Perhaps humans have always felt ambivalent toward their tools. Especially when new, technological change often has carried with it a sense of the magical and given to those holding the tools a special connection to unknown powers and supernatural forces. Imagine the feelings of those first confronting an enemy who knows how to carry fire or able, through sling, bow or powder, to hurl injury or death across great distance. In many cultures, a priesthood knew the calendar and by special state were able to proclaim and enforce the order of things. To most people, all these were things to be thankful for when benevolent, honored and propitiated as needed and mostly feared, or at least needing a wary eye.

Today, for most people, our computers, cars, medicines, telephones, movies–so much of all that makes up our day to day–are black boxes. We have no clue as to how they do what they do. We give a special status to certain people as masters of the machine–our doctors, engineers, experts and politicians, but we mix a desire to trust with unease. There exists a persistent sense of posturing and hug-a-boo about the suits and lab coats; as if we know that the forces at work are larger than the individuals, and Gods, Devils or Chance actually pull the switches. Perhaps in the end Marx was right, and humans, thinking they control the ship, all unknowingly ride a wave of historical necessity. Perhaps the end is near. Perhaps all our tools are merely the extensions of desire. We wanted the fruit and grabbed the stick to reach it, and all our global corporations, our smart arsenals, our digital webs serve to amplify ancient, human greed and lusts. Perhaps our machines are nothing but mirrors. If we do not recognize ourselves in them, and if we fear what they do or where they take us, it is only because we do not know who we are.

We live in an age of faith and can’t move without it, but faith isn’t some wild assertion about the nature of things without regard to evidence. Faith is walking in the dark. It is how you move when you do not know. The great heroes of faith are not those loudly proclaiming their mishmash of doctrines and theories, but those who quietly find a way to act with love and grace in a world so often lacking in the ways and means to either end. What we can know is limited, provisional and utilitarian. The essential human fact is ignorance, and all of our knowledge rests upon that foundation.

“This is apple pie.”; but, perhaps it is a concoction of chemicals soaked in paper created by some corporation as a cheap, non-nutritive sensation for mass consumption, perhaps it is an electrode stimulating some region of the brain, perhaps it is a dream. We cannot know, but we can know that there is an experience that causes us to say, “This is apple pie”. All words, ideas, conclusions that we attach to the experience are at best tentative, but we can know that, “These are words, ideas, conclusions”. We can use words to help us find our way, but the words we use are only a part of our knowing a thing. The whole of what we have of knowing precedes and encompasses them. I believe that this wholeness of knowing is moral, deliberative and decisive. It includes reasons and words, but is not limited by them. The conclusions we reach may extend beyond the rational and yet be true. So, for example, we can know when an action has crossed the line, become immoral, even when all our dogma and rationalizations declare it right, and there is a human thing that dies within those that allow their dogma and preconceptions to cut off the awareness of this deeper knowing.

When I am working on a canvas, it is not unusual for me to sit before it for long periods of time without actually painting. If asked, I say I’m thinking. But, the kind of thinking I’m doing is complex. It can involve rationality and words, but it also includes a feeling for what is occurring on the canvas–the play between colors, lines and volumes. It involves an imagination of how this will change with the introduction of another brush stroke. There is a certain sense of just waiting, with the antenna up, like a hunter in the field alert for some movement. When I pick up the brush, I don’t want to think about what I’m doing. I don’t want my action to be tentative. I want to be like a dancer who has caught the rhythm. I want an uncluttered awareness of what is happening as the brush touches the surface. When I paint, it is important to me that I have some idea about where I’m going, but equally important, perhaps more, is my alertness to what I don’t know–the unexpected and that which I don’t consciously intend. I am walking in the dark. It is an act of faith.

It is for this reason that I consider my work spiritual, and by spiritual I mean a process that involves my entire being, including that part of me open to the prompts that extend from beyond the boundaries I can know to be myself.

