Leaving landscape?

reflections on point of view and abstract painting

Autumn

When I shared an abstract I painted with my art critique group recently, an experienced artist pointed out to me that I hadn’t actually left landscape. There is still the sense of earth and sky despite the inarticulate imagery. All you need to indicate the earth is a simple horizontal line. This is the plane on which we live. The vertical, on the other hand, is the line of ascension. We aspire to go high. In the painting above, the blue orients us toward sky, and the darker swaths in the lower part of the painting can be read as mountains or swirls of textured landscape. My brother promptly called this painting, Autumn. So I named it that.

Our vision of the world around us is as much internal as it is external. Maybe more. We easily map onto what we see our inner pictures. That’s why it can seem almost impossible to leave representational art, at least to me. Even if one consciously paints only shapes without reference to any object, the mind quickly remakes those shapes into identifiable things-much as we read the clouds as forms. We seem to need to anchor ourselves in the familiar lest we loose all orient. Listen to people talk about an abstract painting and you will hear them tell you what they see in it. There’s a face. The mountain looks like a sleeping dog.

It’s hard to make too much of this feature of our consciousness. It arises even more prominently in our interpersonal relationships. Projection, suggested and explored by C.G. Jung, is the psychic act of externalizing aspects of ourselves into another. Jung encouraged us to pay especially close attention to those we love, and those we hate. What aspect does that person carry for us? Are we harder on the person who shares our faults, or gentler? It’s possible to re-enact our original family relationships by projecting onto the new people in our lives the meanings that those family members carried for us. Did you have a critic in your family? Did you find that critic again in someone you now know? Does the person you have chosen to be your life partner resemble someone you grew up with?

The dangers of projection are many. One would be misunderstanding the person onto whom you project because you are dominated by what that person represents to you, and thereby blocked from really knowing them. Another danger is that you fail to reconcile inner conflicts because you allow one part of your conflict to be represented by someone else. The healthy use of inner conflict is found in the effort to resolve that conflict. As we develop, we face the trial of decision making; both the loss and gain implied by our choices yield resolution only when we have the courage to cut off some of our options. If you map a side of yourself onto another you will try to work out your conflict interpersonally. Working with your conflict that way can interfere with development.

Projection is stabilizing, but not always in a good way. Through projection, we remain in a spider web of meanings, unable to clarify and sort them because they seem to belong to the nature of the world around us rather than to our own psyches.

Given the mind’s tendency to create story from the smallest of suggestions, what would it be to create a truly a abstract painting? Is it even possible?

Everything we paint has to be constructed from horizontal and vertical gestures. It has to be, because the painting is in space and time. Perhaps you could object by saying that some marks could be diagonal, but the diagonal is only a compromise between horizontal and vertical, and not something new. Does every painting reference landscape in some way?

In as much as you are an artwork, is it possible to act outside of any particular point of view? It is possible, Socrates says, to see the contradiction in an argument without adhering to one side or another of the argument. What would a painting look like if the painter had been tasked with creating a painting without a point of view? It seems like it couldn’t work, just as it seems that it couldn’t be possible to be a human being without acting from an identity. In other words, can a person be aware without being aware within a form?

It is the goal of meditation to do just that.

still a landscape

There are philosophical forms of Buddhism that, like the Socratic method, suggest the possibility of awareness “beyond” point of view. It may be foolish to contemplate parallels between mysticism and abstract art, but for me they arise from the same source.

In writing this essay, I needed to walk outside, before dawn, to look for a book in my studio. I couldn’t find the book, a book on the Madhyamika school of Buddhism, but the short walk was fruitful none the less. I was amazed, simply, that it is possible to be alive; to walk in cold air, to see the vast sky above and around me. Perhaps, it occurs to me, it is simply amazement that is the best expression of mysticism. I think I’ll try to paint amazement today.

Namaste.