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.

Teton Windows

Teton Windows
(Click on image for larger version.)

A collage made from two photos of the Tetons, made by improvising in Photoshop till inspiration struck. This piece is thematically tied to the series of Ocean Windows and Sunset Windows pieces also made in Photoshop.

Each piece in this series is made of two or mote layers of photos of the same setting or subject, with "windows" in the upper layers masked out to reveal what lies beneath. There is an apparently Cubist aspect to this collage method, with multiple viewpoints of the subject within the frame; but for me the visionary art aspect is more important, with each of the multiple viewpoints being a window or door one sees through into another aspect of the scene, or into another world entirely.

On one level, my inspiration here is from contemporary stained-glass windows in cathedrals. These collages evoke standing inside Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, for example, the stained glass illuminated from outside, flooding the walls and floor with colored patterns of light, the sacredness of the space created as much by this illumination as by any conventional religious association. I plan to print some of these "windows" pieces large, and hang them so that they in turn evoke the feeling of cathedral windows.

Visionary Artwork 5

Going back through some older archives, looking at some early visionary Photoshop work, I pulled out a few pieces to make fresh prints of. It's good to look back on the work you did some years ago, to reflect on the process and how it's changed. And how you have changed.

It's interesting to look back over some of this old work, at the moment, as I proceed forward into a new phase of productivity, in art-making and music composition.


Prince of Air (c. 2000)

A piece made for a proposed Tarot deck, actually more of a Jungian archetype deck. A friend modeled for me at the lake, and I assembled this from several sequential poses and images. The feeling I had, as I played with the images, was of that of a man leaping into the air and flying. It was definitely a leap, not just floating up. So I represented the upward take-off as sequential and layered images, with wings on the sides. The side panels are Art Nouveau angels from a decorative clip art book.

This version of the piece, printed and framed at 8 inches square, has been shown in a number of group exhibitions in the Midwest. It was this square version that I stumbled across when browsing through my old archives that made me think to think make a new print edition.



This version was the one that I actually made for the proposed deck of cards. I still work on this deck from time to time, although I still haven't found a publisher for it. There are some 48 or so finished images, with several more still in progress, and a dozen or so images I made that I've decided not to include.

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Gambuh

A self-portrait taken in Surakarta, Central Java, c. 1985. This was taken in the living room of the house I rented. I was dressed in traditional Javanese court garb, and playing a Balinese bamboo flute called a suling gambuh, suling meaning flute, gambuh being an ensemble composed of pairs of these long low-pitched suling played using circular breathing technique.

I don't do a lot of self-portraits, but occasionally as an artist, you need to. Just to see where you're at, to locate yourself in your work. A form of artistic self-assessment, if you will. At this moment, I was studying traditional Javanese court gamelan in Surakarta, on a Fulbright grant. I was studying as a composer rather than as an ethnomusicologist at the time, although of course those interests converged at times.


Gambuh Sunset

In the early 90s, I combined this self-portrait with an image of a winter sunset taken overlooking Lake Mendota in Madison, WI. The pink, orange and red sunlight reflected on the ice of the frozen lake, haloed the trees, and spread across the sky. When I combined the layers I did some dodging and burning, and some masking of parts of each image, so that the elements I wanted to have appear were clarified. For example, I created an oval vignette around myself playing the suling, so that face and hands and flute would not be lost in the trees of the sunset image.

One thing I like about this image is that it combines two climate zones and locations that have been important in my life. It combines the tropical heat of equatorial Indonesia with the frozen sub-arctic tundra of the northern Midwest, my birth home. Some 45 degrees of latitude and nearly 180 degrees of longitude separate the two locales in which the separate images were made. To combine these images like this represents my life's history in microcosm. So this piece is symbolic, for me, of how big parts of my life have merged.


Chamber Music CD cover (1995)

In 1995 I produced and released a CD of some of my composed chamber music. The album had five pieces on it, which I had digitized from the original performance recordings, all originally recorded on stereo reel-to-reel tape.

To make the cover art I re-versioned the Gambuh Sunset piece. A lot of graphic design is re-versioning, when it is based on pieces that were originally stand-alone art pieces. I used two different typefaces for the Chamber Music titling, heavily modifying each word in Photoshop.

Using this self-portrait piece for the CD cover was actually to fulfill a request from a friend, who believed that people would want to knew who the artist was. I'm not big on author's photos on book covers, or composer's portraits on album covers, as I like to think the work can speak for itself. In this case I acceded to the request because I knew I could do something a little different with it, play with the image and type, make it new.

Sunset Windows

Green Man 2

In the Greening, the Great God Pan, the Green Man rises again, come Spring, come Summer.

Ocean WIndows

Ocean Windows I


Ocean Windows II


Ocean Clouds, Mendocino, CA

Visionary Artwork 4

A few notes on method.

As with poetry-writing, I don't find endless tinkering to be all that useful or important to the process of making visionary art. The more you tinker, the more you risk the image losing its power, and going stale and overly-familiar. Most often, I do my best to work quickly, as spontaneously as possible, so as not to over-think an artwork and possibly risk killing its energy.

There are two or three larger, overlapping impetuses towards making a new piece, which can be categorized roughly as:

1. inspired by dreams, and records of dreams
2. inspired by waking visions; things I see, and ways I see things, made in Photoshop so others can see them too
3. made by playing around with elements and techniques in Photoshop till something ignites and tells me what it wants to become

The first two categories contain spontaneous as well as more "planned" or "deliberate" pieces. Many of these pieces are deliberate attempts to recreate what one has seen, in a dream, in a waking vision, in the imagination. The intention is to bring into the visible realm what one has seen, so that others might see it too. It's a way of sharing your unique vision of the world with others.

