Thursday, March 14, 2013

More on painting


"We are trained as children to say only the things that will be understood. The vast forests and storms within us we are taught not to try to communicate because they are too vast. Yet they are still there. We are still filled with vast oceans of consciousness. We are trained to constantly replace, interpret, symbolize, instead of paying attention to the actual moment-by-moment flood of consciousness, in which is contained the entire history of our race, the cosmos, our species identity, our birth, everything we know. Instead of attuning ourselves to this we are more or less trained to do the exact opposite: to shut out or short-circuit or symbolize all that vast phenomena into really limited and imprecise verbal formulations, and whatever cannot be so symbolized and short-coded, abbreviated, all the rest stands outside of consciousness."   --Carey Tennis

The above quote is something that seems to be a newly recognized principle in my daily life.  Always I have been wordy, reductive, and given to long-winded explanations of myself and the world around me.  Eighteen years of painting retablos did not expand my mind as much as two years of learning to draw and paint with my teacher and partner.



The art form of the retablo, much like most religious art, is meant to comfort and reassure, not to challenge or question.  Historically, some of it was meant to inspire us to greater things, but an awful lot is also meant to show the viewer just how wealthy and pious the patrons of the artist were, as their portraits are included in the scenery.  New Mexican retablo art was at its heart a catechitical tool for the illiterate.  Illustrations of the saints that both demonstrate and are recognizable by their iconography tell a story of sainthood and are reminders for us of certain virtues.  For myself, that type of painting became a daily tool for maintaining my state of recovery from depression.

Ecce homo, 2013
 Ellen Santistevan


I have felt for the majority of my life unable to explain myself sufficiently with words, often feeling that the words that were needed did not exist, or I did not have the facility needed to use them properly.  I have had a hard time making myself understood, and perhaps I recognize now that it is the general failing of humanity and language that we cannot truly communicate with words alone.  Certain things, yes:  directions, instructions, descriptive passages -- but words fail me completely when it comes to essence.  

On my website, the first thing on the first page says:  "Words cannot describe everything.  The heart's message cannot be delivered in words.  If one receives words literally, he will be lost.  If he tries to explain with words, he will not attain enlightenment in this life."  (Zen Master Mumon)  The next thing:  "Massage is a language without words."  I see the development of my bodywork practice and my painting as coming from the same source, and they have the same direction, that is, communication, listening.   What happens to me as I paint or draw is that the lines call to me to be created, rather than being planned from the beginning.   I'm certain that more than half of what I do with the watercolors on paper qualifies as 'happy accident', which I then try to reproduce with varying degrees of success, until stumbling into the next nifty thing.  At this point, I feel that this more receptive approach, that is, allowing the materials to talk to me and letting myself just work with them, is where I like to be.  It seems to fit in well with my approach to bodywork, in which I listen to the person and their body, and allow that listening to guide the work.

I have historically had a terrible lack of confidence where it came to expressive art.  Illustration is easy -- one can easily say that looks realistic, or cute, or moody, or whatever -- as long as it is recognizable, that is "good".  But the act of making visible one's subconscious is incredibly risky, and the judgement of "good" and "bad" (because we do judge) becomes not only a judgement of technique but also of the artists themselves.  Recognizing the beauty in abstract or minimalist art becomes more a question of what we personally relate to and are attracted by rather than the accuracy of representation.  Therefore, it is actually much more of a conversation,  or perhaps a cruise through the cocktail bar to scope out potentially interesting partners, words becoming less necessary because we are reacting on an almost pheromonal level.  Instead of thinking, we respond.  
In making the paintings, instead of thinking, we act.  no words.

In this course of compiling a small notebook with my small paintings, approximately the first one-third to one-half of the pages are not organized by chronology, because I had just discovered that indeed, I was able to handle watercolors on paper for the first time in my life, and I was less concerned by time order than arrangement.  After the initial filling in of pages, the progress becomes more apparent, as then I tried different techniques or subjects, and played with them in different ways.  
Some are lovelier, 

some are stranger,

 but all are for me to remember some kind of process that I was going through at the time.  I want to recall the feeling of laying down the paint rather than attempting to describe it with language, because finally I have another vocabulary, this visual idiom.





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