Listen

Listen, oil on gessobord, 8 x 10 in,  2010  Sharon Kingston

Yesterday I was talking about "silence" and today I'm contemplating voices.  Maybe it is all about being still long enough to experience an overlap of the senses-- see the music and hear the colors--or somehow transcend the sensory categorization.  As the winds take up their surging again tonight--these words from Rilke came to mind reminding me to listen. 

The rich and the happy can choose to keep silent,
no need to bid for attention.
But the desperate must reveal themselves,
must say: I am blind
or: I am going blind
or: it's not good for me here on Earth
or: My child is sick
or: I am not holding it together...

But when is that really enough?
So, lest people pass them by like objects,
sometimes they sing.

And sometimes their songs are beautiful.

The Purity of Slience

A Glow Perpetuating Itself into the Memory, 36 x 36 in, oil on canvas

From Concerning the Spiritual in Contemporary Art by Donald Kuspit

The "spiritual" is a problem concept in contemporary art.  When in 1912 Wassily Kandinsky published On the Spiritual in Art, the nature of spirituality in art was clearer than it is today.  For Kandinsky the spiritual was identified with "the search for the abstract in art," and it existed in opposition to "the nightmare of materialism." Art was unequivocally regarded as "one of the mightiest elements" in "the spiritual life...a complicated but definite and easily definable movement forward and upwards." Today art does not seem so mighty an element in spiritual life, and spiritual life does not seem so evident in art or in general.  After three-quarters of a century of abstract art and the development of of an abstract art that seems to have deliberately purged the spiritual Stimmung (atmosphere) that Kandinsky expected abstraction to distill, abstraction itself has become materialistic and it is hard to know how artists can create works that have, in Franz Marc's works, a "mystical inner construction."  The artist today seems to have less of Kandinsky's "inner necessity," less of an impulse for spiritual expression.  The denial of the spiritual dimension of abstract art, its conversion into a purely formal, material, external enterprise, has made it into still another "art for art's sake," a "condition of art" that Kandinsky described as "vain squandering of artistic power," a "neglect of inner meanings."...Authentically spiritual abstract art does not so much "communicate" as "induce an attitude of communion and contemplation."    Authentically spiritual abstract art also faces an inherent conflict with another kind of material destiny, that brought about by its commercialization, its inevitable reduction to a luxury product.  It is institutionalized not only as emptily decorative but as the most useless or ornamental or spectacular of consumer goods.  

According to Poggioli, the purity of silence implies that art can free itself from the prison of things, the noisy sound of reality. Silence is also art's way of suggesting its transcendence of the conditions of its creation and appearing to be self-created.  Silence is an ever increasing process of distillation and condensation, purification.  Max Kozloff, writing about Mark Rothko's version of silent painting, that it is necessary "to find that lever of consciousness which will change a blank painted fabric into a glow perpetuating itself into the memory." 

The silent painting, contemplated in more than casual way, has a numinous effect simply by reason of its radical concreteness, its unconditional immediacy.  This can be iconographically interpreted or not, but it is functionally mystical--that is, it is not the vehicle of communication of religious dogma but of a certain kind of irreducible, nondiscursive experience.  Many of the silent painters who refuse their work an overt religious meaning are afraid that their art will be appropriated by a belief system, becoming a dispensable instrument of faith rather than an end in itself.  It will thereby lose the full power of its negativity.  The question of religious belief is separate from the question of spiritual experience, which is what silent painting engages.

The Spiritual in Art

A slow deepening and gradual unfolding, 48 x 60 inches, oil on canvas, Sharon Kingston

Unfolding

If there is no spirit unfolding itself in history,
No gradual growth of consciousness
Beneath the land grabs and forced migrations,
... The bought elections, the betrayal of trust
By party faction in the name of progress—
What about spirit in the personal realm
Unfolding slowly inside us, so slowly
That our best days seem like a holding action?
Seasons repeat themselves, but the tree
Shading the yard keeps growing.
Don’t be chagrined that the sadness you felt
This evening beside the bed of a friend
Who’s growing weaker wasn’t more profound
Than the sadness of yesterday, that you still
Can’t imagine a fraction of what he’s feeling
As the world he loves slips from his grasp,
No progress from your perspective,
But who’s to say what you might notice
If the scroll of the last few months were unrolled
On the table before you, how clear it might be
That your understanding of all you’re losing
In losing him has been slowly deepening?
Another day, you say to yourself, at dusk
As you climb your porch steps, which you notice
Could use some scraping and painting this weekend,
A fresh coat that with luck will last a year.