These images are "planned" mainly in the sense that one has the image very quickly, and the rest of one's effort lies in the execution: going to find the elements needed; putting it together, like a painting, which can take some time; finishing it up and polishing it, making it come as close to the original vision as possible. Occasionally this yields very strong work, which acquires more energy when you complete it, and keeps growing. (Which certainly renews my faith in the importance of incorporating our dreams into life.) I practice keeping my analytical mind in check—keep the inner editor or critic turned off—for as long as possible, at least till the basic conception is done. I might spend considerable time on the technical execution, if drawing in Photoshop, or editing certain parts of an image becomes necessary.

The following piece was made immediately upon waking, after seeing, in the last dream before waking, this image of multiple moons above the road. The feeling in the dream was that the sky had opened up like a window or a gateway, revealing another world, another universe, another place and time:



The following image was made this way: a quick imaginative waking vision, I knew what I was going to do when I made the photo of the huge willow tree, followed by a lot of work in Photoshop to get everything to look right. The lighting effects alone took several layers to make look right:


Arrival, from Spiral Dance

In Photoshop, as in painting, subtlety goes a long way. Underpainting layers, layers with slightly different lighting effects and opacities, multiple repetitions of a layer each with a slightly different blur to add depth—these are all typical techniques one can use. I find in practice that using a lot of layers with subtle effects looks far more realistic, more like what the eye actually sees, no matter what the subject matter is. Remember that the camera eye sees more things, in sharper focus, than does the human eye. That's a property of photography that can be used to create super-realism and sharp depth of field; and since the real world is often fuzzy around the edges, it can be an effect we need to tone down, to give an image heart and breath.

The third category, above, actually accounts for over half of the visionary art I make. Sometimes I get inspired by an element of what becomes the final piece, which leads me to go looking for the rest, to pull it all together. Sometimes the mood of a basic photo inspires me in a certain direction, and seems to call for something specific to go along with it. Sometimes it's pure play, which ends up revealing something archetypal. Fooling around with one's art materials is a time-honored way of finding inspiration, which is really no different in Photoshop then it is with colored pencils on paper.

None of this is accidental or random, however. It's a kind of active imagination, to use Jung's term, that goes spelunking for the contents of one's unconscious, and translates them into imagery, poetry, dream-narrative, and other creative materials. One reason I like working with wood is that it retains the feeling of being alive; Jung worked often with stone.

Photoshop for me is a tool in which active imagination can happen; the key to active imagination is putting oneself into a meditative, receptive, numinous state, to await what is brought forward by the unconscious for you to examine. This is dream-logic, and the logic of the Dreamtime: it's not rational logic, and it's not a process of art-making in which the intellect is "in control" of the process, or even present. None of that artist's ego beforehand saying that it knows what it's going to do down to the last millimeter; it's more important to set out with no idea of what's going to happen. You actually have to get your ego-mind to "step aside," to get out of the way. The discipline is to create a field of receptivity in oneself, then wait to see what comes forward. You might end up with a doodle rather than finished piece—a risk you take anytime you play with your artistic tools—and you might find something that needs to sit and percolate awhile, before you come back to finish it. Or it might all come together suddenly and complete itself. All this is as true for poetry-writing as for making images.

There have been many times when, sorting through photos made recently, I run across one that hadn't left much of an impression on me before, but which now seems to be surrounded with a powerful, glowing aura of importance. It can stop me in my tracks. When that happens, I start working with the image, trying out different tools and techniques to see what might happen—very like a jazz player riffing on a theme, trying out different ways of improvising till something starts to take form. Improvisation in Photoshop can very much be a way to activate the imagination.

There have been other times when I knew the photo was going to be important as I was making it, because the moment of its making was surrounded by something liminal, something numinous and non-ordinary. You get a feeling, a sense that something important is going to happen, and you set up the camera then wait for the exact moment when your intuition tells you to release the shutter. You know what's going to happen before it actually does—or rather, not exactly what, but that something special is going to happen. Some people call that feeling a hunch; others call it intuition. If it's luck, it's not random luck, but the luck of synchronicity, the meaningful coincidence when everything lines up just so, and sings.

This photo was made at one of those moments:



Sometimes, when you catch the light of spirit just right, just so, you want to jump up and down and yell "Yes! Yes!" to celebrate everything in the Universe converging, just so, to make the photo happen.

This leads me to mention a curious paradox: There have been numerous occasions when a viewer of my artwork thinks that a pure photo was manipulated in Photoshop, and when a heavily-worked image in Photoshop is taken to be a pure photo. The two processes are confused for one another; I grant that it's not always obvious. Yet that this confusion of means keeps happening is very interesting to me as the artist.

There is another, related paradox, too, in which someone sees something numinous and archetypal in an artwork which I myself view as fairly mundane; just as there are times in which I see a lot of liminal power in a finished piece that no one else seems to see. That line between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious, wherein live the archetypes, is an apparently fuzzy and movable line.

I leave these paradoxes unexamined, without trying to force them towards a resolution. As the artist involved, I find it very interesting, and make note of it, without necessarily needing to force it towards intellectual understanding.

Visionary Artwork 3

In many traditions, birds are a symbol of the soul. Birds in flight have always fascinated me. I have managed to capture some images of birds in flight that to me represent the soul in flight. I've also made some Photoshop digital collages and art-pieces using birds in flight as elements.


White Bird/Badlands

This is one of the first pieces of visionary digital art I ever made. Probably circa 1996, although the photo elements date from 1993. Color monitors on which to edit photos were still new to consumers; the digital revolution was in its relative infancy still. I labored long and hard to make this image, with several layers in an early version of Photoshop.


Water Birds I

These two Water Birds pieces were made from photos taken around the lakes in Madison, WI. The mood is darker, more introspective. I remember making the photographs, then assembling the final images later. There is a process in just playing around in Photoshop during which you discover things almost by accident, which inspire you to combine things in new ways, and create new kinds of imagery. These are some of the first wave of digital art I ever made in Photoshop, in the mid 1990s, when the tools were still fairly new, and I was still learning how to use them. Much of the experimental digital art I played around with at the time was collages of adequate if not brilliant quality; and some of the roots of the digital art I make now began here, although my technique and the tools I use are by now far more developed and sophisticated. Still, it's interesting to look back on this old work, and see some of the same themes play themselves out. Some visionary art themes are eternal, archetypal, permanently embedded in the collective unconscious.


