A Portrait of P... I... (2019)

There are a couple of quotations that do not explain or define but shed light on the nature of this painting. Not its “meaning” but the structure (or composition) which both acts as the portal to meaning and in its conception is so structured as to be the only portal to this particular meaning…this particular painting…this particular person. Both content and structure are portals…the epiphany of the Thing considered and the epiphany resulting from the structure of the grammar/language used.

Quotation #1: from Giles of Viterbo, an Augustinian monk of the late 15th/early 16th centuries, whose Platonism influenced Giordano Bruno.

“Sometimes, however, the footprints are so hidden that the power of human intelligence cannot reach them. For this reason we seek help from another source, and bring in experienced dogs so that with their help we may obtain our quarry. Now we are chasing something about God out into the open from its hiding places in Nature, something that we could never succeed in capturing with Nature alone as our guide, not unless we use the demonstrations of dialectic as our dogs and the study of philosophy as our nets. These dogs cannot trace hidden quarry except by means of footprints, clear traces of the feet, or odor. Thus in this Forest of Matter divine footprints lie hidden, but when we take notice of them by means of reason and consider them well, we hunt out the hiding places of the divine light. Plate assents to this in his 3rd book of ‘Laws’ when he teaches that one should track down musical harmonies in the manner of experienced dogs.” (quotation taken from Ingrid Rowland, “Giordano Bruno: Philosophy/Heretic,” p. 49)

Quotation #2: from William T. Noon, SJ, “Joyce & Aquinas,” p. 63. The earlier reference to Giordano Bruno is significant given that James Joyce admired Bruno. The echoes of similarity over a chasm of 400 years is no accident.

“As time went on, Joyce, without discounting the role of the inward light, paid less attention to it. His later remarks on epiphany, incidental as they appear in context, show that he is thinking more of the ‘Entis-Onton,’ the ‘sextuple gloria of light’ which is hidden within the onject. It then becomes the poet’s business to represent this light in the only way he can, through the symbolic constructs of language. Opaque, unwieldy, ambivalent as words may be, the ‘sound sense sympol’ of poetic discourse can concentrate much of the sunlight and firelight of reality, the radiance of claritas, the blaze of being, in the ‘wold of words,’ and what matter if the paths of this wold have become dense and weed-grown, if the light can still be trapped withing the wold and the weeds?”

An Essay: The Three Hour Still Life (2019)

I began my studies at the Water Street Atelier in May of 1997. The course of study at that time involved only working from a posed life model 4 hours a day five days a week with the same pose being held for the duration of an entire month. At lunchtime the cadre of students went their separate ways. But I had just quit a job at Christie's auction house to pursue full-time studies at Water Street. I had nowhere to go and the enthusiasm to continue working. And so Jacob set me up along one of the walls in the model room with a plaster cast to begin practicing the most basic skills of the translation of dimensional reality to represented reality...the block-in. In the emptiness of the new Water Street Atelier I did my exercises.

 I do not remember the reason or the timing but at some point Jacob mentioned that he had done a series of 3 hour still life paintings early in his career to practice painting and to begin selling paintings. Up to that point I had never painted before, so the idea from a technical perspective and a professional perspective seemed like a reasonable one. I set aside the block-ins and started afternoon and weekend quick still life paintings. They started to sell, albeit for paltry suns of money, and I have been painting still life ever since. I have seen the 3 hour still life painting as a wonderful experience ever since. It was a training ground in the material knowledge of paint, in the selection of preferred tools and working habits, in the perception of color, in the feeling of composition and aesthetic possibilities, in the endeavor to incarnate concept through all these elements and in the development of relationships of people beyond myself (collectors and galleries) to the work I was producing.

The Material Knowledge of Paint

 The three hour still life ignited in me the sensation of thinking in paint. It developed the immediate sensation of what the French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, calls the "material imagination." Previous narratives of creativity most often described a ghostly idea plugged into a receptive material, resulting in a work of art. But that is a poor description. In fact the material reality has just as much influence on the conceptual dimension as the conceptual dimension has on the material receptor. It is an intimate dialogue with no primary element. The paint influences the idea as much as the idea influences the paint. It is a chicken/egg scenario.

 And so, immersion in paint as an exercise develops the painter as a painter. It develops the skill of thinking in paint. It develops the state of making paintings and not plugging ideas uncomfortably into paint like square pegs into round holes. The mess of the paint...the very element of its infinite flexibility...must be embraced to realize its expressive possibility.

 This is where the three hours becomes such an important element. It might seem arbitrary to put a time limit on a creative act. But what I experienced was that the time limit forced me to think inside the paint and work with it as paint. I had to move and move quickly. The only way to do so was to embrace the constraints and possibilities of the medium. I had to develop a trust in my decision making within the medium. I had to live in the chaos of slippery color to experience resolved cosmic work. The imposition of time on the process forces a development of trust in oneself within the immersive environment of paint. There is no time to think outside of paint. One learns to think inside the paint...inside the process...inside the possibility. As a result one grows in confidence in this once-foreign environment.

The Selection of Tools and Habits

 The education of the artist is not simply the education of personal technical procedure.  Nor is it the education of the former with the development and refinement of personal sensibility. It is both of these things, but it is also the placement of all these important elements in relationship to the realization of the importance of a necessary and ever-present persistence of play, experimentation and openness as vital to a healthy and lifelong creative orientation. If this last element is not present and nurtured then the first two will eventually become stale. The three hour still life was my first experience of an openness to non-intentionality in my work.