–Carl Dennis

The word "spiritual" is often whispered by viewers when relating to my paintings.  I also find myself talking about my works as a response in some small way to the missing connection / void many of us feel with organized "religion" and the disconnect from our natural world that technology and our busy lives has brought about--which is all explored and poetically represented in the words and metaphors of Rilke's poetry.  Spiritual art is taboo, I expect, in the gallery world where art is about the head, and less about the heart and hands and spirit.  I believe I extended the kiss of death to a gallery opportunity a few weeks back when I used the "s" word to describe my work.  But those gallery owners haven't had the experience-one that keeps me painting and striving to capture this essence--of viewers responding again and again to my paintings on this level.  Laughable to my atheist friends who believe rational thought reigns supreme, but relatable to my Buddhist friends who find meaning and mystery in the breath that is life and nature-- I still find words such as these by Carl Dennis and Rilke and images of the abstracted natural world to be gateways to empathy and understanding.  

High Resolution Images of my Art

Original on exhibit at Fourth Corner Frames and Gallery

on exhibit at Fourth Corner Frames & Gallery

On exhibit at Fourth Corner Frames & Gallery

On exhibit at Fourth Corner Frames & Gallery

On exhibit at Fourth Corner Frames & Gallery

Private Collection

Many of the photos I post of my paintings were taken with my iPhone.  I know it would be a good thing for me to invest in a digital camera, but I'm lazy and like to spend every dime on paint and canvas.  My friend, and fellow painter Ann, comes to my studio periodically and photographs my paintings with her really fancy expensive camera.  I get so excited to see these high resolution captures of my work, especially when a painting has sold and it is the only evidence I retain that I actually created this work.  Since starting to sell my work to the Bellingham audience in the Summer of 2008, my paintings have made their way into collections all over the United States - from Virginia to Chicago to Houston to Vancouver - and although I know all but one of the patrons who purchased a work, the real mccoy is no longer hanging in my studio.  So thanks, Ann, for giving me these wonderful mementos to keep in my archives.

An ode to Turner

An ode to Turner's Sunsetting over a Lake, 24 x 30 in, oil on canvas

 

Turner's Sunsetting over a Lake

As the season's change, I've noticed that my palette changes.   As the Fall comes to an end and I'm noting all the colors parading themselves on the hillsides in Bellingham, those hues start to make their way into my paintings.  Today in the studio it was Alizarin Yellow and Quinacridone Red Gold.

Turner's atmosphere's--so progressive at the time he created them for their abstraction and emotive qualities--have been as equally influential to my work as have Rothko's color fields.  The simplicity of his compositions, the energy of his paint application, the absence of line or any definitive subject matter--all things I aspire to incorporate into my work.  Texturally, he's got a lot more going on than I do, especially with the scumbling broken color effect to his surface. 

Today in the studio I ran out of surfaces to paint on--but so wanted to be painting.  A work that had at one time been what I thought a successful abstraction--that I overworked until it had lost all its nuance and beauty had been sitting around for months waiting, I guess, for this moment. I'd been pondering this painting by Turner for some time, loving the loose shimmer and the sunset without being a sunset aspect of it.  It inspired this work and allowed me a wonderful afternoon of painting.

Conceptualizing Art - what happens in the shower

 

plus this interview of Jane Rosen


This is why I say, art is the language of the body and feeling trying to make a relationship between what the disconnected part of my mind is desperately trying to understand. And that, as a possibility, is what art does. It’s informing and transforming another part of myself and showing me what’s really going on. I think of this as my underwater life. It has to do with the difference between sitting in a boat on the surface of the water versus diving under the water and snorkeling, which is a much more three dimensional experience. My mind is sort of above the water. This underwater life constantly registers all of these impressions which aren’t being heard or received.
RW:  By your mind?
JR:  By a certain part of my mind. And right now there is so much talk about the mind-body connection. And although I’m interested in esoteric things and always interested in the question of philosophy or spirituality, I feel like some construction worker who’s seen God and didn’t want to! I had the experience and then had to understand what the hell it was! This underwater life is going on all the time. Now art for me—when I see a shell, or I see a horse, when I see two weather systems meeting—I don’t understand it with words. I feel something. I experience something. I am aware of it, but I can’t say what it is. When I try to understand it with my hands, something in the alchemy—the process of working —engages a kind of listening, The underwater life connects. It registers something and begins to lead me. And so rather than impose, I follow. For me that is the art process.

plus
this from Rilke  as well as the Sonnets to Orpheus
It seems

our own impermanence is concealed from us.

The trees stand firm, the houses we live in

are still there.  We alone

flow past it all, an exchange of air.

Everything conspires to silence us,

partly with shame,

partly with unspeakable hope.

plus
Hindu pagodas and the metal ribbon leading the divine down and the people to the divine as discussed by Lesley Dill at her artist talk at the Whatcom two weeks ago--the idea of the tangible leading one to the abstract.


plus this image of Howe Sound during the Summer Solstice