Water Birds II
(Click on image for larger version)

Birds and water together, in visionary art, can evoke the spirit moving over the waters. Therefore, the days of creation; the myths of the ancient sea out of which all life arose; the sea that is a creator goddess, still always living, in motion, in change, in process. A rumble of wings over the dark turbulent waters: the world in turbulent upset, shaking itself out, trying to come to some rest but not ready, just yet, for the settled rest that islands and the mainland offer. Far better to fly over these dark and brooding waters, still, staying in flight, for now, till we know where it will all end. The sound of wings. The rush of water. Life, death, forces much larger than ourselves and our mundane concerns.

Mathias the Painter

I first encountered the painter Mathias Grünewald via Paul Hindemith's Symphony "Mathis der Mahler," from 1934, which was based on themes from his opera of the same name; the opera was premiered later, in 1938, due to several controversies. Hindemith was one of the composers of the first half of the Twentieth Century who changed the face of contemporary music, though he is now often given credit than he deserves. As a composer he combined traditional tonal elements with more experimental elements in his music, to create a distinctively modern sound. Yet it was as a teacher and music theorist that he influenced many other composers. HIs theory and method books were much sought when he was at Yale in his later career.

I began working through Hindemith's theory method books when in my teens, long before I went to music school. By then I had already studied a lot of Debussy, had a teenage fling with Sturm und Drang in the Romantic composers (my two favorite Beethoven symphonies being the Sixth and the Ninth), and wanted more than traditional tonal music. I had already started to explore John Cage's musical ideas by then, and also Steve Reich's, and had had my hands on tape recorders and electronic music instruments; my junior high school actually owned a suitcase Moog synthesizer. Hindemith provided an alternative to both traditional tonality and to Schönberg's serial atonality; neither of which spoke to me as a composer. I recall being introduced to modes and modal composition; to polychords; and to open, non-triadic voicings in counterpoint. Later on, in music school, I was drilled relentlessly in 18th C. counterpoint, notably Bach's voice-leadings, Heinrich Isaak, and much more. It was a good grounding, but Hindemith's ideas about opening up music theory beyond strictly tonal possibilities had a stronger influence on me. Hindemith prefigured a fair bit of jazz music theory, although I don't know if he was aware of this; on the other hand, I recall reading somewhere in a jazz history book that some influential jazz composers had read and absorbed Hindemith's theory books.

Hindemith's Symphony "Mathis der Mahler" can be thought of as an orchestral suite of themes developed from the opera; although it stands alone as a symphonic work, and is probably Hindemith's best-known work at this date, the programmatic origins of the music should not be forgotten. Each movement of the symphony is a musical response to a painting by Mathias Grünewald: each depicts a painting, or the meaningful response to the painting. The music, therefore, is simultaneously contemplative and ecstatic. There are moments of great dynamic force, of relentless motion; these are side by side with moments not of tranquility but of revelation.



Grünewald's most famous surviving work is the Isenheim Altarpiece. it was originally painted for a chapel hospital serving patients afflicted with St. Anthony's Fire, a neurological syndrome scholars now believe was caused by ergot contamination of rye, a fungus that grows on the grain and produces a poison.

The remarkable starkness and cruelty of the Crucifixion that Mathias depicted in the Isenheim Altarpiece has been much discussed; less remarked upon is the context of naturalism that Mathias was depicting within the context of his commission: the horror of the Crucifixion was no doubt felt directly and personally by the patients who might have viewed the paintings, suffering as they were from ergotism and perhaps plague. The stark naturalism of the painting thus connects the viewer to the Christ of the miserable, the poor, the forgotten, the diseased. It tells no lies about the hard facts of life. Death is not made pretty or easy. Mathias' depiction is remarkable in part because of its heightened drama, created by its technical ultra-naturalism, remarkable for tis time. In fact, still remarkable, still unique.

There was a tradition in Medieval and Renaissance painting to be darkly horrific when depicting the Crucifixion. Death was quite familiar, and fear of death, and fear of damnation. Remember that Medieval art was visual preaching: sermons in sculpture and paint. Even some of the landed gentry were quite illiterate, and the Church conducted its offices in the learned tongue of Latin, not in the vernacular. This tradition of painting has doctrinal origins, obviously. A great deal more art historical study of Medieval art focuses on the Crucifixion rather than the Resurrection: in part because it was more often depicted in art. Again, there are doctrinal and dogmatic reasons for this. These visual sermons were intended to get sinners to repent, by depicting the horrors of death and damnation. They were meant to inspire, if only by fear, good behavior.



When the three wings of the painted altar are fully opened, there is a bit of gilded peace: the presence of St. Anthony, the balm and protector of those with the fire in their flesh. The altar wings open through layers of art and thus layers of meaning. It's a very poetic artwork, full of deep symbolism, each opening layer reflecting upon the others, making a complex sermon indeed. The patient viewing the altar might be led through a connection of their personal suffering to Christ's suffering, through to their personal relief of suffering: they might achieve consolation.

I remember from when I studied art history and Medieval art, that several art historians have noted that, since the Middle Ages, the emphasis has almost always been on death over resurrection: it's a more emotionally powerful image, as it leads them to contemplate their own mortality. At its crudest, it keeps the flocks in line with threats of death and damnation. The crucifixion makes people aware of their own immortal souls, and they might be reminded to repent of their sins. There's a special area of study in Medieval art history on this topic.

Artistic images of death remain more common, even today, than images of transcendent overcoming. We still think this way. I've read more than one book analyzing our contemporary culture as death- and pain-obsessed. We market everything with sex, while our stories, our fictions, our contemporary myths strongly emphasize death and violence over love and overcoming. We can show violent bloody deaths on television every night, but we still can't show people making tender love without getting censored.

