We are looking again, at best, at something we mostly have already seen. We seem to be re-creating something that has been created before. Therefore, we are copying the past. Is it possible to create something unprecedented and new? Great artists do this. Someone appears on the scene who employs a vision, a manner, a way of doing things that is beautifully shocking in the present. Many are appalled and challenged to see things differently than they ever did before. The status quo of good taste cannot go there. It clings to the repetition of the “old.” It’s view is “re-creational,” not “co-creational.”
We learn our p’s and q’s in art school and in life. We learn what gets by, and what pushes the edge of the envelope. Much of the time we “get by.” But an equal, perhaps greater part of the time we yearn to “push the edge of the envelope,” and even get away with it. This is the yearning of creativity in it’s most authentic version. What is a vision of the new that co-creates with the Unknown? This is when the art of re-creation becomes the genius of co-creation. And to go there, the artist has to face the very real possibilities of his own “nothingness.” He jumps into the abyss of the universal Unknown with the trust that something meaningful and beautiful will catch him, and a new truth will be revealed to him (or her).
I have a friend who lives in Mount Shasta. She is a dear soul. She is an artist of modest means, but has a heart that is always stretching the boundaries. She makes what she calls “Angel Cards.” I support her sometimes financially by placing an order of these cards. Some may construe them as “naïve” or childlike. Indeed they are, but this is the very beauty of them. They come from a place inside of her that is not premeditated. They are truly in the moment of co-creating with the Higher Forces in her life. Always they are surprising and unique. I love them. Lucky is he or she who receives one of these original “Angel Cards” from me, because they are “original drawings,” every one of them—one of a kind—and what I write in them is usually something I have never said before. So their whole “action in the world” rises to the level of a Co-Creation.
Does she know what the heck she will draw in the next “Angel Card?” No. Do I know what I am going to write and to whom in the next “Angel Card” I will send out? Most likely not.
Creation seems to come out of “nothing,” but that is not totally like it is. One cannot see, taste, hear, smell, or touch the “Spirit of Love,” but we do not doubt it is there in our most brilliant and sublime expressions. We may use a language that is familiar, but how we use that language in the present in combinations and poetry that are formerly unseen or unheard, shows that we tap into something “beyond the known.” The “Spirit of Love” could also be called the Great Void out of which everything springs forth. Before anything existed, which we can hardly fathom with our limited intelligence, there had to be a Divine Nothingness… an Outrageous Sacredness of an ever present impetus, and a great yearning to Create. We could call that God or the Divine Creator or Universal Intelligence, or even the Benevolent Void of Pre-Existence. Or we could simply call it the “Spirit of Love.”
I think when I am really “with it,” something comes out of me. These “Art Looks” for instance. I never know ahead exactly what I am going to say, or how I am going to say it, and thank goodness I don’t. I receive a Substack post-a-day from a gal called The Rogue Art Historian. I like her passion for art. The articles seem too long for me, and perhaps too “intellectual,” but she brings to my attention works that I may have missed, in ways that round out my observations and sense of the greatest artistic expressions of our world, and the reasons and background behind them.
Recently she sent this article out: Artemisia Gentileschi Painted Women Men Could Not Control. Artemisia painted because her father, Orazio Gentileschi, was a Italian Renaissance painter in the Mannerist period, and she grew up immersed in his workshop. She admired her father, who also had admired the genius of Caravaggio. In many ways she surpassed her father and integrated the lessons of Caravaggio in a more thorough way.
Artemisia herself was raped by her tutor, Agostino Tassi, who worked in her father’s atelier. Foreshadowing this real life rape, she painted a biblical scene in which a bathing young woman is evesdropped upon by a couple of lecherous elders of the community. As the story goes, a Hebrew girl Susanna is spied on while bathing by a couple of “dirty old men.” The men attempt to blackmail her for sex. Eventually she was put on trial for their false claims. She is proven innocent, and the elders executed for their crime.
Artemisia’s painting is a pointedly psychological work. A woman artist in a time of male domination manages to express some deep mode of feeling of vulnerabilty and apparent danger—that the deck is stacked against her, somehow. She not only in her art form must re-create a better artistic standard and prowess of technique than her prominant male conterparts of the day, but also surpass what these men painters had established as the highest artistic norms. She was compelled to co-create a new and visceral reality of a “woman’s plight” in a predominately chauvanistic and patriarchal male world. It is interesting that she herself was raped not even a year after this painting was completed.
