Painting and Impermanence

“That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and impermanent, is the first mark of existence.”

— Pema Chodron

When I begin to think about why I paint, I am very much drawn to the idea of impermanence. For millennia, human beings have created out of a desire to leave a record of some sort; something beautiful or meaningful, artifacts of significance about themselves, the world and their beliefs. In some sense this is an exercise in futility, given the brief nature of our time here. In the end, all is fleeting, and great art, like everything else, will eventually fade away one day. But art can also be about that fading.

In Western Art, the vanitas tradition in 17th century still life painting of the Netherlands focuses on reminding the viewer of the brevity of life. Masters of the genre such as Pieter Claesz influenced their contemporaries, most notably Rembrandt, whose lifelong practice of self-portraiture bravely chronicled his own battles with Father Time. Skeletons and skulls, rotting fruit and wilting flowers, burning candles-- these obvious signs of decay and degeneration are proffered in a way that may now seem hackneyed to us. And yet the insistent display of morbidity, perhaps partly because it is so sumptuously rendered, nonetheless drives the intended points home: youth and beauty vanish, pleasures and riches are ephemeral, all is change.

Pieter Claesz Vanitas still life Oil on panel, 1630, 15.6” x 22”, The Hague

More implicitly, masters of the landscape tradition of Far Eastern Art such as Fan K’uan (10th-11th century) or Ma Yuan (12th-13th century), perceived the world quite differently. The abundance of Nature is revealed as an immense, inexhaustible space. And whereas the human observer in a vanitas painting is a priori, in many of these works that presence is diminished to the point of insignificance (one barely notices the figures in K’uan’s scroll). The Cosmos is not a fixed place where people and/or objects are metaphors for a path to self-improvement. Indeed, they are in constant flux and rendered inconsequential when placed against the sublime Void.

Several centuries and artistic inventions later, by the time we get to Impressionism and Cezanne, the perceived world has been torn asunder and dissolution is at the forefront of our visual experience. If, as Ezra Pound said, “Artists are the antennae of the race.”, then Cezanne’s feelers had to be on steroids. It wasn’t until my mid-forties that I began to actually understand the work, and I’m still unearthing its considerable depths. With Cezanne you see the individual characteristics of the world emerge and disband all at once.

Fan K’uan Travelers amid Mountains and Streams Ink on silk, hanging scroll early 11th century, National Palace Museum, Taipei

I believe that a great deal of post-Cezanne Modernist works can be read, indirectly or openly, as an inference to the impermanence of our world; the barely seen drift into the silence of Monet’s water lilies, a shrinking head in the vast space of a Giacometti portrait, the implied motion of a writhing nude by Francis Bacon, and the frenzied dynamism of de Kooning.

When I paint, mindful of and humbled by the great achievements of a long tradition, I am engaged in a process that has no utilitarian purpose other than to remind me of this impermanence so that I can live more presently and more fully in the moment.

Paul Cezanne Three Skulls Watercolor on paper, 1902/06, 18” x 24”, Art Institute of Chicago

Origins

1. The Orange Paper

The house I grew up in was attached to a medical facility where my father worked as a general practitioner. His offices during the day would serve as my playgrounds in the evenings, especially on those bitterly cold mid-winter Buffalo nights when going outside was forbidden.

The layout of the facility was simple and designed for efficiency. After entering the large rectangular patient's waiting area, one came upon a long narrow hallway with a shiny green linoleum floor on either side of which were small rooms with purposes specific to the patient's treatment: the consultation room, the examination room, the laboratory with its sterilized medical instruments, and then the larger emergency room. In this room, where more than a few times I watched (with a kind of cocky glee) my father sew up the torn knee or elbow of a playmate, was a large X-ray machine. Looking vaguely like a modernized version of something out of Dr. Frankenstein's lab, this imposing hulk of metal and green marble slab with a complicated sliding overhead contraption afforded me the opportunity to lie down and envision various science fiction fantasies or nightmarish scenarios of a medical nature.

(When I did happen to venture outside in the full moonlight of those freezing nights, my footprints in the snow resembled the ghostly, spectral glow of X rays). 