 The boundaries or parameters the exercise sets creates a lack of attachment to nearly all elements of making a painting. Nothing is allowed to become so precious that I won't undo it through some bold gesture. I have committed neither so much time nor energy nor expense that any and all elements are open for evaluation. And because of this lack of attachment an exercise like this gives a practical place to experiment with any element of the painting-making process.

 Let me give an example. When I first started out painting I used to get together with friends and make painting surfaces with the highest grade linen treated until gessoed and sanded to glass-like perfection. I did not just make painting panels, I made love to them. But what I found was that the effort to make the painting substrate created a performance anxiety in painting on them. The painting had to be perfect to honor the effort of preparation. And it never was nor should I have expected it to be simply because I was at the beginning of my development. I had no room to learn and play. The specter of perfection hovered over the panel before the first mark was ever made. I was paralyzed.

 I started to regain psychic movement when I started to remove expectation from the process. I used the worst brushes, drew on the cheapest paper, painted to think in paint and not to achieve a final result. And in so doing...in removing myself from the confinement of mythological perfection and creating a space wherein I allowed myself to wallow in my imperfection and in my learning...I saw a way toward the sound of perfection singing inside me. The three hour still life is one concrete possibility for realizing this space in one's creative landscape. One can use it to experiment with materials and tools, with process and technique, with expressive possibility and with final aesthetic goals. It can offer the room to experiment with working habits, daily creative schedules or technical and intellectual process possibilities that might resolve into being "my" process way. And the investment is so low that failure does not discourage further exploration and eventual resolution to issues through this exploration. The cost is low, so the fear of failure and the accompanying paralysis is low in intensity. 

 It is one possibility...the one I have to offer. There are many more. But each should be characterized by an immersion in a process that is not governed by creative attachment.

The Perception (and Translation) of Color

 This element of the three hour still life painting process is, in fact, a subject of thinking in paint. Perhaps instead of the general statement of thinking in paint, the matter of color is best described as thinking in the particular painting. That is because, despite being spoken of in absolute terms with definitive names, the perception and translation of color in the painted world is a completely relative undertaking. The meaning or "rightness of any given color is determined relative to all the surrounding colors and the general framework set up by the demands and state of the world captured in paint on the substrate before the artist. 

 The three hour still life is not only an exercise in thinking in paint, but it is a particularly helpful exercise in tuning the eye and mind to the notion of living in an absolutely relative world. Every part of that world as translated in brushstrokes of paint takes its meaning from the neighborhood in which it lives and how it relates to its neighbor in the structure of that neighborhood. The very first brushstroke paints the entire painting unless the artist is able to hold two positions in his or her head simultaneously. The first position...that this first brushstroke establishes the key of the painting. The second position...future experience might demand that the key be adjusted. So the artist must have a working method that allows for concrete, assertive statements while also allowing for the development of perceiving and understanding that require small or fundamental changes even in foundational elements of the work. A painter is a carnival juggler. Everything in his or her hands is in constant motion relative to everything else in his or her hands. The three hour still life teaches each student to live in the complex universe of the absolutely relative painting, developing a process which results in a sensation of universal stability as a result of experiencing said painting. This final sensation is the sensation of meaningfulness of the work.

The Work in Relationship

 My beginning at the Water Street Atelier in May, 1997, was also an ending. I quit a job...a career...that I loved. One that was advancing. When I informed the bosses of my imminent departure I was offered a raise and new position to entice me to stay. I declined both my current situation and my future possibilities. I was 27 years old.

 Jacob Collins' suggestion that I paint three hour still life paintings was not made solely or even primarily in the context of becoming a better painter. It was made in the context of making money as a painter. That resonated deeply with me given my situation in life at the time. And so part of the experience of the three hour still life is the possibility the work offers in developing a necessary economic ecosystem around the act of making art.

 Now the purists and idealists in the audience will perhaps find a problem with the union of educational concerns with economic ones. And I will respond by stating that the relationship is not of my making. And I would refer the skeptic to a seminal work of anthropology by Frederick Turner titled "The Ritual Process." in the book Turner argues that a constant dialogue exists between utopian aspirations and the pressure and need to put formal structure around those aspirations to allow for them to continue and develop into the future. 

 The same is true with the life of the artist. It is essentially a utopian form a living...a life based on adhering to the purity of vision or calling resonating within the artist. Deviation from this feels like treasonous betrayal of a fundamental order. And so the notion of linking the educational nurturing of this calling with the stated desire to profit from the process seems problematic. But the reality is that this structure already exists. The aspirant lives inevitably in an economic ecosystem. He or she is immersed in it whether conscious of it or not. In most cases the pressure of that ecosystem incites a fear so great that the artistic aspiration is drowned out by real and present fears. The art happens...if it happens at all...as a prosthetic to the person's life. Jacob's suggestion offered a way to fuse art-making into the center of my life. 

 It proved to be true. The small still life paintings started to sell. And I have been painting ever since. Over 20 years. I learned how to relate to people looking at my work. To criticism and praise. I learned how to develop relationships with people who might want to represent or acquire my work. I built networks of relationships with all the elements necessary to get my work into the world...photographers, shippers, framers. And as I change and the art world changes I continue to learn. But I learn as a person still painting. I learn as an artist in the world making art. The three hour still life began that process for me.

Conclusion

 Paul Cezanne, it is said, once made the following pronouncement: "I want to astonish Paris with an apple." And he did. Andy Warhol astonished with a can of soup. Paintings of lowly Things can be the occasion for the investigation and revelation of the most profound insights and possibilities. 