I suppose I am accustomed to think of a thought as something that can be put into words and undergo the tests of rationality. Historically, my culture has stated that reason is what separates me from animals and is that part of myself created in the image of God. But, I have seen the most craven urges put on a cloak of reason, and I have come to doubt that there is any human thought that is pure reason, and even the most abstract activity includes within it desire, emotion and dream. In fact, it is the separation of the wholeness of human thought into just a single aspect that we fear. Unbridled emotion curdles the blood, and the coldly calculated crime that lacks any sensitivity for the victim is heinous. This is, I suspect, what we fear in machine intelligence. It possesses great power, but only mimics one aspect of human thought. It is an unbalanced mind.

So, I think it is the balanced mind that includes all the diverse potentials of human thought that is needed today. It is a curious, even poetic, piece of cosmic justice that the qualities of the traditional, intellectual worker–the ability to order facts, make logical deductions from available data and remember things–are the very abilities most adaptable to machine intelligence, while those abilities which read and know how to sound the secret pathways of the human heart–the expertise of the seducer, the flim-flam man and the artist–are those furthest from the machine. So, for example, medical doctors who pride themselves on their reason and pronounce prognoses and prescriptions from scans of tests and their knowledge of recent studies, may already be better replaced by a computer; while those practiced in arts of healing and, along with the computer, have learned the ways of intuition and empathy can perform what the machine alone is incapable of doing. I would call art this balancing of the totality of the human, and the 21st century will demand a generation of artists.

In this sense, art is not only the activity of a special class of people involved in a particular profession; rather, it is any human activity that brings to it the entire self. There is an art of raising a child, an art of living, an art of love. This artistic thought, this thinking from the whole, is not the mere arrangement of data into different forms and combinations. It deals with psychic forces. These forces can be organized, evaluated and modified, but the resulting expression may or may not include logical consistency. Its measure is not whether it is correct as in some sort of test question with a right answer, but whether it is true. An idea is not only a collection of words. It is a form of energy.

My father told of a Chicago he knew before the advent of the automobile. He lived from the time of horse and buggy to the moon landing, and such a span of change always impressed me. It has made me wonder what will be the markers that define my own span. There have been many possibilities, but I have come to think that we live in an era of such profound change that there will be only one marker dividing our time, the era before and after the internet, or, more broadly, the era before and after the advent of the digital age. Already people speak of those who are native born to this new time and those who are immigrants, having arrived here from another country, with a different mother tongue and a foreign culture.

Many years back, I was impressed by the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit who wrote about evolution. He made the distinction between the human brain and the human mind, the former being the bit of organic matter residing in each individual’s skull. The human mind, on the other hand, comprises all of the mental constructs ever devised by human brains–all the words, music, ideas of self, images, objects, dreams, tools–it is the repository and source of all the cultural artifacts that shape our perception of the world. Each culture is a subset of mind, and each brain born within a particular culture lives and grows within that portion of the human mind a given culture encompasses. Teilhard thought of the mind as another sphere that encases the planet–like the lithosphere, the biosphere and the atmosphere. He called it the noosphere from the Greek word for mind.

Earlier, I was writing about the "cultural language" with which an artist "speaks". I was using the analogy of the spoken or written word to describe the interior process of making something. For example, the visual artist has a certain visual vocabulary, a certain visual grammar and tools that are used to make a canvas "say something". In many ways, the analogy of language is misleading because we naturally tie language with words, and a work of art expresses so much more of what it is to be human than that narrow range which words can reach. Even poetry, which uses words as its medium, gains its power from the way a word or phrase can carry reverberations of significance from beyond the prosaic letter. Art is the expression of the entire person–emotional, intuitive, rational, physical and spiritual. It puts blood in things. Ultimately, its medium is all elements of the noosphere that are at play within a given culture.

