john

"john" 96" x 96" house paint, acrylic + pastel on board

This is a mural size portrait of a man I met near my studio at Healthcare for the Homeless. He's an artist and a vet. When I met him he was working on a painting of a sculpted block of ice.

The painting will be included in an exhibition at the Albuquerque Museum in January 2015.

flesh

in this here place, we flesh no. 3

“She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.’” [from Beloved, Toni Morrison]

What would it be like to love the flesh;

to love, without shame, the weeping, laughing, dancing flesh;

the flesh which so rarely takes the shape we expect and respect?

These paintings are about loving that flesh. Hard.

cholamandal artist's village

in this here place...

"in this here place, we flesh no. 1" oil on canvas. 24" x 24"

here's a beautiful passage from Toni Morrison's Beloved:

“She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.

"Here," she said, "in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.
Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain't in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don't love your mouth. You got to love it. This is flesh I'm talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I'm telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver--love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet.More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize." Saying no more, she stood up then and danced with her twisted hip the rest of what her heart had to say while the others opened heir mouths and gave her the music.” 
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

on meditation

mark horst, oil on canvas. 18 x 18"

"The idea here is to immerse yourself in the feeling-tone of you and consciously access thought-free wakefulness in order to experience yourself with clarity. The practice is to be so unthinkingly in the now, so present, so involved with feeling what's actually happening now, that you override your conditioning about who you are--giving rise to a new experience of you.

Breath awareness during motionless sitting is one of the very best techniques for this..."

[from Eric Schiffmann, "Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving Into Stillness"]

beauty and cruelty

mark horst "the holy family no. 36" oil on canvas, 12" x 16"

But this “universal love” will be found upon examination (like most other utopian projects) to make such severe demands upon human nature that it cannot be realized, and indeed, even if it could be realized it would in fact cramp and distort man (sic), eventually ruining both him and his society. to because love is not good and natural to man (sic) but because a system constructed on a theoretical and abstract principle of love ignores certain fundamental and mysterious realities, of which we cannot be fully conscious, and the price we pay for this inattention is that our “love” in fact becomes hate.” [from an introduction to “The Way of Chuang Tzu” by Thomas Merton]

Merton is writing about religious “systems” but I’m thinking about painting and drawing.

For me, Merton’s argument is also an argument for paying attention to the very specific and very individual characteristics of the figure. No two figures the same. No two faces the same. No two hands the same. Just look.

The price we pay for our failure to pay attention to individual beauty is that our looking becomes judgmental and our standard for beauty becomes an abstraction that no individual can approximate: our hunger for beauty becomes cruelty toward ourselves and others.

some thoughts about the India paintings

[notes from a gallery talk at Canyon Road Contemporary on Sept. 19, 2014]

thanks to Nancy Leeson and CRCA for inviting me to do this work
thanks to my partner in art and love Elisabeth for encouraging me to do it my way…
thanks for coming out to look…
the paintings don’t need words
and I’m not going to give you many…
but here are three things I might say about them…

1. these are studies of scenes from everyday life…
I love India and there are some aspects of these images that are typically Indian, but I think what interests me the most about them is that they are typically human: parents hold hands with their children, friends with these gestures of warmth.
One of the things I love about India is that most every aspect of daily life is visible and out in the open.

2. I’ve tried to keep these paintings very direct and honest.
To me that means I’ve worked on them until they communicate an honest feeling. I’m not trying to make them more than what they are. So in painting these I kept asking myself if they were speaking; if they were carrying a sense of life and mystery. I found that sometimes I painted right over that sense… and had to stop and go back to something more simple; sometimes more detail, more color, meant less emotional clarity.

3. and finally I want to try to say something I’m not sure how to say:
there is something else about India that I love very much and that is an acknowledgment of mystery as a part of life. I’ve thought a lot about that as a painter and I’ve come to think that the access to this sense of openness and freedom only comes indirectly. I can’t say: let me see you and then get this picture of spiritual depth; I can’t resort to visual cues that say “mystery” or the painting becomes something like a visual cliché.
So, for me, the only way to approach this thing I sense in India is to return, again and again to the ordinary and the common. It’s here that the mystery can speak most clearly.