 The three hour still life workshop is not the transmission of a complete, fully-formed method for making three hour still life paintings. It is the setting for the practice of all the elements that will allow for each individual artist to experience the process and elements necessary for him or her to develop into an artist capable of making astonishing things. Perhaps those astonishing things are the three hour still life paintings themselves. Perhaps they are something of a totally different nature. The workshop is the space wherein one can open up the possibilities of astonishment. Whether through apples or cans of soup. Astonishment is the only aim of this workshop.

A City Upon a Hill (2017)

from and email written to a friend:

...so, I started doing "A City Upon a Hill" before "Non-Vitruvian Man." The image comes from a 1970s Superman comic letters section and not the narrative section. I was in NYC on 9/11 and saw the 2nd plane hit the second tower. What struck me about the image was the cool confidence of Superman, the immense and warming sun and the Twin Towers still standing in the skyline. And as I looked at the image it brought to mind John Winthrop's words from a sermon near the beginning of the Massachusetts Bay Colony...how this new land would represent a beacon...a shining city upon a hill...extolling all the liberties not found in the Old World they had just left. And I wondered if that idea still exists or if America has turned a corner and has a new sense of itself based on a growing experience as an entity and based upon the experience of vulnerability experienced in the attack on the Twin Towers. The sentiment of the image is not the sentiment of our time in this country.
Then, I painted "Non-Vitruvian Man" using the tape to indicate the geometric perfection into which Leonardo fits his Vitruvian Man...the summit of creation in his naked form based on the evidence of his resonant divine geometry. Again, the idea no longer resonates with me and is only an approximation at best and an imposition of idea on particular, spacetime embedded reality. There is no state of nature. Humanity is always and always has been  "technologized" ...clothed, empowered by the use of tools, limited but with the means through intelligence to surpass that limit. But the surpassing of the limit is always through super-added means. He is aware of limit and the possibility of failure and darkness.
That made me re-read even deeper the Superman image. Superman is a "state of nature" Superhero. His power is his state. His costume reveals his identity and his state. Batman's hides it and allows him to act for his justified reason. Superman is a Superhero built in the teenage imagination based on the implication of a vitruvian man...a being built in the divine image. Batman is the opposite and inhabits a future world (now here) where he is, always was and always will be a cyborg...part man and part machine. That is his true state. Clothed in technology. He is not naked. His identity is not power.

The Dark (K)Night (2017)

Pieces of the puzzle:

(1) from St. John of the Cross, "The Dark Night" (16th Century)

Once in the dark of night

when love burned bright with yearning, I arose

(O windfall of delight)

and how I left none knows--

dead to the world my house in deep repose;

in the dark, where all goes right, 

thanks to a secret ladder, other clothes,

(O windfall of delight)

in the dark, enwrapped in those--

dead to the world my house in deep repose.

There in the lucky dark, 

none to observe me, darkness far and wide;

no sign for me to mark, 

no other light, no guide

except for my heart--the fire, the fire inside!

(2) from Federico Garcia Lorca, "Prologue" to "In the Garden of the Lunar Grapefruits" (1920s)

I have taken leave of the friends I love the most & have set out on a short dramatic journey.  On a silver mirror I find, long before dawn, the satchel with the clothing I'll need for the exotic country to which I am heading.

     The tight, cold scent of sunrise beats weirdly on the huge escarpment we call night.

     On the sky's stretched page a cloud's initial letter trembles, & below my balcony a nightingale & frog raise up a sleepy cross of sound.

     I--tranquil, melancholy man--make my final preparations, impeded by those subtlest feelings aroused in mme by wings & by concentric circles.  On the white wall in my room, stiff & rigid like a snake in a museum, hangs the noble sword my grandfather carried in the war against Don Carlos the Pretender.

     With reverence I take the sword down, coated with yellow rust like a white poplar, & I gird it on me while remembering that I'll have to go through an awful invisible fight before I enter the garden.  An ecstatic & ferocious fight against my secular enemy, the giant dragon Common Sense.

.....

Before taking off just now I felt a sharp pain in my heart.  My family is sleeping & the whole house is in a state of absolute repose.  The dawn reveals towers & one by one counts up the tree leaves.  It slips a costume on me:  crackling, made of spangled lace.

The Other (no. 4): Non-Vitruvian Man (2017)

from and email written to a friend:

...so, I started doing "A City Upon a Hill" before "Non-Vitruvian Man." The image comes from a 1970s Superman comic letters section and not the narrative section. I was in NYC on 9/11 and saw the 2nd plane hit the second tower. What struck me about the image was the cool confidence of Superman, the immense and warming sun and the Twin Towers still standing in the skyline. And as I looked at the image it brought to mind John Winthrop's words from a sermon near the beginning of the Massachusetts Bay Colony...how this new land would represent a beacon...a shining city upon a hill...extolling all the liberties not found in the Old World they had just left. And I wondered if that idea still exists or if America has turned a corner and has a new sense of itself based on a growing experience as an entity and based upon the experience of vulnerability experienced in the attack on the Twin Towers. The sentiment of the image is not the sentiment of our time in this country.
Then, I painted "Non-Vitruvian Man" using the tape to indicate the geometric perfection into which Leonardo fits his Vitruvian Man...the summit of creation in his naked form based on the evidence of his resonant divine geometry. Again, the idea no longer resonates with me and is only an approximation at best and an imposition of idea on particular, spacetime embedded reality. There is no state of nature. Humanity is always and always has been  "technologized" ...clothed, empowered by the use of tools, limited but with the means through intelligence to surpass that limit. But the surpassing of the limit is always through super-added means. He is aware of limit and the possibility of failure and darkness.
That made me re-read even deeper the Superman image. Superman is a "state of nature" Superhero. His power is his state. His costume reveals his identity and his state. Batman's hides it and allows him to act for his justified reason. Superman is a Superhero built in the teenage imagination based on the implication of a vitruvian man...a being built in the divine image. Batman is the opposite and inhabits a future world (now here) where he is, always was and always will be a cyborg...part man and part machine. That is his true state. Clothed in technology. He is not naked. His identity is not power.