In art, another factor in play might be that it's very easy to sentimentalize the resurrection. It takes a very great artist indeed to effectively paint, or sculpt, ecstatic experiences. There are some great resurrection poems; perhaps it's a topic that easier to talk about than to directly experience. Many of us never rise above the pain of life; we remain mired in the woundology of crucifixion. It's difficult to depict transcendence without becoming clichéd, or using symbols that are so familiar that they don't pack the same emotional punch as images of death do. (BTW, that emotional punch is one reason Sigmund Freud decided that the death-fear was so central in his model of the unconscious. I don't agree with Freud that it is of primary importance; but it is present nonetheless.)

Joseph Campbell wrote compellingly about the death-and-resurrection mythos. So did Carl Jung. You have to die to be reborn: and each of us experience smaller crucifixions in our lives, which to overcome we too must be reborn. It's part of the Hero's journey pattern, and goes back very far in Western culture. The goddess Innana, from Sumerian myth, died and was reborn; the trope is also in the Gilgamesh myth.

Death images contain drama, high drama, high emotion; we're all afraid of death, to some extent. But not all of us experience the ecstasy of rebirth: it's a fundamentally harder topic to relate to, personally, for most people. There are some great artworks depicting the resurrection, including some from the Middle Ages, but they're usually sublime rather than dramatic, so to be blunt they may not hold the attention of the average viewer quite as powerfully as death images do.



For me, the most remarkable panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece is the Resurrection painting. As has been remarked by more than one art historian, depictions of the Crucifixion, of the Suffering, far outnumber depictions of the Resurrection. This painting is thus both amazing in its own right, but extraordinary in its context. There is nothing at all sentimental in this painting: it's as stark, as super-naturalistic as the Crucifixion, in its depiction of its theme. It's one of the most potent Resurrection paintings I've ever seen, one of the most memorable.

The resurrection panel depicts Christ literally exploding out of the tomb, blasting out of the earth, flying above the landscape as though an angel or a rocket, enveloped in a sphere of glowing luminous light. His flight from death is the point of light illuminating the darkened landscape. Ordinary people on the ground, mostly covered in shadow, avert their gaze, the Light is so bright; or perhaps they have been knocked off their feet by the wind of the Christ's passage. There is in this painting a sense of immanent power, overwhelming force. Nothing can stand before the conqueror of death, without being utterly transformed.

Light itself has often been used as a symbol of resurrection and transcendence. The light coming in the Medieval cathedral windows was a symbol of God, who is Light and Radiance. The radiant light surrounding the Christ in this painting is both explosive and sublime: a continuous explosion that never ceases, that never ceases to renew itself, and goes on and on. The rocket analogy seems natural to me here, because, in essence, a rocket is propelled by continuous explosions that thrust it forward through space.

To contemplate a painting so transformative for a long period of time does make changes in the viewer. Perhaps one feels a peace arise within, knowing that the fear of death is not so important after all. Perhaps one is led into a direct experience of the Light, in one's own self: an experience recorded by many mystics from many times and places is of feeling illuminated from within. Of being lifted up, and plunged into a Light-filled space in which all shadow is scoured away. Perhaps one can hear a lingering trace of that continuous explosion in the music of the heavens, which in this pocket of the Light suffer none of the chaotic failings of entropy. The conqueror of death conquers time, as well.

Hindemith's music, in the Symphony, reaches this sublime level more than once. There are moments when one hears that continuous explosion in the orchestration: a lot is going on in one part of the orchestra, while an immanent, continuous theme floats above it. The music mediates upon the paintings, each containing a fragment of eternal Light, and becomes itself transcendent.

(With thanks to Dave King for inciting this meditation.

Photography As Seed for Contemplation

Three Circles

In going back over my archived photos of the past three years, searching for materials to work with now that I might have overlooked previously—as time gives perspective to quality—I find myself pulled into photos I had forgotten I'd taken, forgotten were there, in one or two cases forgotten where they were made until I looked at the context.

I often take photographs of interesting scenes or found arrangements, knowing I might use them as elements later in a digital artwork. Sometimes I never use them; sometimes I have a vision for a piece right away, and use them immediately. Some elements have been recycled through more than one digital artwork.

For example, a photo of a seagull in flight—a motion-blurred closeup, taken at the beach near Ft. Lauderdale, FL, in 1993, when I was there for an academic conference, giving a paper, and stole away with some others to the beach for an afternoon—has been used in two or three pieces, as it was the most evocative bird-in-flight image I had, that I could call my own. From the beginning, it was important to me to use my own photography as elements, rather than clip art or stock photos taken by others. A point of pride, orbiting concepts of originality, rather than a copyright issue. Photos that were entirely mine, that I didn't need permission to use; certainly some recreated what I'd seen in stock photo books, or concepts seen in surrealist advertising images, and elsewhere: but entirely mine, made by myself and my camera.


White Bird/Badlands

Nowadays, having traveled much more since then—my semi-nomadic lifestyle not manifesting itself as fully-alive until a decade later—I have many more such images to choose from. By continuing to shoot elements, one gradually builds up one's own personal stock library. Still, whenever I'm out making photos, and I happen to see a similar bird-in-flight image to be made, I do so. The next photo of the same subject might be better than all the previous ones. You might get lucky, or get it just right by intention; either way, it's worth pursuing. Over time, as I have become a better photographer—and I feel as if the road trip out West, last late summer and early fall, pushed me into a new level of quality in my photograph that I'd never achieved before—I still return to many of the same subjects that compel my interest, always trying to do better each time, hoping each time for a new image even better than all the old ones ever were, on that subject. So I always keep my eyes open, and my camera near at hand. Capturing the moment is a discipline of readiness, of being mindful and of having one's tools close to hand, cleaned and prepared and ready to use.

Making a poem is exactly the same thing, for me: readiness, preparation, combined with openness to experience, to seeing what's around one, and being prepared for the poem to come at any time. I'm never without a small notepad; there's one in the outside pocket of my camera case; there may also be one in a shirt pocket; there's one in the backpack, another clipped to the truck's overhead visor; and so on. Readiness is all, when a poem can come to you at any moment.