"injambakkam"

"injambakkam no. 19" oil on canvas. 24" x 30

These paintings emerged from time I spent at Cholamandal Artist’s Village in South India. This past winter Elisabeth and I spent five weeks there in a small studio belonging to the Indian painter Vishwanadan.

I spent a part of every day drawing and photographing the people around us: boys sharing bike rides after school and swimming in the temple tank. Women walking with their children. Fisherman mending their nets and launching their boats into the bay of Bengal.

There is still much of daily life in India that spills out into the street and becomes public. Friendships are more visible as are animosities. The rituals and rites of daily life play out before you. Shop keepers light incense and ring bells reminding the gods to pay attention. Homeowners sweep their houses and draw patterns in rice flour on the sidewalk as a gift to the eye and the ants.

In all of this there is, for me, a feeling of warmth and mystery: a sense that in all this activity something deep and beautiful and strong is at work. You don’t get at this “mystery” by going away from everyday life. Somehow it rises up through it and shows itself in small acts of mutual affection.

The drawings and photos from Cholamandal are the basis for these new paintings, which attempt to capture some of the warmth and mystery of my experience.

"injambakkam no. 13" 24" x 30" oil on canvas.

demystifying the mystical

"glimpses no. 29" conte + pastel on paper.

I've been reading a little book by a painter named Sam Scott. In an essay "radical astonishment" he suggests that what we call "mystical experience" is "nothing more than an encounter with that which actually is." So instead of treating the mystical as an encounter with "other" or something "outside" our life, we could say that the mystical arrives through a clear attentiveness to the world around us.

normalave.com review

MARK HORST PAINTINGS

July 9, 2014 | Art | Posted by Andrew

Mark Horst’s paintings are at once simple and complex, depicting images reminiscent of film or video stills, degraded by hand in the same way that photographic images would be degraded by time. Whether the work is drawn for photographic sources, or simply a reminder of our point-and-shoot lives, one can’t help but be drawn to the formal aspects of the work, especially with Horst’s diptychs, where the viewer is practically challenged to compare the minute differences in the two subjects.

www.markhorststudio.com

http://normalave.com/art/mark-horst-paintings

Albuquerque IQ review by Katherine Oostman, June 25, 2014

Mark Horst: Figures and More

Wednesday, 25 June 2014

By Katherine Oostman The ability to see comes from light reflecting off surfaces, entering the eye and twisting together until the brain recognizes a shape and assigns it a name and use. Mark Horst uses this anatomical phenomenon and translates it into his vision as a painter.   The internationally known artist has been presenting exhibits featuring confident colors, candid figures and simple situations since 2007. Each piece resembles distorted photography as Horst creates perspective from the light and shapes what the eye absorbs, leaving room for his viewer’s brain to decide how the image and its elements fit into the world.    “I paint the way I see — which is always incomplete and in process,” Horst says in his artist statement. “The more I look, the more there is to observe. The world opens up and flowers; the mud takes form.”   Just as light enters into the eye and reveals shape, Horst’s art takes the light, creates shape and reveals beauty.

some new work

"injambakkam no. 1" oil on canvas. 30" x 30"

I'm working on a series of paintings using some images from the time I spent at Cholamandal Artist's Village in Tamil Nadu last month. We rented studio space from the painter, Vishwanadhan.  Right now, I'm comfortable letting the image rest in this ambiguity.

saatchi interview

Did this interview for Saatchi Art a couple of weeks ago. http://magazine.saatchiart.com/articles/artnews/saatchi-art-news/from-the-studio-of-saatchi-online-news/mark-horst

poets + artists interview

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8cKeQJpY7hRbzR4NmxFeERGcUk/edit?usp=sharing

artists + poets december 2013 — www.poetsandartists.com/