The Other (no. 1): Alien (2017)

How ironic that an American icon is completely un-American...an alien...an immigrant.  Superman's creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster (two Jewish teenagers from Cleveland, OH) created the hero they would want protecting them in their vulnerability against life in Cleveland and against life in the world under the shadow of Adolph Hitler's rise to power.  Together they create a hero in the tradition of the comic strongman, the Golem, Samson and Moses.  Like Moses, who delivered his people from slavery, Superman finds himself raised among a foreign people after having been found in a vessel crashed in a field as opposed to hung up on reeds.  Superman is taught to hide his alien identity under the most American of disguised, the corporate uniform of blue suit, white shirt and tie.  Underneath his true identity radiates in the primary colors of his strongman costume. He will always be unfulfilled in his adopted home as the woman he loves does not respect or love his false cover identity.  She loves his real identity, but Superman cannot love under his real identity and risk having it exposed.  Like the 16th century Spanish mystic, Teresa of Avila, who finds the depth her identity in the investigation of the rooms making up her deep interior life as expressed in The Interior Castle Superman finds the full expression of his identity only possible in the depths of isolation...the Fortress of Solitude located deep in the Arctic landscape...where he has artifacts of his past life collected and displayed.  

The most American of icons is un-American in his origin, but perhaps that makes him fundamentally American.

A Hunger Artist (2014)

Both the title and the inspiration for this work come from Franz Kafka's 1992 short story, "A Hunger Artist." I read the short story in German class in the original German during my senior year of high school.  1988.  I have been thinking about the implications of the story ever since.

Plot summary (from Wikipedia):

The story begins with a general description of "the hunger artist" and then narrows in on a single performer, the protagonist. The hunger artist performed in a cage for the curious spectators, and was attended by teams of watchers (usually three butchers) who ensured that he was not secretly eating. Despite such precautions, many, including some of the watchers themselves, were convinced that the hunger artist cheated. Such suspicions annoyed the hunger artist, as did the forty-day limit imposed on his fasting by his promoter, or impresario. The impresario insisted that after forty days public sympathy for the hunger artist inevitably declined. The hunger artist, however, found the time limit irksome and arbitrary, as it prevented him from bettering his own record, from fasting indefinitely. At the end of a fast the hunger artist, amid highly theatrical fanfare, would be carried from his cage and made to eat, both of which he always resented.

These performances, followed by intervals of recuperation, were repeated for many years. Despite his fame, the hunger artist felt dissatisfied and misunderstood. If a spectator, observing his apparent melancholy, tried to console him, he would erupt in fury, shaking the bars of his cage. The impresario would punish such outbursts by apologizing to the audience, pointing out that irritability was a consequence of fasting. He would then mention the hunger artist's boast that he could fast much longer than he was doing, but would show photographs of the hunger artist near death at the end of a previous fast. In this way he suggested that the hunger artist's sadness and poor physique was caused by fasting, when, in the hunger artist's view, he was depressed because of the premature cessation of his fasts. The impresario's "perversion of the truth" further exasperated the hunger artist.

Seemingly overnight, popular tastes changed and public fasting went out of fashion. The hunger artist broke his ties with the impresario and hired himself to a circus, where he hoped to perform truly prodigious feats of fasting. No longer a main attraction, he was given a cage on the outskirts of the circus, near the animal cages. Although the site was readily accessible, and crowds thronged past on their way to see the animals, any spectators who stopped to see him created an obstruction in the flow of people on their way to the animals. At first the hunger artist looked forward to the passing of the crowds, but in time he grew irritated by the noise and disruption caused by the people, and the stench, the roaring, and the feeding of the animals depressed him. Eventually, the hunger artist was completely ignored. No one, not even the artist himself, counted the days of his fast. One day an overseer noticed the hunger artist's cage with its dirty straw. He wondered why the cage was unused; when he and the attendants inspected it, however, they found the hunger artist near death. Before he died he asked forgiveness and confessed that he should not be admired, since the reason he fasted was simply that he could not find food to his liking. The hunger artist was buried with the straw of his cage and replaced by a panther. Spectators crowded about the panther's cage because the panther took so much joy in life, unlike the hunger artist. The story also mentions that the panther was always brought the food he liked, a hint to the readers that can be interpreted in many ways.

The phenomenon of the hunger artist was a real spectacle in Kafka's time.  The artist performed his art in public squares across Eastern Europe, starving himself for the amusement of people.  But given that it was a spectacle viewed by a public too much starvation would not be palatable for consumption by those viewing, so to speak. The very grandeur of the art...starvation...was both beyond the receptive potential of the audience and the mechanism for the art's demise. And yet the hunger artist at least begins with a desire and a need to have the splendor of his pursuit radiate before a viewing public. The hunger artist is mired in the absurd dilemma of needing and wanting to be seen but also of being unwatchable. This dilemma is central to great artistic pursuits which originate in the desire to communicate Something but which meet with the frustration of having the central communication inaccessible to those for whom the communication was intended. The cage represents this divide, creating spaces filled with expectations and decisions not aligned with the expectations and decisions inhabiting the neighboring spaces.