Making a drawing or painting is more deliberate, It requires more choice, more will, more deliberate intention. At this point, making a photo is often effortless, the camera is the end-extension of one's hand-eye coordination. All you have to do is turn the camera on, bring it up, frame the image, and shoot. It can less time to do it than to tell about doing it. Starting a drawing means I need to open up the zippered case in which I carry some colored pencils, a sketchbook, and some other small tools; I need to pull out the sketchbook, grab a pencil, and get to work. It's becoming more natural, as I progress along that road of teaching myself to draw; it goes faster, and can be more compelling; but photography remains the most effortless of the visual arts I engage with, the medium that requires the least consideration before execution.

So, drawing and painting still require intention, if only for the time it takes to set up the tools. Photography is becoming increasingly unintentional, unwillful, and egoless. Poetry likewise. I find myself wanting less and less to include any part of myself in a poem, but only to be the receiving pipeline via which the poem happens. And they do seem to just happen, often enough. I freely admit I'm not very good at intentional poetry, anyway: sitting down to try to write a sonnet, or a sestina, or something similar, is certain to be an hour wasted in which I could have done something better; and the artistic product of such intentional sessions, the poem itself, usually is a lesser vessel, for me—never one of my best efforts. Usually too far unbalanced towards the cerebral.

•

I freely admit to some impatience about feeling like I'm wasting my time when asked to do certain activities. Why don't I attend writing workshops? While I might gain some new insight or technique, most such workshops are geared towards beginners and intermediate writers; if there were an advanced workshop that would really push me, creatively, I'd consider attending. But 99 percent of all seminars on any creative topic will give you the exact same teachings and lessonings—rephrased through each teacher's individual experience, and useful to the extent that, if one way of talking about a perennial principle doesn't excite you, another will—and you'll repeat yourself a lot. I can do "writing exercises" on my own—études, scraps, and finger-exercises—without paying someone to lead me through them. (There are plenty of free-to-read craft-polishing websites available, too.)

To be clear, in no way am I sneering at workshops of any kind. I disdain nothing. There are always people who need them, and for whom they are life-changing and revelatory. For some of us, though, we take the lesson and move on to the next, without needing to repeat it endlessly. It's not a question of workshops being bad, it's a question of needing another level of workshop than is generally available. And at a certain level, you're teaching yourself, anyway: it only requires realizing that that is what you're doing, and that hand-holding is no longer even emotionally necessary. Perhaps it's a sign that, after all those years of struggling and repetitive practice, progress has actually been made.

Why don't I teach a workshop, then? Actually, I already have, on the community college level. It was a popular course, too, the few times I was asked to teach it. I don't claim to be a gifted teacher—although I will certify that I'm rather good at "translating" complex concepts, without oversimplifying them, into forms understandable to many beginners. I certify only because students have so testified. Actually, I do enjoy teaching. The problem I usually have is with the administrators, rather than the students: I tend to present concepts from outside-the-box, oblique angles. I like to do so precisely because it's a sideways approach. I use musical analogies when I teach photography; I use poetry to talk about dance; I use cinema to teach poetry. I would teach a workshop on what I've learned, over time and experience, any time some group paid me to do so. It's a great pleasure to pass on what I've acquired. It might also be of the nature of a duty, on some deeper, archetypal level. Readiness is all, and willingness treads not far behind.

•


Devil's Tower, WY

When I look through these past few years of photography, in which my travels and experiences, and some of life's evitable dramas, have pushed me to continue to improve as a photographer, artist, writer, and human being (the true work, the real opus, always a work in progress), what I see in the photos is a record of my own progress. No, it's more multiplex than that: my improvements technically often feel serendipitous to me: accidents that I learn to repeat, mistakes that yield fruit when repeated: my evolution via experience as a pilgrim whose Way is the artist's way as much as the spiritual-technology way: as though those could really be separated: are perceivable as punctuated equilibria proceeding by fits and starts: up a bouldered volcanic throat rather than a smooth incline: whole months of photos bland boring and repetitious: followed by a sudden leap into a vision never quite so clearly seen before: as though the eye itself had caught focus as the world catches light. The path of progress runs along a fractal coastline, twisting back on itself on many scales, infinitely recursive while still proceeding along a path towards resolution and escape.


Paleofractal

The photographic image is whole, but is also made up of its elements. Zoom into a photographic print past the resolution of imaginary meaning, and one approaches the veil between matter's solidity and its representation as vibration locked into habitual electronic forms: the singing of the atoms, the music of the spheres. How can one separate the paper from the image, the dancer from the dance? Even the gods have habitual opinions, endlessly repeated across the narratives of myth. The bright deities in their own way as inflexible of purpose as their darker cousins, their blooded emanations reflecting in the burning glass. Only when reborn as human is there a chance for change, the power to choose, and choose again. The way of heaven, the river of stars, the bloody road, the six paths and the four ways of meifumado.

And so one progresses, artistically and humanistically, paths braided upon one another as a pebbled stream. In reviewing life and work, it's tempting to become a tracker, reading sign in the trail and assembling a narrative from it. All narratives are invented, usually in hindsight: memory is not different, even with reminders. We make something coherent out of something incoherent, scattered, and momentary. What endures, other than the photographs, is what we choose to keep—apples chosen from the bushel for freshness—and what makes demands on us, even against our will.

I find photos, in my review, that are compelling now, although at the time they seemed forgettable enough. They call in voices louder now. Ripening to fruition over a months, or years, to focus attention on themselves where previously unremarked. An emergent process of contemplation: what once was overlooked becomes sublime.

Visionary Artwork 2

Journal Pages

Notes working towards a visionary artwork that can be described, articulated, but not contained. Notes jotted down at white heat, to be expanded later, because you really need to run out the door right now but don't want to lose the thought. Notes that might be presented later as notebook verbatim, perhaps as a poetic journal. (A genre that strongly appeals to me, which I practice by default if not always by conscious intent, with my Road Journal.) Also an artistic journal. A photographer's daybooks; an artist's pages. A logbook of transformations.


