The Yellow Painter

A canoe is tethered to a dock with a yellow cord, called a painter. It is a light cord; it doesn’t take much to hold a canoe captive. A gentle breeze quickens the water, and the boat pulls gently at the painter, holding it taut.

Isn’t it like that for each of us? The ties that bind us to our moorings are mere strings and, for most of our lives, the tug to freedom is really quite gentle. And do we want that freedom? What happens to this canoe without the painter? What happens to me if I slip away? What happens to you? Do we truly want to be adrift, even though we tug?

The title of this work is a bit of a pun, and my intention was that the two definitions of the word “painter” each be meaningful. How does a painter hold two worlds together?

The composition of this image is strongly diagonal. Only the water has any semblance of horizontality. The boat is actively angled, but so is the dock—and so is the painter.

The side of the boat is a large mass of fairly bright red, and if we are sensitive to color, we are drawn to notice that the blue, out-of-date sticker (this was painted in 2013) is of a similar intensity. As is the painter. These three colors constitute the primary triad. Now we notice the muted colors of the world in which the canoe rests. Perhaps as we muse we match up the muted blues and greens, and then go for the grays. Next, if we are really into color, we compare the relationship of the triad of primary hues with the bundle of muted colors and the grays.

Or you might follow lines, or the masses. I leave further musings to you, though this image is a very poor substitute for the original.

This is why I believe that paintings belong on walls where people live and work, in houses and offices. I detest mausoleums—I mean museums—and attend them only out of necessity. Galleries make good orphanages for art—and you should know that the artist really does feel like she is abandoning her work—because a gallery provides a place where you can meet a painting that has a future for you, and then take it home and live with it.

A painting does worlds more than decorate your house, just as does your spouse. A painting offers one side of a conversation, and you keep up your end through reverie and contemplation. What you notice about a painting, if it works for you, was probably thought about and put there deliberately by the artist. You might be very surprised to know the care we artists take in the creation of a work of art. The intention is that your conversation with the painting will occupy you for hours and years—that is what makes a painting good, not so much that it “looks like a photograph” or is pretty or is any better than you could do.

There is no right set of things to notice about a painting, or to think about, or to muse upon. The only no-no, in my opinion, is to make up a back-story and impute it to the artist. If you had a teacher who led you to that practice, well, education is in a sorry state, isn’t it? The true back-story to this image is that my daughter Julia and I spent a week paddling the Everglades. Every evening we tied up to a wooden, roofed platform called a chickee. On the afternoon when this painting was conceived I sat and watched the canoe play at its tether, and watched the shapes and colors and began thinking about a new painting.

Angela’s Nap

I started this drawing of my nineteen-year-old daughter Angela last weekend. As you can see, I was groping a bit. Each of those lines was drawn carefully, even if later abandoned. I am sure there are many who would scold me for showing this very vulnerable exploration on the blog now, before any of my finished work—first impressions and all, you know—but it makes my point more dramatically than the paintings or a finished drawing might.

This drawing is unfinished for a simple reason: Angela rolled over. But it accomplishes, very bravely for a drawing if I may say so, expression of the idea behind much of my work: we have a propensity to make sense out of what we see, even on the basis of the sketchiest information. We see dragons and cows in the sky; we see faces in wallpaper stains, grotesque figures in tree trunks, and the Virgin Mary in half-eaten pieces of toast. We’re happy about that, we accept it; but we barely appreciate the full implications of our extra-reality perceptions, and it’s really all about us.

Take a look at my little drawing, if you don’t mind. That left eye, for me, is absolutely Angela. Others, by the way, may disagree and that’s all right. What is important is that somebody, anybody, looks at some graphite scribbles on white paper and has that recognition sensation—Angela! If you don’t see Angela there in that eye, certainly you have had the experience of recognizing a person in a drawing. Even if you have never seen a drawing of a family member or friend, you have seen drawings of famous people in magazines or online and recognized them.

If you look closely enough at my rendering of Angela’s left eye, it will not look like an eye at all. Look closely and you will see scribbles. Look closely enough at a high definition photograph, even, and the image will collapse into patches of meaningless color. On the computer pictures turn out to be made of little squares. Artists have been aware of the dissolution of recognizable image into color patches—or the resolution of brushstrokes into image—for a long time.

I’m not telling you anything new, but I want you to think how we take this for granted. Even the loosest of Impressionists was making it easy for us to perceive brushstrokes as object. It amazes me that under even the most adverse conditions we turn things into recognizable images. Animals don’t do that. Most animals, anyway, do not see figures in drawings or photographs or piles of hay. So I just want to settle into a state of wonder about us for a while.

Look back at the drawing of Angela. The left eye was easy to recognize. The arms and hands are a little more challenging, but we still see arms and hands, even though I have not erased the lines I rejected. The hair looks nothing like hair—but don’t you see hair? The remaining facial features are not really there—those are just light notes to myself about placement—and yet we see the other eye, the nose, the mouth. We may not like what we see (I don’t!), because if those were accurately drawn they would be misshapen, but we do see features, and because one part of the drawing looks to be somewhat accurate, we fear these other features might be also.  And then look at the long wiggly lines away from the face and hands. You “see” a solid figure, clothes, a sofa in spite of the dearth of detail.

