what they're doing, it becomes almost ritualistic. Is it therapeutic? I think for some performance artists, it's like shape-changing: changing the self. For others, I think they never get out of their heads, really; they sort of distance themselves from life by enacting their art. I think artists who live in their heads can be found in every genre. The psychology of this is interesting.

I've heard it said, since we're on to psychology now, that sociopaths are never creative. I think that's wrong. I think it comes from some wrong definitions, although that may be open to discussion.

Sociopaths are a specific kind of personality trait and set of behaviors. It's not yet known if there's an organic component; there may be, but childhood environment also contributes. I've known a few sociopaths in my time; one of these was my paternal grandmother. To a sociopath, other people are not really real. Sociopaths know that it's not right to hurt other people, they know that their actions have consequences, but they can't perceive other people as being as real as they are themselves, so they often hurt others without realizing it. It's not always malicious, but it can be manipulative in the extreme. To sociopaths, only their own emotions and needs are real; other people aren't perceived as having similarly authentic feelings. A sociopath is perfectly capable of being creative, and more than one artist-sociopath has become famous or considered a great artist. What sociopaths seem incapable of feeling is empathy, even sympathy, for others, and unable to really understand others' feelings and needs. A sociopath still knows right from wrong, however, which is something a genuine psychopath cannot understand. It's a matter of degrees.

Art can be a way of enabling empathy. It can be political, which often evokes little more than the empathy of mutual revulsion, it can be personal within the larger context of being social, which to me seems more nuanced, more capable of making connections. If you ask artists what they're to do, they might discuss their politics, or their craft (technique), or what they're trying to do in a social or theoretical context. But artists can't be entirely trusted to reveal themselves, or their core selves, in anything but their art. A lot of art criticism by artists is about hiding the self, rather than revealing it. Even the poet of total honesty and self-celebration, Walt Whitman, edited and censored himself, when talking about his poetry. Artist often have large egos, and both painters and performance artists can be notoriously self-involved. It's not just ego, though: it can be using one's own self as raw material for exploring larger meanings. You start with the self, but you end up in a larger space. Except for course, for some artists, their process stays stuck in self-regard: and that can end up as therapy-art, confessional art, and never reach transcendence. Is that egotistical confessionalism? Sometimes, perhaps, it ends up there.

If you surmise that I'm biased towards transcending the personal self, say rather that I think it's a greater life-goal, not just an artistic goal. Art reflects life, which reflects art, and so on. I'm more interested in art that goes beyond: beyond my own limits, and conceptions; beyond the ego, beyond self-representation, beyond involvement with the self. If that's transcendence, well and good.

The bottom line is that confessional art just isn't very interesting to anyone but the artist, if it doesn't somehow get past the personal and into the universal. The ego tends to love itself so much that it can't see past the mirrors it has set up around itself to regard itself in.

That would be an interesting performance art project: to have an artist, naked, stuck inside an eggshell-shaped container made of mirrors, which she would have to break to get out of. Until then, all she could see would be herself. Breaking through to the outside world might involve cutting oneself by accident on the mirrors. (Just like my own nighttime worries about my future.) A little blood might be shed before she could escape into the outside world—which might be like being born.

But once you realize, with your greater self, that there is much more to both your self and the world than the ego, or the personality-ego, you start to see a bigger picture. You start to have faith, perhaps even trust, that something more than yourself is out there, and is worth paying attention. Artistic self-regard might open up into artistic splendor. This is harder than it seems, as the personality-ego is tenacious: even nature poets have a tendency to simply use nature, as a set of images or events, as a reflection of self. The worst kinds of political poetry, the bathetic "I feel your pain" political poetry that tries to generate empathy through associating lists of atrocities with one's personal dramas, never get past self-regard, because the only person the poet can really see is the one in the mirror. It is a laudable attempt to generate or recreate empathy. But it's not genuine. It gets stuck in the mirror.

Breaking the mirror is possible, though. The best political poets recreate the experience of empathy in the reader, and in themselves, not with mirror-tricks but with simple reportage. Whitman's poems of long lists manage, through sheer accumulation, to pull the reader in by direct connection. The best poets who sometimes get labeled nature poets give us an experience of true empathy, by evoking life directly: by giving us what the hawk feels, soaring on the wind, rather than telling us what the soaring hawk makes the poet feel, which we ought to feel as well. The simplistic, clichéd workshop formulation for this evocation in poetry is "show, don't tell." I would rephrase it as "evoke." Get me inside the experience. I am become the deer nibbling the sedge in the mountain glade. I am become the world turning slowly. This requires imagination, not only narration. In fact, the best "nature poems" often have a sense of time that is eternal, timeless, not bound to linear progression, the Now in which most animals live. Do wolves spend sleepless nights, as I do, worrying about their futures? No. The wolf rules for life are ever more useful to me as a role-model.