Calligraphy of the Body

Many pieces of visionary artwork began from photographs of Mystery: often a little blurry, motion-blur or depth of field, as photographs of Mystery ought to be. Motion blur or camera shake seem appropriate places to start, as Spirit is always in motion, always moving, breathing, dancing. Many names for the Divine are verbs, not nouns: Living is dancing. Or Spirit That Moves In All Things. Or The Breath of God moved across the waters. Or the loom of time is Indra's breath.

It's good to start with something a little mysterious in itself. Something that doesn't give you a quick thumbnail answer or narrative. Something that stops you long enough to be contemplated. It's good when it's a little inexplicable, a little hard to capture. (And harder to capture in words than in images.) Catch it by one wing, but don't try to hold it, don't try to pin it down.


water birds 2

Lines from a poem merged into artwork. I don't remember now if the lines came first, or the image was there, and inspired the lines.

the night goes walking like a bird,
bobbing its head around every flame,
filling the spaces in between with dark, shiny feathers

A single image, a little spare when just words. Add some evocative context: imagery, blur, expressive typography, and something greater than the sum of its parts just might emerge.

One weakness I feel most writers have is that they don't think about presentation: the way things look on the page, the proper use of spacing and placement, the best choice of typeface. In other words, design elements. I've been a graphic designer, a book designer, a layout artist, a printer, and I've designed original typefaces. That puts me in very small minority of writers, most of whom in my experience are conscious of none of these disciplines. I know of few poets who are even aware of design, and fewer among those who have set their hand to it.

There are few poetry presses, even, who have done much with book design or illustration; those that have, such as Copper Canyon Press, stand out from the pack. In their early years, they were a small-budget press in which the publisher often handset the type for a book; I have several of Copper Canyon's old first editions, and they are sensual experiences in themselves. Paper, ink, and typeface choices all made carefully, as complementary aspects of the process of publishing. There was a fondness for Deepdene type in those early editions; it's a strong, classic typeface, very good for poetry setting, not well known now or often used currently. This is the sort of thing poets ought to think about, and rarely do. Ugly presentation does your words no good service.



I've done a lot of commissioned cover artwork and illustration for books, magazines, and music albums, and interestingly a lot of that commissioned work falls into the category of visionary artwork. Some have been pieces that were requested by the artist because they had seen an existing piece of visionary art, which they wanted a version of for their publication; this CD cover was one of those instances. (We're getting into nuts & bolts of the business here, and demystifying the artistic process, I know, but bear with me.) When you're an aspiring visionary artist, you might still need to be a working commercial artist, and this project paid a month's rent at the time. Sometimes I also get to do the typography: I often try to convince the client to let me do the typography, as part of the art itself, as this opens doors into a greater potential to be able to integrate art, concept, and type. Just as in a vision-poem piece, the words become part of the artwork itself.


Moons

Follow the blur. Spirit moves too fast for the naked eye to follow. The golden statue at the center of the ring of light, seemingly motionless, is flickering: not moving, or moving so fast, and returning, and moving, that it's too fast to catch, except by the flicker, the blur. The gold streak across the redblue eye of sunset.

Visionary Artwork

I've said before how Adobe Photoshop, the software application for visual art and photo editing, when I first started using it, which was around version 1.5, was a tool that freed me up to make the kind of art that I could see in my mind's eye but had not the technical skills with brush or pencil to create by hand. I've said before how Photoshop became for me, as a visual artist, what literacy is for the illiterate: a tool to help me express things that I never could before. I've also made the analogy, perhaps unwisely but sincerely, that before Photoshop I felt handicapped as a visual artist, one who couldn't draw or paint worth a damn, but now was suddenly freed. At last I could make the art in my head, the things I've seen, the visions I've had, and put them out so that other people could see them, too. Photoshop completed a void in my toolbox, and gave me wings.


Fractal Trees

I've always had visions: numinous and liminal experiences; moments of transcendence, filled with Light; moments at times and places where you could see through the veil into another world. Early in my career, I attempted to paint some visions; but the results were mostly symbolic, iconic, not literal illustrations. I've written poems about the visions; I've been open about saying that some of the vision-poems are really just transcriptions, journal-entries of events outside the ordinary. I've frequently been misunderstood, or disbelieved, as often as I've talked about it.


music taking flight

I've always had an inner soundscape that was in my awareness. Jazz composer/trumpeter Lester Bowie once said (paraphrased) that he had a continuous 24-hour inner soundtrack; all he had to do, to make music, was dip in and bring it out into the audible world for awhile, for others to hear. But it was always playing in his head. In Balinese folklore about their gamelan music, there is the belief that music always is going on, as the music of the spheres, on some other plane of existence; all playing gamelan music does is bring that continuous sound into human audible range for awhile. My own experience of music is exactly like that. I always have music playing in my head somewhere, which can be dipped into at any time. It can be annoying, when the song playing is an irritating viral distraction; in which case, I play some other music to replace it with. When I'm improvising, just as Lester Bowie, says, I listen to the inner soundtrack, and pull something out of that to play around with. Few people realize, in parallel to how much of my vision-poetry is recorded experience, how many musical recordings I've released are deep-improvised first takes. There is a small group of improvising musicians who I admire and emulate, who do this sort of thing very, very well: Lester Bowie, of course; David Darling; John Coltrane; Charlie Haden; among others.


Music of the Spheres, from Spiral Dance
(Second Place Award (tie), Juried Religious Art Show, St. Paul, MN, 2004)

So I'm really talking about art, music, and poetry as recordings of continuous inner continuous, which you produce, as an artist, in order to, first, share the experience with others, and second, get it out of your own system. There is a valid element of art-making that is therapeutic for the artist, a venting and purging of inner systems, of getting it out of the body—although not all products of venting and purging should be considered art.