A lot of artists and teachers go to a lot of trouble to enhance an illusion in a painting, and others speak about destroying it. Please understand that I am emphasizing neither, that I want to marvel at the perceptual process, and that, to me, the most interesting experience I hope to provide my viewer is wonder in her own perception.

Politics and Perception

          My wife Ann and I went for a walk yesterday along the top of the Corps of Engineers’ dam that impounds Canyon Lake. We usually walk around our long block because it is hillier, and I had not been to the dam since the Great Shutdown. Some of the signs at the far end were still up, prohibiting park use; all of the walkers ignored them. There were no signs at the main access to the dam. It’s an interesting little detail that at the beginning of the shutdown federal agencies were able to find the manpower to create and erect signs at both ends of the dam, but the far end of the dam is inconsequential enough to neglect it when things are back to normal.

It’s one thing to leave the gate shut that first morning, when all the staff at the park were notified that they were on furlough. But shutting down the park with barricades and signs actually took a lot more effort than is expended on daily maintenance there, and why was it necessary?

But wait, there’s more. Around Canyon Lake are some seventeen public boat ramps. Some of them have been closed for a while, due, I am told, to low water levels. But the one closest to my house has always been open. Living only half a mile away, I have launched my canoe there many times.

The boat ramp is very simple. There is a parking lot sufficient to accommodate several pickups with boat trailers, a small picnic area with a couple of tables, and of course the concrete ramp. It doesn’t look like anyone regularly cuts the weeds or grass, or performs any other landscaping. There is no trash receptacle; no toilet, permanent or portable. Aside from very infrequent repairs, the boat ramp does just fine being left alone to a bunch of boaters who mind their own business.

 I went down there during the Great Shutdown, just to look at the water a bit, only to be confronted by a chain across the road. Attached to the center of the chain hung a sign carefully prohibiting entrance by vehicle, bicycle, or (even!) pedestrians. The installation of that chain and sign required more work than the area had seen since the resurfacing of the parking lot. And there was a matching chain and sign at the other entrance to the ramp. Not only that, but every one of Canyon Lake’s seventeen boat ramps not already closed got the same treatment.

You gotta ask why. I mean, if the shutdown was really about the gummint not spending money, where did all this overtime come from? And why? Clearly this was all more about theater than necessity, and I doubt people were expected to think deeply into the matter. The folks who physically installed the signs were probably grateful for the work. The public, most likely, further demonized their political party of choice, and this time one party took a worse hit than the other. But if one party was the bad guy, who made that extra effort to dump on the People?

The chain across the road made me rethink the news stories I had read about other parks and monuments, and how rangers had been stationed to block access to them. Who decided to pay the rangers to block people from walking? Was it about the government shutting down or not?

And then I think of the fourth estate. Many reports were slanted against one political party, and others against the other party, but almost none spoke of how little the welfare of the people mattered to either party. It was all really about message, manipulation, and victory, and the press was just as willing to take sides, to the detriment of the audience.

As a result, I am not willing to debate the original issue. I am fully occupied with thoughts about how truly little any of us knows. But metaphysics will have to wait till next post.

The Boundary of Tennessee

Fifty-one years ago, perhaps to the month, I was assigned to read this poem:
Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee, 
And round it was, upon a hill. 
It made the slovenly wilderness 
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it, 
And sprawled around, no longer wild. 
The jar was round upon the ground 
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where. 
The jar was gray and bare. 
It did not give of bird or bush, 
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Wallace Stevens

I was not, and am not, a Lit major, but I believed that I “got” this poem. The jar provides a boundary for Tennessee. It does not matter whether the jar is inside Tennessee or Tennessee is inside the jar. Through the magic of the mathematics of topology, we can imagine either to be the case. And by bounding the wilderness of Tennessee with this gray and bare surface, the jar tames it. 
What makes art good, in my estimation, is that it continues to engage its audience, and this poem has not disappointed me. I have returned to it many times, and it has supported a great deal of contemplation and interpretation. Among the many questions it has suggested are: 

“In just what respect is the entire state of Tennessee slovenly wilderness?” 
“Is all of Tennessee somehow chaotic? And isn’t this jar, as part of Tennessee, part of the chaos?”
“What’s so special about this jar? Aren’t there other jars in Tennessee?”

Most recently it has pleased me to consider the jar somehow special simply because we (as the placer of the jar) are looking at it. Of course there are other jars in Tennessee, but they are on the chaotic Tennessee side of the gray and bare surface. The jar, it pleases me to imagine, is analogous to Atman, the Witness, the great I Am, me-ness. And the Experiencer is impossibly different from the experience. 

Many philosophers—too many—have argued that consciousness (self-consciousness, self-awareness, or whatever you want to call it) is just brain structure, or behavior, or some other manifestation of how things work in the world. Well, as far as everyone else’s consciousness is concerned, it is. What these philosophers fail to take into account is my consciousness. (They should, speaking for themselves, certainly call their own consciousness “my consciousness”.) Those philosophers are actually talking about everyone else’s consciousness, and failing to recognize their own self-awareness as something that is like nothing else in Tennessee. 

Is it possible that anyone could choose to work at philosophy and never “remember himself” (in the words of Gurdjieff)? I’m not concerned at the moment with what a thinker might say about that pure witness, but not to mention it at all? 
Anyway, no one ever mentioned this interpretation of the Anecdote of the Jar in my Lit class.