Suburban Sisyphus (2015/2018)

From the "Preface" of Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus:

"For me 'The Myth of Sisyphus' marks the beginning of an idea which I was to pursue in The Rebel.  It attempts to resolve the problem of suicide, as 'The Rebel' attempts to resolve that of murder, in both cases without the aid of eternal values which, temporarily perhaps, are absent or distorted in contemporary Europe.  The fundamental subject of 'The Myth of Sisyphus' is this: it is legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has a meaning;  therefore it is legitimate to meet the problem of suicide face to face.  The answer, underlying and appearing through the paradoxes which cover it, is this:  even if one does not believe in God, suicide is not legitimate.  Written fifteen years ago, in 1940, amid the French and European disaster, this book declares that even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism.  In all the books I have written since, I have attempted to pursue this direction.  Althought 'The Myth of Sisyphus' poses mortal problems, it sums itself up for me as a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert."

I find life in suburban Ohio to be a contemporary manifestation of life in the desert...barren, arid, unrelenting and oppressive psychological heat.  The relief of deep and interesting conversation with anything simulating regularity...the relief of intimate relationships within which one feels understood...the relief of others around taking existential risks to understand Reality in all its facets and to create new realities based on these existential experiences plumbed in depth because of the vulnerability of these risks taken...these reliefs do not exist for me.  There is not even a drop of cold water for my parched and bleeding lips. My suburban life is life in a desert. My suburban life is constant repetition of seemingly meaningless acts...waking at 5:15am, washing dishes, preparing breakfast, walking the dogs, mowing the lawn, raking the leaves, shoveling the snow, paying bills.  And on and on and on.  Even the process of making art on a daily basis assumes this character.  And yet I desire to create. And given that I live in a suburban desert it is in this suburban desert that I must create.  I must accept the invitation my being offers me to create despite needing to mow the lawn once again. Suicide is an unacceptable option despite the overwhelming absurdity of the circumstances.

The Gift (2015)

The gift arrives.  The waiting is over.

The function of the Muse--bringer of the New.  The New is not determined by conditions immediately preceding its arrival but is somehow possible given those conditions.  As Gaston Bachelard writes...the poetic moment is a knot between successive moments but exists outside the idea of the one moment causing the next moment.  The New arrives freely during the state of waiting.  It is given.  The New is a Gift.  The Gift comes wrapped with a series of complex knots forming a bow.  The Gift which comes wrapped is a cause for rapture.  The waiting is finally over. IT has arrived!

Advent (2015)

"There then occurs a new development in the story.

"The many young princes had tried to get in but they had tried to get through the thorny hedge, but they had remained sticking fast in it, and had died a pitiful death.  Then the youth said:  'I am not afraid, and I will go and see the beautiful Briar Rose.' The good old man might dissuade him as he would, but the prince did not listen to his words.

[From the Briar Rose narrative]:

"But by this time the hundred years had just passed, and the day had come when Briar Rose was to awake again.  When the king's son came near to the thorn-hedge, it was nothing but large and beautiful flowers, which parted from each other of their own accord, and let him pass unhurt.

"This is a beautiful denouement:  the thorns become roses and the hedge becomes flowers by virtue of 'creative waiting.'  The fairy tale would have it that this occurs simply by waiting.  I believe differently:  it is inner growth, the external manifestation of kairos."

"This mythic approach to time is opposite to the routine and often boring--concept of time as automatic passage of 'tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow 'creeping on in petty pace from day to day.' This demonstrates that this great change did not occur because of the special qualities of this prince (others were as courageous and died in the thorns). This prince, we assume, sensed the kairos, the moment when 'all creation trembled and groaned.' (Rollo May, The Cry for Myth, p. 205)

Advent is a period of waiting for the Moment to arrive. I have found that much of my life is a period of Advent...waiting for the Moment to declare itself ready for expression.

Incurably Atomic (2018)

"It cannot be too clearly understood that some chief notions of European thought were framed under the influence of a misapprehension, only partially corrected by the scientific progress of the last century.  This mistake consists in the confusion of mere potentiality with actuality.  Continuity concerns what is potential; whereas actuality is incurably atomic." (Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 61)

As a contemporary realist artist I am concerned with the actual.  The parameters and implications of this are for the history of art to define as those making up that history define it through their actuality.

A Moment of Clarity: The Apophatic Way (2017)

"The terminology of 'apophatic' and 'cataphatic' theologies, that is, the use of negation (apophasis) and affirmation (kataphasis) in our ways of talking about God, was introduced into Christian theology by the probably early-sixth-century author who wrote under the pseudonym of the Apostle Paul's convert, Dionysius the Areopagite (generally referred to as Pseudo-Dionysius). It was, however, only terminology that Dionysius introduced; the use of negation and affirmation in relation to God had a long history, longer than even Christianity, reaching back into the traditions of the Hebrew scriptures and classical Greek philosophy to which Christian theology had early laid claim.  Human beings have always affirmed something of God, either as a result of speculation about the divine or as an affirmation of revelation about God--the Hebrew scriptures contain records claiming to be God's self-revelation, and followers of other religious traditions have both claimed similar revelations and celebrated the divine in hymnic aretalogies, that is, lists of divine virtues.  But this affirmation of the divine has always been hedged about by a sense of the mysteriousness of the divine, leading to the negating of any affirmations about God, thereby bearing testimony to the inadequacy of any human conception of God.  So a Hebrew prophet exclaims in God's name, 'To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? says the Holy One" (Is 40:25) and even the revelation of God's name to Moses--'I am that I am' (Ex 3:14)--is an affirmation about God inviting or even requiring an apophatic interpretation.  Similarly, within Greek philosophical tradition, we find Plato asserting in the Timaeus that 'to discover the Father and Maker of the universe would be some task, and it would be impossible to declare what one had found to everyone' and in The Republic that the Idea of the Good, for Plato the highest reality, is 'beyond being.'" (Andrew Louth, from The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism)

