Contemplating what is done, what is made, what is being
First light ;
It’s a long time I’ve been
looking
at stones, at
water,
breathing,
mixing
colors.
Thoughts and memories,
ideas and learned notions
crowd in on the presence before me,
and
within me.
Most has been surpassed,
is only a dream,
a big shape in some other expanse.
The other day I hefted a stone
and
thought
nothing
more
basic
than
this.
The motifs have come down to
rock & water
lake
& mountain
sky & horizon
river and more
rock
Life, being-of-itself, burgeons forth
through all forms,
like wisps of exhalation
or vapor, in effortless
waves and volutes :
Stillness and radiance.
Immanence; not
transcendence.
The vastness
of landscape throws us back on our own interior vastness.
I have painted complexly,
but
am drawn now to simplicity
and restraint.
It’s enough that rhythms
and forms
exert a little pressure on
each other,
as in the paintings of old East Asia, where
landscape has always been
understood metaphorically.
Besides my own experience
in wilderness,
these have been my primary
sources.
The motifs can be anything
that pits vastness against intimacy:
coastal waters and rocks;
the sagebrush of the desert
from the Okanagan to
Sonora;
sky and land of any
artless, self-willing expanse.
I am ushered by enormity of
wilderness
into silence and light.
My mind opens as the sky
opens, resting nowhere.
The
stability, the firmness, of the buttes and mesas
—and
the yielding of the valleys and hollows—
are
my own steadiness.
Repetitions
of pattern in rock,
of
biomorphic forms, even of weather,
find
rhythms in my being,
as
numerous as my own false and beautiful selves.
Now, I can count four ways of making art:
- by direct response to the world ‘out
there’
- to mental objects ‘in here’
- to ideas, or primal intuitions
- and painting as painting: forms found in the tearing of paper, spilling
of ink, carving wood, smearing tar & paint,
ink-rubbed impressions of
sidewalk cracks, of sticks and stones, coaxing chance,
delicate
laying of gold.
So, where is mind? Is there any part of
this that is not mind? How does meaning arise in relation to a thing observed,
a sound heard, a touch, a shape or color? What makes form significant?
I don’t know.
It all emerges from nothing.
Every particle of the observed world,
every thought and furtive breath of
intuition,
my hands, the bits of material that
they
assemble into a ‘painting,’ all of it
emerges from this mind.
Where is this mind?
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