In previous eras, individual cultures were like valleys set between high mountains. Travel was difficult, and few brains made the journey from one to another. The Internet is a machine that can carry an individual brain to unprecedented expanses of the noosphere, and the artist today stands before a freedom that can easily be overwhelming. I am an immigrant. For what it’s worth, let me say this:

It is important to keep in mind the nature of the internet. It is bits of data with no necessary cohesion. Bits of data can be cut, pasted and combined with other bits without the slightest straining of ligaments and tissue. They are weightless, but human culture is a gravitational field. I recall well my experience when I first came in contact with classical European paintings in their original setting in a Cathedral. I had seen similar work on museum walls or in books, but here I was made aware that these works were part of a larger ecosystem. People worshiped before Piero della Francesca. They did not worship the artist; rather, the work has a life and purpose within that environment that makes their museum counterparts seem like dead butterflies pinned to a collector’s board.

We surf the web, but eventually one must break the hypnosis of the surface and embody depth. There is thrill in the freedom from gravity and, especially when young, a sense of sufficiency in the always new, the always being born. I now believe there is great wisdom in this, and it is always true; just as spring is always true, and just as with maturity comes a sense of return and the desire to put aside the things of youth. The trick is to know the time and be neither old with too much haste nor young with too much foolishness. The advance of the human spirit is always oppositional–first left, then right; first contraction, and then the expanse. In the end, as the French say, one wants to fly like a bird, not like a feather. I believe it will matter less which traditions one chooses to embody, but it will matter a great deal that one be able to incarnadine work into a living environment.

On the other hand, one wants to fly like a bird, and not like a chunk of lead. It is a good thing to master a tradition, but a mistake to ignore how a tradition thereby masters you. It is a common thing for artists to desire at times to "prove their chops" by taking up some traditional style that can allow them to demonstrate proficiency in an easily identifiable craft. In times of rapid change, there are many who will praise them for it. People will desire solidity and want the old time art just as they will the old time religion. It reinforces the comfortable ground, even as it inexorably shifts away. It is a long held tenet of the spirit that the rigid adherence to some external dogma is dead bones. In all things, people will so strive after the ought to be as to become blind to that which is and so cut themselves off from the joy in the green heart of creation. Life is a turning within and learning anew this present place. So, it does no good to overly revere the past. It is enough to know that in their time they were alive. Build upon the structures thus provided. It is the responsibility of the artist to give expression to this world and this time.

Love and gravity are at least analogous, and similar laws apply. My advice is this: attain mass, but keep your distance. Accept your masters with gratitude, but may they be few and quickly surpassed. You need the ground to make the leap. Leap.

Technology, part 1

Technology in the context of speaking about style means the tools and materials used in the making of a thing. People rarely look to foundations. They are moved, or not, by the effect of the whole, but every object is a structure, and it is the job of the practitioner to look to the building of it because the foundation determines the object, and every tool leaves its imprint.

It is interesting to note how easily our tools become presumptions. You wish to write a letter, and you naturally pick up a pen and paper. Your writing proceeds until you have completed your idea of what a letter should be. It is the purpose of your letter that is on your mind–the greeting to Aunt Mildred, or the things you must tell John. The tools become automatic. This continues until a change in our tools is forced upon us, often with kicking and screaming and a stubborn allegiance to “old school“ methods. Witness the rise of email and text messaging, and the cries from some quarters about the way these technologies harm the art of writing. And it’s true. The art of writing with a pen is fundamentally, radically, different than the art of writing with a computer. The tool shapes the product.

We live in an era of rapid technological change and innovation, and it is easy to forget that a brush is a technology, as are paper, canvas, charcoal and all the other paraphernalia used in the making of things. Each cultural tradition also possesses informational technologies developed to produce certain effects. In the European tradition these include perspective, shading, anatomy and color theory. All of these tools shape the product, but within a culture we often do not see the marks of the tools, rather we see something closer to “correctness“. A thing that matches our assumptions.