I would offer that both of these avenues of knowledge pertain not only to God but to the experience and knowledge of each and every particular existent Thing.  Affirmative and negative knowledge pertains to human intellectual access to all Things...to the encounter with the most seemingly insignificant Advil Liqui-Gel capsule as well as to the encounter with God.  As a result, every Thing is infinitely interesting and infinitely unattainable in its entirety as a known Thing.  All things are elusive.  The theory of the Univocity of Being from Duns Scotus tells us as much.

A Moment of Clarity: The Cataphatic Way (2017)

"The terminology of 'apophatic' and 'cataphatic' theologies, that is, the use of negation (apophasis) and affirmation (kataphasis) in our ways of talking about God, was introduced into Christian theology by the probably early-sixth-century author who wrote under the pseudonym of the Apostle Paul's convert, Dionysius the Areopagite (generally referred to as Pseudo-Dionysius). It was, however, only terminology that Dionysius introduced; the use of negation and affirmation in relation to God had a long history, longer than even Christianity, reaching back into the traditions of the Hebrew scriptures and classical Greek philosophy to which Christian theology had early laid claim.  Human beings have always affirmed something of God, either as a result of speculation about the divine or as an affirmation of revelation about God--the Hebrew scriptures contain records claiming to be God's self-revelation, and followers of other religious traditions have both claimed similar revelations and celebrated the divine in hymnic aretalogies, that is, lists of divine virtues.  But this affirmation of the divine has always been hedged about by a sense of the mysteriousness of the divine, leading to the negating of any affirmations about God, thereby bearing testimony to the inadequacy of any human conception of God.  So a Hebrew prophet exclaims in God's name, 'To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? says the Holy One" (Is 40:25) and even the revelation of God's name to Moses--'I am that I am' (Ex 3:14)--is an affirmation about God inviting or even requiring an apophatic interpretation.  Similarly, within Greek philosophical tradition, we find Plato asserting in the Timaeus that 'to discover the Father and Maker of the universe would be some task, and it would be impossible to declare what one had found to everyone' and in The Republic that the Idea of the Good, for Plato the highest reality, is 'beyond being.'" (Andrew Louth, from The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism)

I would offer that both of these avenues of knowledge pertain not only to God but to the experience and knowledge of each and every particular existent Thing.  Affirmative and negative knowledge pertains to human intellectual access to all Things...to the encounter with the most seemingly insignificant Advil Liqui-Gel capsule as well as to the encounter with God.  As a result, every Thing is infinitely interesting and infinitely unattainable in its entirety as a known Thing.  All things are elusive.  The theory of the Univocity of Being from Duns Scotus tells us as much.

Felix Culpa (2005)

A poem by Emily Dickinson inspired this painting. Here it is:

Must be a Woe--

A loss or so--

To bend the eye

Best Beauty's way--

But--once aslant

It notes Delight

As difficult 

As Stalactite

A Common Bliss

Were had for less--

The price--is

Even as the Grace--

Our lord--thought no

Extravagance 

To pay--a Cross--

(1) Dickinson wrote this poem in the early 1860s.  Its statement rejecting the Common Bliss for a deeper, more difficult Delight predates similar discussions that arose in Modernism by 50 or more years.

(2) The beauty of the poem is not only thematic.  It comes to the palate in the tense rhyme between eye and way in first stanza. It comes in the different speeds needed to read the poem as controlled both by line and line breaks but also by the staccato effect interspersed and controlled by the dashes.  It starts with a regular rhythm in the first two couplings in the first stanza.  The reader is made aware that something different is going on by the stretched rhyme at the end of the second coupling.  Then, the picks up a different rhythm.  Faster. Dissonant.  Difficult to the ear seeking a traditional poetic or even spoken melody. The music of this poem could have just as easily been written by a composer of the 2nd Viennese School.

(3) I love every bit of this poem.  I have memorized it and thought about it and obsessed over it for some 25 years.  It forms a cornerstone for my understanding of how Art works both in composition and in reception.  But I think my favorite part is the word "Stalactite." The difficulty that Dickinson refers to is the very concrete sound quality of the word.  The word as a concrete sound with no reference to the an image or the thing is designates makes this element a visionary one.  Experimentation in poetry in Dada and in Paris in the early 20th century and the development of concrete poetry in the mid-20th century all live in the shadow of Dickinson's use of the word "Stalactite" in this poem. Absolutely brilliant...absolutely beautiful!

Hermeneutics (2005)

"How irresponsibly Belbo, Diotallevi, and I had rewritten the world, or--as Diotallevi would have put it--had rediscovered what in the Book had been engraved at white heat between the black lines formed by the letters, like black insects, that supposedly made the Torah clear!" (Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum, p. 39)

Prometheus (2017)

Footnotes:

(1) I love matches.  I love the blue of the Ohio Blue Tip Match.  I love the possibility of conflagration hidden in the simple stability of a matchstick. And I love the transition between phases...from stability to turbulence and back to stability in a matter of seconds...of a match scratched on an old pair of jeans.  I love thinking about how one match relates to the other and can influence the other by a transfer of possibility in passing along its flame.