So much for the Naïve to the Technically Refined co-creations of Linda Marie and Artemisia. The ability to capture a current mode of feeling in the visual expressions of drawing and painting has always interested me. What am I going to dedicate my time and effort to express, which is not merely a repeat of some past artistic style or attempt to match standards with a genre that is not even mine—done better by others in a bygone day?
Recently I wanted to slow down my process, introspect more, and not pressure myself to even paint at all… as I would just repeat or re-create the images and styles of my own past gestures to express my own subject, style, and uniquely personal imagery. I needed a break for something else to emerge. I needed to go into the Unknown in order to shift my re-creation into an act of co-creation. By “co-creation” I mean to join my will of artistic action with that of a Higher Power of a pervading Life Force. In that true joining would only Co-Creation be transcendant.
This painting is for sale. Serious bids start at $10,800 USD plus crating and shipping; Send offers to immortalrayproductions@gmail.com
I am using graphic design programs to generate my more complex imagery now. My painting is enhanced by this freedom from my own past practices and gestures. I can come up with new possibilities I had not fathomed before. There is a meeting with the NEW that did not happen in the former ways I was doing things. I took myself out of a rut, it seemed, to establish a new mode of working, and even a new mode of feeling about the work. I am still interested in the “spiritual themes,” something beyond the confines of everyday life, but using those things “in everyday life,” even like “emojis,” in a more charged up and visually impactful way. This new “mode” enables me to get a more co-creative message across.
Paint is paint in the end. Materials become the focus of the “Spirit of Love.” Karen Eubel, one of my classmates at the Cleveland Institute of Art, once said to me, “I have yet to meet someone who really loves paint.” She was careful not to say, “who loves to paint,” but rather loves the “paint itself.” So this stuck with me. Do I love the medium itself, and all the gestures and actions required to make these materials “sing” a new song… from the rawness of their being to the miraculous relationships they end up forming on a canvas?
I still ask myself that.
I keep on keeping on. I can honestly say, “I love paint.” And I reckon I could love it even more. There is something in the act of painting, though, that can be disconcerting. Throwing oneself into the Unknown, so wholeheartedly required to come up with something totally co-creative, does not always taste like a bowl of vanilla ice cream and blueberries. There are bitter elements one all too often wants to spit out. But in the course of sticking with it, something well worth the perseverance emerges. I come out of the whole thing tastily triumphant. Maybe even a little proud of myself that I stuck it out through the yearnings to dash the whole affair into the compost heap of future re-creations.
I will leave you with a black and white version of some former co-creation. When I was completing my graduate studies in Phialdelphia, at Tyler School of Art (Part of Temple University), I was studying with Steven Greene, Frank Stella’s Teacher. He insisted on some form of serious subject matter. He told me my blunderbuss approach to blasting the whole surface of the painting with endless colored bits of collaged shapes was an “Ungepatchket.” This is a Yiddish word for everything gaudy or overly designed, having “everything but the kitchen sink” in it. My style had no discrimination. It was just a pile of unrelated elements. Basically, a heap of trash.
Well, of course that pissed me off. And I remebered what his teacher, Philip Guston had told him, “I want to paint like the first man.” That put me back in touch with my atavistic roots. Not quite like a Cave Man, or anything like that, but close. I wanted to be a man who picked up a brush, or a tool, or a bone, or a rock, and fashioned it into something useful. Granted, my anger at the time came out in a kind of personal “weaponry,” that I have since outgrown since 1982. I made a bunch of atavistic tools after that. Tools that I did not even know what they were for. Anyhow, I would draw these things as well. I did this drawing of a “Primordial Hatchett.” It won a Philadelphia Museum of Art purchase prize in a local show.
It had a Power, of course. But at that time my power was channeled into a very defensive stance of asseting myself. It was all I could do at the time, to try to be seen and heard. Not until meeting Sondra Ray, getting myself to India, studying A Course in Miracles, forgiving myself for my past, getting my mind blown by Tara Singh, and sorting out my Spiritual Life did I start to “see things differently.” That is my ongoing challenge to this day. It is a Joyous Journey that is not merely re-creational. It is not angry but peaceful and happy. It is now, as it was “back then,” deeply Spiritual. It is not a re-creation but a transcendental Co-Creation. Bole Baba Ki Jai!
That’s the News from Washington D.C.
Warmly, Markus
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