Beauty is unexpected

(the following comes from an answer i began to write Steven Larose in the comments from the preceeding post... it got long and started to carry into other things that i figured i might as well post it all... hope that's okay with you SL, but i guess that is what we are all doing here anyway...)

SL: As far as the ant/remix connection/alagorical blend goes, I find that it has rung? my proverbial bell. Really. It helps to de-mystify the notion that "art" comes from nowhere, or even, from some external muse. Art, or originality maybe, comes from the recombination of familiar events.

Please post more things that you don't expect to.


(Me:) Ha...i would love to do a lot more that i don't expect to in life in general. that's the stuff! painting a line that does a little of what you want and a little of what it wants. that's the dialogue. (ps... if you think i am hinting towards your "automatism" work, you are right).

For me right now, in painting i am looking for the result created by a combination of assisted accidents. Not forced, not directed. Even in works like the caddie. Every great painter does this. Every single one. the more we move ourselves out of the way, the more we hear. It is why a brushstroke is a brushstroke and the brushstroke is the brushstroke.

I was talking with art powerlines the other day about the handful of painters that ever lived that could paint an eyeball with the depth of Velasquez, Rembrandt, Sargent, DaVinci (not excluding names like rothko and extending all the way out to the chinese ink brushers... another hint SL) etc...

why that work is timeless...

Why it is such a difficult place to get to (and yet as easy as an tiny, umeasurable shift in our own perspective)...

Why it is absolutely ridiculous that anyone even consider John Currin to have "nuances" of the great masters... (rant for another day)

But taking all of that into account, along with the ants, let us remember that it has nothing to do with an eyeball. Loads of people paint portraits for example. Why are only some of them amazing? No matter how technically "perfect" they are. Notice how the same works in abstraction?

Why does it feel like there is a whole nother layer of atmosphere lying over a velasquez portrait? It's not impressionist. Is it an illusion? People will say,"look how well he captured that persons essence... their soul." To which one has to laugh. We don't know those people! They are long dead. It's not about the people. The people aren't there. It's just paint. A combination of elements that work like a potion on our conciousness to return us to ____.

(not to make this magical... it's not. and it needs to be taken out of that realm as well. An artist is an artist like a lawyer is a lawyer. The more we are seen as magicians and mystics and "artists" the more we are sequestered and the less we get paid. Art: don't believe the hype.)

Currin is actually the perfect example (and if this was his point conceptually, i might actually give him some credit, but his work turns me off so much that i don't even care to know his point conceptually... chalk one up for my narrowmindedness). Currin uses the same colors, the same techniques, and the same gestures as "great masters", but his paintings have absoulutely none of the nuance of said masters. And it has nothing to do with the distortions. He could keep his cartoony figures all he wants and still find something deeper. Don't believe me?

Going back to the beginning of all this (and the ants). The unexpected, and the dialoge with the brush are so important. What do chinese ink brush painters and Sargent have in comon? They are some of the best abstract artists that ever lived.... ha! It's all the same marks, and moods, and atmospheres, and structures, and lines... just ordered in a way that allows us to turn off the logical part of our mind..... and listen, and absorb.

Like the hologram, each individual brushstroke, in its abstraction... carries all of the information for the whole. (but the "whole" does not refer to what you are actually
recognizing as the final combination of all of those strokes... in other words not the person in the portrait.) No, the whole is something else. Some call it a quality, a message, a concept, a connection, a third entity, a feeling, an atmosphere, a perspective... (really it is beyond words in my opinion, which is what we're all here for.)

hmm.

What just popped in my head was the day i finally understood that our eyes aren't proactive. Our vision doesn't move out like tentacles and actually gather information. Instead we eat what little we are given through a slot under the door (again with the crack in the wall) as our eyes process light that enters them. and we learn that the different combinations of light is a this or a that. And we separate those this' and thats' and put them in a logical order, as bohm says, intitially, so that we can deal with them easier. Until our logic becomes so smug that it believes it can take it from here, and begins to tell our eyes what is and what is not. Our expericence becomes based on what we now think we see which forms our perceptions which eventually... yes... allows us to see only what we want to see. (and you can rearrange all that in whatever order you wish.)

We see so little, really. We think we are seeing, but we are actually watching... essentially sitting in the dark, watching our 150" flatscreen, flipping through channels. Most of what we see, we probably don't believe.

An artist has to break down all of this, going through a process with the end result being that we realize there are actually no divisions again. That the light has tricked us. Or our eyes lied to us... Or more accountably, maybe we wanted to be tricked... so that we could feel special, different from everyone else. In our parents eyes. In god's eyes. In our own eyes. We wanted those objects to be those obects, so that we could own and disown them.

And then the artist takes this new (old actually, because we started with it) understanding... and attempts (and sometimes fails), to reveal truths we choose not to see... that nothing is separate and nothing is missing. The understanding is called compassion, and when it does its job we call it beauty.

Then there is no this, and no that. And even the smallest bit of food coming through that slot, is a meal.