(2) I had no endpoint in the composition of this painting.  I started with a painting of a couple of matches.  The painting offered its own direction.  I followed.

(3) The self portrait of the jester atop his staff, staring back at himself. The incendiary head of a match atop a pine stick.

(4) What started as a couple of matches arranged as a traditional trompe l'oeil painting has moved in the direction of a meditation on the myth of Prometheus...transgression against the rule of the gods to bring not only fire but also fundamental knowledge in the form of the technology of the alphabet and number to humanity.

(5) The essential character of transgression/disruption and the punishment meted out by the established system in relationship to the challenge to its established structure by the transgressor:

"This, then, is the true basis for the respect shown to flame:  if the child brings his hand close to the fire his father raps him over the knuckles with a ruler.  Fire, then, can strike without having to burn.  Whether this fire be flame or heat, lamp or stove, the parents' vigilance is the same.  Thus fire is initially the object of a general prohibition;  hence this conclusion:  the social interdiction is our first general knowledge of fire.  What we first learn about fire is that we must not touch it.  As the chile grows up, the prohibitions become intellectual rather than physical;  the blow of the ruler is replaced by the angry voice;  the angry voice by the recital of the dangers of fire, by the legends concerning fire from heaven.  Thus the natural phenomenon is rapidly mixed in with complex and confused items of social experience which leave little room for the acquiring of an unprejudiced knowledge.

"Consequently, since the prohibitions are primarily social interdictions, the problem of obtaining a personal knowledge of fire is the problem of clever disobedience.  The child wishes to do what his father does, but far away from his father's presence, and so like a little Prometheus he steals some matches." (Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, p. 11)

Ideal (2018)

While each individual fascinates me, the impetus for both this work and for the revised composition of it [I did another version of it under the same title in 2013 which can be viewed in the "Pop Archaeology" section of this website] is the fundamental relationship between the two images.

(1) Both represent idealizations. Mondrian's idealism echoes a philosophical idealism, where perfection resides beyond incarnated particulars and also disavows any suggestion of human intervention in its making based on the mechanical perfection in its presentation...a perfection which time has called into question with discoloration and cracking. Superman's idealism originates in the aspiration of two Jewish boys in Cleveland, Ohio, looking for a better world in the face of the struggle of being an Other in their own community and an Other in the world community as the reality of Adolf Hitler became apparent in its full horror.
(2) Both are representations of this idealism produced in the early 1940s, though in different places...Mondrian in London and Superman in Cleveland and NYC.  Both adopt the same basic language of representation...the primary colors of yellow, blue and red and the device of the black outline delineating the primary colored zones of form.
(3) Both come to me as a viewer by means of mass media.  While it might not have been Mondrian's intention, my access to his image via a postcard purchased in a museum store in a museum where the painting does not even reside, is no different than my access to Superman through popular distribution channels.  The Idealism arrives to the masses via media.  Without the promulgation the Idealism is the provenance of the elite of finance or thought or circumstance.

I have learned a great deal since I composed the first painting.  The original work seemed like a perfect opportunity to try the compositional and theoretical advancements in my thinking on this topic.  While the final work is more challenging than in the original instance, I feel that the deconstruction of the original image allows for the construction of the original meaning in a more authentic manner.

Chaosmos (2018)

“…every person, place and thing in the chaosmos of Alle anyway connected with the gobblydumped turkey was moving and changing every part of the time:…” (James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake)

I first encountered the term “chaosmos” in a book by Gilles Deleuze called The Fold. Upon further investigation I discovered that Umberto Eco had written a book titled with the phrase: The Aesthetics of Chaosmos, The Middle Ages of James Joyce (translated by Ellen Esrock, Harvard University Press, 1989). According to a note to the translated edition, this book started as the final chapter to Eco’s seminal work of 1962, The Open Work. Many of the considerations in the book are considerations of great interest to me and have been so for decades. They form the considerations that started the idea of the small paintings. Engagement with these ideas as found in the Eco book refined my understanding and my presentation of the work to the point that I titled it in honor of this lineage of under-discussed aesthetic considerations. To help the viewer of my work, “Chaosmos,” access my considerations and interests through the work itself, I include here some brief quotes from the above mentioned edition with corresponding page numbers. These are meant to act almost as footnotes and not descriptions…grains of salt to give the individual viewer of the work added flavor in the visual tasting. It is by no means comprehensive or definitive on the subject. Just a few grains of salt. Enjoy!

(Author’s note, vi) “To me [Eco] Joyce was the node where the Middle Ages and the avant-garde meet, and the present book is the story and the historical-theoretical foundation of such a paradoxical meeting.” [Aside: I cannot stress the significance of this concept. I first came across it during my junior year of college. I was writing a lengthy paper on early Cistercian architecture. A photobook I encountered captured artistic shots of the remnants of the 12th century buildings. The turning point for me, however, was the preface to the book written by Le Corbusier. He spoke of the influence upon him of the sensibility of the architectural forms and materials and pervading aesthetic…a direct influence that spoke from a not-so-direct 700 years prior. That is where it began for me. Since I am aware of it, I see how pervasive the connection was…time folded on itself to have to seemingly unrelated epochs share the relationship of first cousins.]

(2) “Approached in this way, our research needs a guiding thread, a line of investigation, an operative hypothesis. We take, therefore, the opposition between a classical conception of form and the need for a more pliable and ‘open’ structure of the work and of the world. This can be identified as a dialectic of order and adventure, a contrast between the world of the medieval summae and that of contemporary science and philosophy.”