Drumming

Photoshop allows me to do this with visual art, in ways very parallel to the poetry- and music-making practices I've just described. In truth, an important reason I don't make strong distinctions between artforms, and why I practice crop rotation among them, is because, for me, the process of dipping into the stream of creative force that is always there, always available, feels the same to me no matter what artform I'm working in. In truth, the process of art-making is almost exactly the same, no matter what artform I'm working in. That's why it's easy to pick up another artform when one is lying fallow. That's why I don't believe in writer's block anymore. That's also why I tend to perceive as multi-sensory rather than mono-sensory; multimedia is more evocative of the immersion into life as it is lived, than single-sensory artworks. Not to mention the parallel channels, triggered simultaneously, of synaesthesia.


Angel 2

The process of making visionary art in Photoshop is often improvisatory. I might start with a photo, or scan, or group of images. I might start with a drawing or piece of calligraphy, scan it in, and see what it feels like it wants to be merged with. A lot of visionary art-making is about finding correlations and correspondences, about blending. When I out in the world making photographs, I am not only looking at the world in order to find and make solitary, unitary, complete-in-themselves photographic images. I am also looking for elements that will later be combined with other images to make collages and visionary art. You multitask when you're out making photographs, just as you multitask when browsing magazines at the library, or surfing the internet: you find wonderful things that catch your attention as you pass by them, while your original purpose was to discover something else. Sometimes the most interesting things are found while on the way to looking up other things. So, I will shoot elements as well as finished images. Photoshop allows one to make seamless merges of multiple images; to create new realities out of multiple single frames.


Gateway: Departure

More than once, my visionary Photoshop art has been used for magazine illustration, book cover illustration, and album cover art. I enjoy the occasional commission. I also like the challenge of creating a visionary art piece that illustrates a concept creatively. I don't make a strong distinction between "fine art" and "commercial art," as that boundary has been repeatedly crossed in both directions, with regards to my visionary art.


Raccoon Spirit

One of my most beloved and powerful influences as a visionary artist is photographer Jerry Uelsmann, who began making darkroom photographic visionary collages in the 1960s and 1970s. His work was done by combining multiple negatives into single large prints on the photographic enlarger. I am in awe of Uelsmann's painstaking care and attention to detail in his work. What I can do in Photoshop he has done with photographic negatives. If this were just a technical trick, it would still be of note; but in fact, Uelsmann's art is sublime, liminal, and beautiful in deep ways, his images arising from the collective unconscious, from dreams and visions, to be seen in the light of day. There are connections in his pieces to those same realms of dream and mystery that have been mined by photographers Duane Michals and Arthur Tress. But Uelsmann is even more pre-verbal, more purely visual, operating in mysterious realms not where words fail us, but where words have not yet even arisen.


Adam

Another beloved and powerful influence on my visionary art is painter Alex Grey. He discusses his history and goals in his book The Mission of Art, which is also a mission statement. Grey speaks directly to artists like myself, who aspire to do something beyond "personal expression," when he writes: It is your responsibility to find the ways your visions can positively influence individuals and your culture. . . . The mere process of fixing imagery onto surfaces or forms does not ensure spiritual development. It is the intention and awareness from which artists create that determine whether their work will serve mammon, ego or spirit. Intention and awareness are core elements, even core values, for visionary art.


Navigations

What I get from these influences is not direct imitation of their styles or concepts, although it's hard to avoid following in Uelsmann's explicit footsteps, but rather: permission. Permission and validation to explore where my inner eye goes in my artwork. Affirmation that I am not alone in either the visionary art that I want to make, or in my reasons for making it. Affirmation and validation that this is not a personal project, a dead-end bit of solipsism, but rather is linked to a global art movement that is much bigger than myself. Permission to be hopeful, honest, and uncynical in my art-making, contrary to the fashions and trends of the irony-entrenched and cynical artistic mainstream of the day. Validation that doing what I want to do, as a visual artist, is worth doing.


crow dance

When I start to do a Photoshop piece of visionary art, I often don't know where I'm going. I could discuss the technical steps for visionary art-making in Photoshop; and perhaps I will, later. Improvisation is part of the process, but so is exploration. It's deep play. Far too many artists get hung up on the notion that "intention" equals "control," when in fact the intention with which visionary art is made is to give up control to some aspect of Self or Mystery that is greater than the ego or mammon, but rather serves Spirit. "Channel" has become a discredited, unfashionable word; but how then are we to describe this feeling of stepping aside so that Something greater than the known little-self can step in and direct? How to put into words this sense of not-being-in-charge of the process, but excited as anyone to see how it all comes out? A lot of artists feel they must dominate, control, or tame this flowing part of themselves: put it subject to will and mastery, require it to turn itself on and off like a light-switch at their command. This will-driven paradigm for making art doesn't work for me; it doesn't describe at all the process that I feel a part of. The Taoist sages have much better ways of describing the artistic process: Water is of all things most yielding, yet it can wear down the hardest places to nothing. . . .


paths, prints

Now that I am taking up brush and pencil, as if for the first time, and teaching myself to draw, I find myself combining that art into the digital art-making process as well. A photograph of a drawing can become an element in a larger visionary piece. Japanese brush calligraphy and enso have already worked themselves into new pieces. The process of convergence of all the various artforms I work in, converging towards unity, is continuous and ongoing. No doubt carrying synthesis, synergy and synaesthesia to as-yet-unarticulated realms of being. I don't expect the journey to end anytime soon. This is the process of making new maps of still-uncharted territory, of going up the mountain to see what's there, of the discovery of what is not yet manifest.


untitled

Vibrations of the Invisible

It may seem strange, but I just have this strong conviction that children might be able to see certain things in the presence of certain things. Things that adults are no longer aware of. Children have a way of listening to "muses," they're aware of them, because they haven't been educated out of it. They haven't closed their minds to that possibility. And I feel that if the photographer is very sensitive, he can do this too. He can hear the vibrations of the invisible.
—Arthur Tress, in The Dream Collector

I am going through back pages of my travel journal, and finding passages like this in my own handwriting. I agree with Tress, that if the photographer is very sensitive, he or she can see more than what's there to the eye. I once concluded a poem, titled last words, with the lines:

like a path among trees
your turning affected you more
than any god or planet,
as though you breathed
only the air you could see
with flesh eyes.

