Alice 6.6.2011

Alice 9.18.2011

the bosque

I've been trying to paint some of what I see along the bosque trail near our house. The colors are much more subtle than the typical New Mexican landscape painting might suggest. Here are a couple of attempts...

Jung and the value of images

notes from my Sunday read:

C. G. Jung particularly was more open to aspects of world culture and its precedents, and his theory of archetypal images, as a kind of visual archeology of the mind, is a very powerful model with important implications for the practice of art.

[the money quote:]

Especially relevant is the notion, a basic component of ancient culture, that images have transformative powers within the individual self, that art can articulate a kind of healing or growth or completion process, in short that it is a branch of knowledge, epistemology in the deepest sense, and not just an aesthetic practice."

from "Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House," Bill Viola

growing wings

Gregory Palamas and the body

notes from my Sunday read:

"Again and again Gregory Palamas celebrates man (sic). Like many [eastern theologians] he believed the human body to be a divine image, a simulacrum of divinity. "The name of [humanity] is not given separately to the body and the soul,"  he wrote, "but to both together, for together, they have been created in the image of God."

"I suspect that Gregory Palamas and William Blake would have agreed on many things. Blake preached that the only way to the spirit was through the body, and regarded it with as much reverence as the soul because the body is part of the soul. "Man (sic) has no body apart from his soul," Blake wrote, "for that called body is part of the soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of soul in this age." And again: "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

from "The Holy Fire," Robert Payne

resisting the intelligence, almost

Wallace Stevens said, "poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully." What does that mean? Maybe it means that a poem is more than a collection of images that can be translated into something we might call "the meaning of the poem."

I would like to say something like that about painting: that a painting must resist the intelligence--the urge to explain the image--and that it must do this "almost" (but maybe not completely) "successfully".

So a painting might allow for any number of "explanations." It might invite the intelligence in and then present it with many puzzles.

you walk out

"When you're in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you - your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics... and one by one if you're really painting, they walk out. And if you're really painting YOU walk out." — Philip Guston

pitcher with pears

12" x 16", oil on canvas, 2010

Graham Nickson on Cezanne

"For Cezanne the tension of forms colliding in space is what the universe is about. He’s discovered how negative space puts pressure on the positive shape. Form and space is about the tension between forms. Think of it like a blueberry sitting in a bowl of yogurt. The yogurt holds the blueberry in place and because of the yogurt, it’s more volumetric." [from my notes at the NYSS Marathon, winter 2008]

JMJ no.4