(3) “…offers us the development of a continuous polarity between Chaos and Cosmos, between disorder and order, liberty and rules, between the nostalgia of Middle Ages and the attempts to envisage a new order. Our analysis of the poetics of James Joyce will be the analysis o a moment of transition in contemporary culture.”

(7) “The medieval thinker knows that art is the human way to reproduce, in an artifact, the universal rules of cosmic order. In this sense art reflects the artist’s impersonality rather than his personality. Art is the analogon of the world. Even if Joyce had discovered the notion impersonality in more modern authors such as Flaubert, it goes without saying that his enthusiasm for this theory had medieval sources.”

“This framework of Order provides an unlimited chain of relations between creatures and events…. It is the mechanism which permits epiphanies, where a thing becomes the living symbol of something else, and creates a continuous web of references. Any person or event is a cypher which refers to another part of the book.”

A Portrait of Stephen Dedalus

A Portrait of Stephen Dedalus (2014)
Oil on linen on board
20in. x 20in.

“With a sudden movement she bowed his head and joined her lips to his and he read the meaning of her movements in her frank uplifted eyes.  It was too much for him.  He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her, body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure of her softly parting lips.  They pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicle of a vague speech;  and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour.” (108)

With the sensuality of this kiss James Joyce closes the second chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  The moment remains one of my favorites in all of literature.  Despite all the elements surrounding the young Stephen Dedalus…Catholic identity, Irish identity (both cultural and political), identity as the son of his father and so on…the first inkling of his true individual identity as a person, as Stephen Dedalus, arises as he “wandered into a maze of narrow and dirty streets” (106) wherein he meets “(a) young woman dressed in a long pink gown” (107)—a lady of the evening.  Joyce writes:  “In her arms he felt that he had suddenly become strong and fearless and sure of himself.” (107)  The maze, the labyrinth of life that must be navigated equates to all of those elements which would contribute to identity but which, in fact, confound an understanding of oneself, of life.  The elements make up the conceptual labyrinth that must be traversed.  He truly meets himself outside the realm of these conceptual and imposed realities only in an experience so intense that it overrides the rational function of the mind.  He begins to find himself in the act of sinning, in the act of undermining the ordained order of things.  He finds himself, ultimately, only when he sets himself against God Himself.  The logic of salvation history, the justice and injustice of political struggle, the custom and tradition imposed by nation and by family all seem as nothing as the young woman dressed in pink slips her tongue into his mouth.  His transgression eventually frees him to assume the central role of the divine himself, that of a creator…an artist.  At that point he no longer navigates the labyrinth, but he engineers labyrinths as a clever, perhaps divine, maker.  The meaning of Joyce’s epigraph taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses referencing Daedalus (“clever artificer”) to the novel becomes clear:  “And he applies his mind to obscure arts.” 

Wonder...Woman

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Wonder...Women (2013)
Oil on linen on board
22in. x 33 3/4in.

In the previous essays addressing my paintings I have attempted to construct comprehensive narratives explaining the painting in their entirety. In this essay I have chosen to give only a hint toward a better understanding of the painting, “Wonder…Woman.” It is a consideration that figured greatly in the painting’s construction, conceptually and compositionally speaking—one with great implications for making and understanding contemporary art.

In an essay, “The Way to Language,” Martin Heidegger makes the following distinction with respect to the notion of signs. He writes: “The Greeks of the Classical Age know and understand the sign in terms of showing—the sign is shaped to show. Since Hellenistic times (the Stoa), the sign originates by a stipulation, as the instrument for a manner of designation by which man’s mind is reset and directed from one object to another object. Designation is no longer a showing in the sense of bringing something to light. The transformation of the sign from something that shows to something that designates has its roots in the change of the nature of truth.” “Wonder…Woman” attempts to address this distinction and to meditate on its implications.

The bottom portion of the composition speaks within the traditional idiom of trompe l’oeil painting, the painted objects sitting on top of the wall depicted in the painting, which in this mode of painting acts as the picture plane, and projecting into the viewer’s space. This portion of the painting signifies by means of designation. Meaning is generated through a relationship of the viewer to the projected or suggested objects and to the web of associations evoked by or added onto said objects due to cultural association or personal experience. The mind of the viewer desires to decipher the significance of this portion of the painting by accessing this web of associations. The things depicted do not show themselves, plain and simple, for what they are but act as guideposts along a conceptual journey leading to some sense of coherence.

The top portion of the composition functions quite differently. It is introduced to the viewer by means of the trompe l’oeil framing element. This element, however, creates a very different result. Instead of beginning and ending in that idiom, the tape frame acts as an introduction to a more traditional mode of realist painting wherein the tape frame acts as a window frame that defines the picture plane and ushers the viewer into a realm beyond itself. The frame delineates the entryway to a space beyond, and in that space hovers a simple cotton candy cloud in the blue expanse of the sky. The mind apprehends the elements of this scene quite differently from the scene below. The cloud shows itself to be itself, a cloud. The mind apprehends the cloud for what it is, a cloud. The experience, the showing is so powerful that all other mental functions cease. The mind does not pursue the web of associations as it did in the section below. The mind simply gazes and drinks in the willingness of the cloud to show itself. The act of showing paralyzes the discursive function of the mind by its sublime simplicity and presence. It experiences the cloud for its own sake. It wonders at the cloud. And from that wonder, as stated by Aristotle, is born all true philosophy.