Is the way I see more significant than what I’m looking at?

Happy New Year! Returning to the studio after a holiday break requires me to retrace my  steps in order to pick up the thread again. I had an idea to study and paint Marc Lancet’s tea bowls. I became committed to this effort. It was fresh and new and bright and exciting, and very challenging. Now I feel like I wander in the twilight, in the woods, in a land of questions. I am blind to where I am going. This place of questions can be a creative place of many possibilities. It can also be uncomfortable. How long and well can I tolerate being lost? I often find myself thinking it is bad to be lost. Is that true?

In spite of the unknowing I continue forward, painting these silent bowls of clay.
The completion of the first large tea bowl collection, the 27-painting group that I think of as a collection of “portraits of emptiness,” left me unclear about where to go next. I’m being led forward by the process, following clues and leads that emerge trying to have faith. As I mentioned in the post from Nov. 16^th, I was struck by the way my point of view, literally the height and tilt of my head in relation to the bowl, changed the paintings. There is something important about that. A painting, even a highly “realistic” representational one, is not just a painting of an object but really as much a painting of a point of view. Sometimes the point of view of the artist may be more significant in regards to the meaning of a painting or the experience of the viewer, than the subject itself.

In tea ceremonies I have attended, an important part of the experience of the tea bowl  is the way one looks at it. It is as if the wonder of the objects does not dwell just within them but is borne out of a collaboration between the bowl and the viewer. This fascination with the power of view point led me to the next step in this unfolding body of work.

After experiencing the subtly different points of view in the collection of 27, I decided to paint two sets of nine bowls, 3 foot x 3 foot squares, from completely different points of view. Nine of the bowls I painted looking down into them and nine I painted looking up at them. I chose the shallower bowls to look down into and the ones with steeper walls to look up at.

I was surprised at how powerfully the view affected the “meaning” of, or impact of, the image. Some of the tea bowls are open like an open hand, a flower petal, a shallow pool. The others look closed and impenetrable. Like a tower on a hill or a monument, they look down at me. 

Collection of 9 tea bowls, oil on panel, 12″ x 12″

The images gazing into the bowls make me feel welcomed, they are unguarded. There is an offering there, you need only travel into the bowl and it will accept you, enfold you. That point of view is so particular, passive, vulnerable and inviting. It is so different from the bowls that I am looking up at, fortified and impenetrable.

A collection of 9 tea bowls, oil on panel, 12″ x 12″

I know that in some sense both have the same kind of beauty but they have a totally different attitude and emotional effect. I think it’s interesting that I say it is their attitude when the difference is, actually, largely my point of view. Every bowl has both an open and a closed aspect and each aspect has a very different character. I can change my art, and life I suppose, by changing the outer “reality” (the subject) or by changing the way I am looking at that “reality”. One could  say that in these two collections of paintings, the choice of point of view becomes more powerful than the choice of subject matter.

This is a reminder that I can never separate what I am seeing from the way I am looking at it. And, like with these tea bowls, often my point of view has more influence over my experience of what lies before me than does the thing itself.

Coming to Terms with Motion and Stillness in Painting

Still Life with Skull and Bottles, oil in linen, 1989

I’ve been away from my subject for a whole week, down in Southern California. I return to the misty morning and a great blue heron takes wing and flies away as I approach the pond. The golden willow tree is covered in new leaves, in fact abundant new growth is everywhere. Most of the warm tones, the red of the twigs, the tips of coral and salmon and the strange violets, are gone. The tree, slope and oaks behind are now green. Again my view is all new.

I begin what will be my suite of April paintings, excited to follow the changes, aware that May and the end of my project is quickly approaching.

My trip to San Diego was in part to clean out my old studio, a garage in my family’s house. Many of the paintings that I have there are well over 25 years old. At that time in my life I had just returned from Italy and was painting still life paintings like the image on this post. I set up my studio as a highly controlled North light environment. Everything was designed for stillness and consistency in accordance with the ancient principles and techniques I learned in Italy. I showed and sold most of the meticulous still lives of that period but a handful are still left and, seeing them again, they look frozen to me. There is a certain beauty about them but also an earie breathless silence. This is especially true in contrast to my living, breathing, pulsing scene at the pond.

I remember so well painting in that garage/studio; the stillness, the uniformity of the Northern exposure, the high window with the 45 degree slope of light, just as Leonardo Da Vinci specified. Everything was controlled and unchanging. For some reason I was interested most in found inanimate objects that were stable, not fruit or flowers so much but skulls and jars and bottles and stones and bits of tapestry. If I could make things in Nature still enough, they would look like paintings even before I painted them.

It seemed like I had endless, un-pressured time to paint, even if I was painting a commission. My subject would not ripen or rot or turn colors or change form. There was no wind or sun or changing shadows to deal with. I could spend hours painting the stem of a bottle or the grain of a piece of wood. When I left and returned, everything was always just as I left it. In retrospect, I see that somehow this mimicked the sense of time my 25 year old self had; no hurry, no scarcity, hours and days and weeks and years filled my basket. And I barely noticed myself or my friends changing. I knew my life would all be there again tomorrow, just like the still life awaiting me in the studio.

But now the scene before me never looks like a painting, it’s a quickly moving picture. Everything seems to be changing all the time, even in a day, from morning to afternoon. It feels like yesterday that the buds started swelling and tomorrow the leaves will be turning orange and falling. I am easily disoriented when a hot afternoon in late February feels like early July.

Just as the stillness of my still lives supported that sense of time I had when I was younger, so the rush of change around me supports the sense that I have now: that everything is fleeting and changing, that nothing is still. If I want to paint something in Nature, honestly and directly, I must accept my limitations. I must run forward and seize the moment. I must do it all now, for as imperfect and clumsy as my painting may be, I know I only get one chance. Nothing lasts for long.

As I stood in the now-empty garage it occurred to me that making Nature “still” was about control, even oppression, or assertion of our power to hold back the tides of time. My still life paintings appeared to be a kind of celebration of victory over change, the very change I now study and try to portray.

I wonder about this shift, over almost three decades, from painting what appears to be still to painting what is in motion. Some spiritual practices suggest we can find the truth by focusing on the unchanging, permanent and eternal. I find myself trying to get at the truth of things by focusing on the changing, dynamic processes of Nature. Am I barking up the wrong tree? Or is change the one great constant and by focusing on change I am in fact focusing on the eternal and unchanging? I’m led to more questions and yet another paradox.