Art can be therapeutic, in this sense, too: that it takes us out of ourselves, away from our petty concerns, for even a little while. It can be a brief vacation. That's perfectly valid, although again it's not all that art is, or can be. It's okay to take a break, though. Which is why "escapist art" like occasionally reading your average blandly-styled beach thriller novel is nothing to feel guilty about. You can't survive on a diet of only "art" literature; a little trash fiction, or doggerel, is good for the digestion. I sometimes go back and re-read a well-thumbed favorite SF novel just to have a break from myself and my daily life.

But art cannot be limited to the therapeutic purposes, the relief of psychological pressures, anxieties, or needs. It must be more than that. Just as with my domineering birth tribe, the Norwegian-American Lutherans of the Upper Midwest, just as with my passionate later-life rebellion against those social constraints, art can container joy as well as sorrow, ecstasy as well as suffering. The rebellious boy who feels so much joy at being alive that he can't contain it, it will certainly blow his heart right out of his chest at any moment—that's a feeling that can come from great art, too, no matter what it's theme or subject matter might be. Art is a container. Not just for what's judged valuable, but for everything.

Non-verbal Film

still image from Baraka by Ron Fricke

In the past few days I have edited together two segments of multi-frame video for one of my own ongoing DVD projects, Waves. This has been a long time in the making; it’s the last of four short films for a set called Dreamtime Ocean. I am experimenting with multi-frame, multi-window video and still montage, and the results so far are mostly positive. Occasionally a segment edges towards the sublime, often as a result of the content, the beauty of the shot itself.

The multi-frame aspect comes in when I have more than one video image onscreen at the same time. The simplest version of this is two moving pictures placed side by side. But I’ve expanded that to a palette of up to nine or ten layered positions possible onscreen at any given moment, including a full-frame image in the background behind a smaller window. Sometimes as few as one frame is present, sometimes as many as six. Positions change with shots. Sometimes shots are layered and duplicated in different positions simultaneously. The eye is called to move between frames, or to sit back and soak it all in as one larger overarching frame. One can focus in on one element in context, or use what in martial they call “soft eyes,” the relaxed vision that takes in all of the visual field at once, including the peripheral vision.

My first set of four short videos (can you label them films if they weren’t shot on film?), Basin & Range, was based entirely on collages and montages of my still photography, and also my visionary digital artwork done in Photoshop. This next set of short films was begun a year later, but I needed a lot of time for the project to mature to completion. In the interim, we began Liquid Crystal Gallery, our series of commercially-released DVDs designed to be both . We are gradually incorporating moving images in with the animated stills, to expand our palette and our horizons. I am probably not going to move entirely into moving pictures—unless I suddenly get a gig as a cinematographer, or have some similar reason—as I am too attached to the advantage that still photography has, of being able to contemplate a single image for a long time, without distractions. This is that boundary region between painting and cinema, sharing some qualities of both.


still image from Baraka by Ron Fricke

This morning I was looking through Mark Magidson’s book of still photographs taken while traveling for the production and filming of Baraka, one of the films he has produced with Ron Fricke. Baraka is one of my favorite films of all time. It’s all images and music, and tells its narrative without dialogue or traditional film structural narrative, using only a sequence of images and music. This is one goal for my poetry, one way of working, that I continue to pursue: a poetry of only images and musicality, that never tells you what to think, or what’s going on, and speaks without voice, leaving the reader/viewer to interpret the work how they will, and how they can.

Non-narrative is risky for both film and poetry: there are many who have expectations that will not be met. Some expectations that both audience and traditionalist art-makers have can be viewed as merely the products of inertia rather than necessity, however. Artistic inertia is never an excuse for closemindedness, although it is often the underlying justification. I do not promote newness for its own sake, either. What I promote is the appropriate approach the materials at hand, to accomplish the work as it needs to evolve. If that means using traditional verbal-oriented story-telling narrative, that’s all to the good; but if a project requires one to step outside the linear story-telling box of assumptions about how to structure time-based art, then so be it, and that too is all to the good.

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More and more this genre of film is being labeled "nonverbal cinema." It's tempting to want to generalize that towards a "nonverbal poetry." One immediately thinks of concrete poetry, visual poetry, and related cross-disciplinary genres. The difficulty of course is the words are the artistic medium of poetry. If you take away the words, make it truly nonverbal, is it still poetry? This could be debated in the same way that non-narrative art is debated. There are expectations about what artforms can and cannot do. It is obvious to say that, if you take away the words, all you have left is the music; but it might also be facile, a little too easy to say. This also gets us into the distinction between "poetry" as an artform and "poetic" as a descriptor.

Certainly films like Baraka are "poetic" films; but so are other films that do incorporate speech and narrative. I wrote recently about director Michael Mann, stimulated by an interview quote he given about the harmonic of human experience. Mann's favorite moments in his own films could easily be called poetic. But even some recent action-adventure films such as Bryan Singer's Superman Returns contain several poetic moments.

Music is often called "poetic"—perhaps a failure of critical language—when it achieves something sublime. We use the word "poetic" a lot to describe things that are liminal, numinous, transcendent, archetypal, and sublime. It is in some ways a cheap fill-in word, that doesn't really mean a lot. But can a non-verbal poetry be poetic? That is still an open question.