It has taken a century of “Modern Art“ to challenge the presumptions of the European tradition, and many still feel that one of the purposes of making art is to challenge and shock the observer out of preconceived notions. I suspect this is changing. Ezra Pound writes about the soul healing function of the artist in society. This function takes two forms, the diagnostic and the curative. The diagnostician defines the disease, the healer makes glad the human heart. We are due for a time of healing. But, to speak to this era, we will need to use the tools of this era, and to use them, we must see them.

I still use brush and canvas, and I believe that more important than the tool is the awareness of the tool. There is a temptation in an era such as ours to constantly chase the new, as if newness itself contains significance. But, there exist depths of attainment that have little to do with mastering technique and much to do with mastering the self. It involves knowing, and then going beyond knowing; past boredom, past futility, past insight. No one can teach you this. You can’t read about it in books. It is a journey, and you arrive when you have traveled there.

It is a matter of balance. We readily become blind to habitual patterns of thinking and doing, and learning can help us be aware of our habits and challenge them. On the other hand, we only engage deeper aspects of who we are and what we do when we no longer need think about what we do, when we are a simple doing. Magic lies in the combination of both, and all art is magic.

I have always been a group show, and what I do is pure indulgence. I am unprofessional. I have little interest in a signature style. I work to be as open as I can be to the first impulse. For me, Style is a balancing act. On the one hand, it is the facility of expression—you can’t dance to the music while you still wonder where your feet should go. On the other hand, I want to challenge my habits, grow them. I do not want to restrict my expression to only established roads. The movement that flows with seemingly effortless correctness, we call mastery. The novice toils and explores new territory, is unsure and capable of stumbling. I strive to become a master novice.

Part 1, generalities

I don’t know from where or from whom my work comes. I receive something. You could call it an idea or, perhaps, an impulse, but it isn’t clear. It isn’t physical. I work because I am curious to see what it looks like.

The root of our word “translate” is to carry from one place to another. In this sense, the act of making a work of art is a translation. For me, the work of art is to carry the impulse of the source into the physical world.

The trick of any translation is to be true to the spirit of the source.

I would divide style into two components, technological and cultural. By technology, I mean the tools and materials. By culture, I mean the human environment a work will enter.

Take a look at the Mother and Child:

The basic thing is fundamentally human. It exists in whatever time and place humans are. It precedes words, ideas and images. How the thing is expressed depends upon the tools and materials available to the artist and the cultural environment in which the artist lives. For the visual arts, this is the artist’s visual language. Craft is learning how to speak, or see, a language. Style is saying something relevant to the living world.

A dead language is one the living no longer use. It can possess beauties and significance, but it can’t buy tomatoes. This is the danger of craft, one can become fluent in a dead language. We live in time, and a living language constantly evolves. It lives in interaction with a changing world. For me, craft is a vehicle. As a destination it is a dead end. You master it in order to go further.

I first learned the craft of painting by learning to draw in the traditional, Renaissance European style. This exercise was a great benefit to me. It trains the eye and disciplines the hand. But, I later went on to study Chinese calligraphy, and I would very much recommend both studies to those beginning this path. The calligraphy also instills a disciplined hand, but the forms I strove to make were, for me, totally abstract, and ink and brush do not lend themselves easily to what some call realism. In my experience, it is the tension between the two disciplines that aids you. Striving to attain both, you become expert in neither. You end up in some middle place. Fortunately, art does not need expertise. It needs life.

I don’t know the answer; do we know what we see, or do we see what we know? So, I am wary of those that know. Light enters through cracks in the structure.

Nothing physical exists apart from structure and limit. The physical is not all that is. I try to build structures that hold something outside of structure–the way a deck of cards and the rules of a game hold the random, or the way a bowl of water holds the moon’s reflection. I purposely limit a good portion of my work to only brush on canvas, and within that structure the brushwork contends between form and scatter. I strive for a middle way that contains both. I find it interesting that a major influence in the style I choose to employ comes from the characters of a language I neither speak nor understand. I believe I am looking for an alphabet within confusion, a language that contains both, the Word of God.