There are lots of things we life we can't see, which we take on faith until we take them for granted. When was the last time you thought about what you were breathing? (Assuming you're not subject to an illness such asthma which keeps you aware of your breathing at all times.) I get accused of being good at pointing out the obvious at times; but it seems to me that most people ignore the obvious, and the occasional reminder is no bad thing.


The Illuminated Man, by Duane Michals

This photo is one of the first I'd encountered by Duane Michals, back when I first saw it, many years ago, and it remains one of my favorites from his body of work. I have carried it around as a postcard, tacked on a bookshelf or bulletin board or refrigerator, where I could see it, ever since. Actually, I've worn out a couple of copies of the postcard, and had to replace them. I can explain this photo technically, now that I'm a photographer, but what remains powerful about the image is that the man seems to be turning into light. Light is exploding out of him from within. He is catching on pure white fire. He catches light, and becomes light.

This is the sort of thing Tress means, and which both Tress and Michals have recorded in their photos, about how someone who remains sensitive to their surroundings can see things others do not. John Minahan wrote, in 1972, in his Introduction to The Dream Collector:

A number of critics have suggested that the obvious success of Tress' dream photographs must be due in large measure to an extraordinary rapport with children, and this is quite true. Watching him work, you're aware of an elusive "chemistry" going on, extremely difficult to define. Of course, part of it is due to his casual appearance and mannerisms, but this is merely a surface psychology that photographers have used for many years. It goes much deeper than that. I think the key to Tress' unusual harmony with children is that he is "childlike" himself, in the true sense of the word. That is, his imagination is still essentially unsophisticated—and therefore genuinely creative. Like children, he hasn't yet lost the capacity to wonder, to see the invisible, to dream in the daytime. He hasn't yet drawn an indelible line between illusion and reality. I believe children intuitively sense this about him.

Child-like rather than childish. That seems important to understand. It's not an infantile and needy response to life, but a playful one, that leaves open the doors to possibility.

There is an openness to spiritual masters that is similarly child-like, in its spontaneity and sensitivity. I think of the story of an important official who sought out a famous Zen monk in Medieval Japan, and was stunned to discover that, rather than sitting meditating in his hermitage, the monk was playing hide-and-seek with the village children. Similarly, Tress' method was to record the children telling him their dreams into a tape recorder, then play them back to the kids to hear, after which they reenacted the dream together for the camera.

This openness to wonder, to the invisible, is something artists and spiritual masters and children all have in common. It might be wise for those among us who have become so hardcore adult that we can no longer play, to regain some of this, this creative play. I know far too many writers and artists who have become paralyzed because they no longer allow themselves to take risks, in order to avoid making presumed mistakes. They have become perhaps too sophisticated. (One sees this attitude a lot more in Big City writers than anywhere else.) They get very stuck, and their faces literally age from all the worry lines, because they don't let themselves risk failure, an d they're afraid of appearing foolish.

But here's another lesson from children: if you fail, you do it again till you get it right. That's how toddlers learn to walk: by falling down a lot. That's also how older kids learn other new skills: by practice, and by play. I often think that the real problem with a lot of contemporary poetry is that it's become too hardcore adult, takes itself way too seriously, and has a lot of its sense of play. Play is also exploration, pathfinding and waymaking new trails into the invisible lands, invisible not because they don't exist but because they haven't been seen before.

Children let their failures go. They don't cling to them, unless and until some adult beats a sense of personal failure into them. Children recover quickly from mistakes: it's all learning. It's adults who beat themselves up forever for a mistake they made a subjective eternity ago. It's adults who can't let go.

Adults are driven by the invisible, the intangible, even those who claim to be total pragmatists and materialists. Because, you see, pragmatism is an idea, a concept. The illuminated man burns away all ideologies by converting them to light. Materialism, too, is a concept, an ideology: no more substantial than the invisible air you're breathing right now. Less, actually. Air is more essential than ideology. Ask anyone who's suffocating if they give a damn, in that moment, about anything but their next breath: if they had breath to answer, they would no doubt say, No.

Minahan's comment that Tress' imagination is still essentially unsophisticated—and therefore genuinely creative is striking. He adds: Like children, he hasn't yet lost the capacity to wonder, to see the invisible, to dream in the daytime. The word unsophisticated here strikes me as the opposite of pejorative, which is the way unsophisticated is mostly used in contemporary criticism: as a dismissal rather than a charm. (Again, one finds this more often perhaps among Big City writer/critics.) The Shakers and Amish and Mennonites use the word plain, as in plain appearance, as a word of approval. There remain lessons to be learned from voluntary plainness, from chosen poverty of means that reveals richness of spirit. Children, as Tress reveals, and as children all know, don't need a lot of materials at hand to enhance their play: A cardboard box becomes a castle; an apple tree becomes a rocket ship to the stars; a sidewalk becomes a runway for airplanes to take off and land on. Children often dream of flying, Tress reports, and often they dream of flying away from home or school, into the wide blue unknown.

One can hear the hardcore adults all complaining at this point: But that's not real, there's nothing there—it's illusion, it's make-believe. Well, yes, it is. That's precisely the point. Creativity depends upon imagination, upon play, upon seeing the invisible, upon being unsophisticated, upon being open to wonder, upon wondering itself, upon What if? games, upon dreaming in the daytime.

It's often been said that writing is a solitary practice. But writers need playgroups, too; and they need to learn to play well with others, to share their toys (rather than form critical cliques, one suggests), and to remain open to seeing the invisible.

it is the invisible, after all, that motivates us far more than does anything visible.