When my imagination was exhausted, I would then make my way to a small alcove which contained neatly compartmentalized stacks of the patients' medical histories, and, next to them, their X-rays. And separating each X-ray would be a piece of bright orange paper. In addition to the separate sheets between the X-rays, there were several tall piles of it arranged monolithically nearby.

I would take a hefty ream and carry it into the family room, and with my pencils and special box of 100 Crayola crayons, would draw and color for hours on this paper. It came in small sheets, about the size of an address book, and larger ones, like Life magazine size, and was of good quality. The drawings' subjects would usually range from Jetson-like futuristic houses or the design of next year's new Plymouth or Imperial (my uncles Dan and Jerry ran a Chrysler dealership across the street), to more abstract compositions featuring spiraling, pinwheel  forms; Catherine wheels of primary colors, improvised patterns and directional marks. 

I would almost always hang these drawings on the wood paneled walls of my upstairs bedroom when finished. For some reason this made me feel less alone.
2. JAMA

On Saturdays, I would watch my father open up a week's worth of mail on the black formica kitchen table with his special jade-handled letter opener. Most of the mail he would discard, but there was one item that arrived every few weeks I would eagerly anticipate: the Journal of the American Medical Association magazine (JAMA). The cover would often feature a reproduction of a  painting by a well known (usually contemporary) artist, which was fitting, given that my father was a fairly accomplished amateur painter.
For the squeamish, the intimacy of the photos inside could be jarring: microscopic views of strange lumps and cysts, or swollen, cancerous pustules that oozed volcanically, or the flayed, lacerating red flesh of a burn victim. But for me, their luridness was beautiful, their disorderly forms were intriguing and the colors were extraordinary. 

I would pore over these journals with the kind of wide-eyed gaze that my friends had when looking through a kaleidoscope; my eyes hungry for more and stranger eruptions, more organic violations and more saturated hues.

3. Fossils

My large collection of fossils was kept in oversize tin buckets in the attic near my bedroom. My fascination with their beauty was tempered by what they seemed to signify to me. A fossil was evidence of something once alive, preserved for hundreds or sometimes even thousands of years, swimming and crawling and struggling and eking out its little square inch of brief existence in the great impersonal world. The diversity and complexity of trilobites and gastropods spoke of a world of mysterious activity long gone, unexamined and unknowable by human beings. That I could now enjoy these mute labyrinthine patterns so many years later filled me with genuine wonder and a palpable sadness that I did not understand until much later on. I also collected glittering minerals that I would send away for in the mail, roughly hewn arrowheads from local Indian tribes that I would find in Mrs. Keel's garden patch, and just plain homely rocks that I found around the yard that seemed interesting for one reason or another. But it was the fossils that held my attention the most and that I would always return to.

The formative childhood events--our relationship to our parents and siblings, the death of a grandparent, varied rites of passage--these are understandably given great importance in the annals of early human development. 

But what of those private reveries from long ago, deeply embedded, fossil-like, in our consciousness, our memory banks? That these three childhood occupations would come to have significant ramifications in my later life and work was of course not something I could foresee. In ways I am still coming to understand, their essences have carried over to become essential components in my creative process.

June, 2013

Between Earth and Sky

The Dorset Maze first appeared during the 16th century in Dorset, Great Britain. In the history of mazes and labyrinths, its configuration is considered quite unique. It was a turf maze, which means it was traversed mainly for pleasure (as opposed to any meditative use, which is the most common purpose of many mazes and labyrinths). The Dorset Maze covered nearly an acre and was bounded by ridges a foot in height. It was destroyed by the farmer’s plough in 1730.

I made my first painting of this maze in 1992 and continued to use it intermittently in my work until 2007. Since then, I have employed it much more frequently and with many variations; the maze becoming disassembled and reconfigured.

This disassembling can also be said for my use of the “tree” image and the shapes that resemble coral or seaweed. These forms are actually derived from pictures of cross sections of the human brain.

Among the most complicated structures known, the cerebral cortex alone contains roughly 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars it would take to fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies.