Zen and the Art of Tail Chasing
Or is it “The Tail Chasing of Art (and Zen).” That’s the trouble with zen, tail chasing, chickens and eggs, yin and yang: one is never quite sure what comes first, where one ends and another begins. A thing is always what it is, unless it’s something else.
A few years ago I decided to take a short break from showing my work. I felt that the artistic vein I had been mining for a while was beginning to dry up. I was a bit unsure of my direction. And, having recently moved from DC to Oregon, it seemed like a good time for a sabbatical.
My work to that point had been based, to varying degrees, on the grid. Oh The Grid! We modernists speak Its name with the sort of reverence normally reserved for phrases like Our Heavenly Father or The New York Yankees. Yes, the Grid was very good to me. In the spring of our romance, my affair with the grid was utterly natural. Intuitively, we completed each other’s sentences while enjoying long walks on the beach.
But eventually that relationship became a crutch, a contrivance. I was making grid-based paintings because that was what I did. Which is not to say that the latter works were weaker; but I wanted to move on before they got weaker. Some artists have the intellectual or spiritual attention span to plumb the depths of a single idea for decades. Sam Francis comes to mind. Chuck Close. Robert Motherwell. There are many. But where the grid had initially provided a structure that freed me, it had lately begun to feel confining.
Here’s the problem, though. As a devout modernist, if I were to leave the grid behind, what would take its place? What other construct could I use to guide my measured division of the picture plane into its component parts? This is a rhetorical question really, because it was obvious to me that (for myself) there was no replacement. So…what now?
One could say that I found the answer by avoiding the question. Rather than pursuing a replacement for the grid, I took an intellectual vacation. I decided to see what would happen if I went into the studio, without any preconceived notions, and began painting. What would I create if I didn’t concern myself with any formal issues, if I banished from my mind (as much as possible) the history of art and the history of my own painting? As it turned out, I made something of a mess. But I found that if I persisted good things would eventually happen. Bob Natkin used to say that success is failure recycled. I was beginning to understand what he meant.
These good things that had begun to happen came in the form of a unified picture plane. Unified through color, value, and by a lack of the object/ground dichotomy that attends any description of form. And there was no evidence of a grid.
But what I’ve lately come to realize is that it’s always there. In modern art—in all art really—the grid is always there. It is there quietly holding at bay the chaos that might otherwise be a picture’s ruin. In some cases it steps to the front, helping Mondrian or Paul Klee or Agnes Martin demonstrate the beauty of painted logic. At other times we only sense its presence behind the scenes, the tail we can see out of the corners of our eyes, gone when we try to catch it.
Dog, Dog, Art
I’ve always wanted a dog. When I was a kid I had a dog, but that was a long time ago. And after college I spent almost twenty years living in apartments or townhouses, and that didn’t seem like enough space for a Labrador Retriever. Because throughout all those years of dog-wanting my sights were set unwaveringly on a Lab.
When my family and I moved to Oregon about three years ago, we finally had some space, a decent-sized yard for a dog. So, a few weeks after getting settled in the new house, we drove down to the Humane Society to check out the Labs. Of course there weren’t any. Lots of Pit Bulls, but not a Lab in the place. There was, however, a beautiful Lab/Rottweiler mix, very friendly if a little overly energetic. But she was much more Rottweilerish than Lab-like.
The Humane Society volunteer said we could put her on hold over the weekend and think about it.
So now what? She was hard to resist, and that was throwing a wrench in my Lab-having plans.
Needless to say, she lives here now. And her name (Curry) has become, for me, almost synonomous with “dog.” If she’s not the dog I always wanted, she’s the dog I should have wanted.
“And what of the Lab lust?”
“What?”
“The Lab. You said you always wanted a Lab.”
“Oh…right. Did I want a Lab? I guess I did. That seems like a long time ago.”
The elements that populate my paintings tend to arrive the way my dog did. They sort of knock on the door, suitcase in hand, and I have no choice but to let them in. Anything else would be rude. After a few days (or weeks, or months) I can kick them out if I wish, without seeming like a bad host. I mean, I don’t even know them, how long can they really expect to sleep on my couch?
But after they’ve been here for a while, I may have started to rearrange things around them, without realizing it. They become fixtures in my paintings while my back is turned. They become the dog I should have wanted. And that’s usually a good thing because I’m not a planner. I’m better off throwing a party, seeing who shows up, and then helping everyone to get along.
In the end the paintings tell a story. For me it’s the story of their own making, but it could really be about anything. And while it’s never my intention to depict something, I do enjoy a good story.
