I Am Not Talented

Just returned from a trip to Fort Worth, visiting my family, and incidentally my archive of Early Works, which lives in a storage unit down by the railroad tracks. The verdict is in: as a feckless young art student, I had No Talent. Yack. I mean it.

Mom and my aunt Prudence were splendid; they helped me haul the piles of cracked, crumbling, dusty, dirty, decaying artworks out of their tomb, unroll them, take vile snapshots with a digital camera for the Historical Record, and then pile them into a dumpster. I didn't throw away everything, just the extreme monstrosities that made me cringe in horror and shame. Actually I even saved one or two of those, as a reminder. They remind me, principally, to be kind.

Because I can't begin to describe how bad those student paintings were. Suffice it to say that I had no notion of color, composition, light, surface, paint quality, line quality, or conceptual content. My student work had no redeeming qualities whatsoever, except for a certain cheerful willingness to keep flinging paint around, in the absence of all external evidence that this process would lead somewhere fruitful.

Funnily enough, I don't find this revelation of my profound untalentedness to be the slightest bit depressing. Instead I feel an expansive sense of peace, liberation and connection. It's difficult to describe.

I'm not one of those PC egalitarians who thinks that talent is an elitist myth. It does exist, and I've seen it. There are people born with grace, skill, vision, and a discipline which expresses itself ceaselessly and without apparent effort; it is if they spent a thousand lifetimes in intensive practice and study, and were born into this body already possessing a mastery of medium and profundity of expression.

I repeat; I am not one of those people. I started off as a committed painter with nothing more than an overpowering sense that there were things I needed to learn through painting, and things I needed to express. I had only the vaguest idea what those things were; if I'd known, I wouldn't have needed to paint. I waged epic battles in defense of my right to be callow, immature and clueless. Anything I may have achieved in the way of worthwhile art has been done the hard way, through trial and error, discipline and practice, and sheer irrational pigheadedness.

Why does this give me such a sense of peace? Well, for starters, I'm no longer the slightest bit upset with all those faculties, arts organizations, committees, galleries and philanthropists who turned down my persistent applications. They were obviously people of taste who knew exactly what they were doing, and I commend them. I didn't need or deserve their help; any assistance from then would have only fed my unrealistically inflated notions of self.

Furthermore, I feel a warm sense of connection with the vast majority of humanity, also not born with the facility of a Mozart or a Barry McGee. Being perceived as 'gifted' sets you apart; it is isolating and chill. Much is expected of a talented person--success is regarded as automatic, and failure is received with exasperated contempt. Talented people are not judged by the standards of ordinary mortals. They are not expected to be kind, mature, ethical or friendly; if they are any of those things, it's a bonus.

When I expected myself to be talented, I also regarded myself with exasperated contempt, as a separate creature from the rest of humanity, where the usual standards did not apply. This was not a comfortable state of mind in which to exist.

Now I look back and think--well, I'm not talented. I just worked really hard. I worked to earn money, and practiced hard, and studied hard, and thought hard. I improved, really really slowly. I made a lot of messes and wasted a lot of time and money on dead ends, and picked out the one small thing I learned from that dead end and used it later on, to better effect. Now when I look around at how many people have paid good money to hang one of my paintings on their wall, and continue to enjoy it, and don't regret the money spent, I'm very proud of that. It was never a given that this would happen.

Now I look at my future, and think that I will continue doing this, without the burden of thinking that it has to be something special. If I create something beautiful, that will be a joy. If I don't, that's to be expected. I am not talented.

Goals

I took a short studio moratorium while hanging the Blogger Show; it seems to be true that I can only flex my creative muscles in one or two directions at once, and hanging shows is like painting and sculpting using other people's artwork as your raw materials. It's a process I really enjoy, and know that I'm good at. Moreover, I've known many many artists who are not good at it at all, and thus I have no problem with unapologetically taking charge of the process. A bad hanging or lighting job can make a great piece look mediocre, and a mediocre piece look like garbage; a good hanging job, or just lots of clean white walls and good light, can make a mediocre piece look like it's in Chelsea. Oh, wait...

So, anyway, at the opening I had a good chat with Nancy Baker about the blatant sexism of the Art World at the highest levels, the levels where serious money changes hands. It is true, as Tracy Helgeson says, that there are tons of non-NYC galleries run by women, that show lots of women's work--largely work that is pretty, in a recognizable genre like landscape or still life, and breaks no new ground, artistically speaking. It is also true that women who paint like Nancy does have a very hard time selling work outside of NYC. Nancy told me that she has repeatedly been dumped by galleries, even when her work was selling well, and replaced by a good-looking young guy just out of art school. Big Money, and Chelsea dealers, seem to be interested in good-looking young men, and not much else.

This is the kind of thing that I prefer not to think about, for obvious reasons. But when I am forced to think of it, I don't expend much mental energy on getting angry. Instead, it forces me to consciously prioritize my life's goals--because, given that there are enormous obstacles in the way of my achieving even moderate worldly success, I haven't got any energy to waste. I need to remember what the ball is, and keep my eye on it.

So, in no particular order, here is my list of Lifelong Ambitions:

• Design a chapel, in collaboration with an architect (hopefully my brother-in-law, who is something of a genius) and a glassworker. It will be of stone, placed in a rural setting or on a large piece of forested property, with a stream bisecting it from back to front. It will include simple vaults, windows based on my mandala paintings, and lanterns suspended in arcs, parallel to the stream. (At least, these are my preliminary sketches.)

• Form connections with artists and other creative people (musicians, writers, dancers, performers, directors etc.) and work with them on collaborative projects that help extend our joint creative minds in genuinely new and effective ways.

• Have some influence on the way hospitals are designed and fitted out, to make then into genuinely healing environments, and not the nightmarish torture-zones that most of them currently are. (I can and will write an extensive treatise on this subject, soon.)

• Exhibit my work in serious professional galleries, where it gets the press and recognition that it deserves. (This may seem so obvious as to be tautological, but it needs to be stated.)

• Produce museum-quality work that extends the capacities of the human mind--perceptually, imaginatively, and spiritually.

• Create healing and meditative environments at every opportunity.

• Publish at least one book.

Maybe these goals are too general, but it's a working list. I am wary of setting my eye on specific targets that are all too easily shot down by forces beyond my control--i.e. 'I want a solo show at the Whitney by the time I'm thirty-five.' I am equally wary of putting too much weight on what might be called external factors--money, recognition, and fame. It has to be enough to for me to succeed on the terms where I have the most control, which are self-discipline, relationships, and the quality of the work itself.

My biggest enemy, and the biggest fear I have, is that despair over the world's indifference will make me lazy. It has done so many times in the past. My biggest challenge is to overcome my own negative tendencies.

Rufino Tamayo--Tres Personajes

Well, some people have all the damn luck. If I had found a Tamayo in a dumpster, you bet I would have recognized it.

But one March morning four years ago, Elizabeth Gibson was on her way to get coffee, as usual, when she spotted a large and colorful abstract canvas nestled between two big garbage bags in front of the Alexandria, an apartment building on the northwest corner of Broadway and 72nd Street in Manhattan.

“I had a real debate with myself,” said Ms. Gibson, a writer and self-professed Dumpster diver. “I almost left it there because it was so big, and I kept thinking to myself, ‘Why are you taking this back to your crammed apartment?’”

But, she said, she felt she simply had to have the 38-by-51-inch painting, because “it had a strange power.”

I wondered why my blog traffic had suddenly spiked; evidently the New York Times ungenerously posted an inadequately tiny photo of the Stolen Masterpiece, and when a person Googles the name 'Tamayo,' looking for a bigger one, they get me. So I did a high-resolution scan of 'Tres Personajes' from the Tamayo anthology on my bookshelf, and here it is. We aim to please.

Rufino Tamayo, 'Tres Personajes,' oil on canvas, 1970

Over the last few days, I have been following a couple of debates about Quality in art--whether it is subjective, objective, or has any relation to morality whatsoever. Much has been said, which I shall not attempt to paraphrase or repeat. I will merely state that one aspect of Quality may include that nameless thing which causes a non-art-scenester to haul a large, odd, cumbersome object out of a trash pile and put it on her wall, because it has 'a strange power.' Not because it has a ream of text on the wall next to it, explaining the post-modern or political ramifications of its existence; not because a haughty individual with a gift of gab and many wealthy connections tells you it is Important; not because it enrages people, or cost a lot to produce, or critics wrote about it, or because hipsters are clustered in front of it, talking about themselves. Just for the energy in the object itself.

That's IT!

'Divinity Lotus' by Agnes Pelton

Thank you, Jackadandy!

Why didn't I know about Agnes Pelton before this? Good grief! I went to an accredited (barely) Art School, and received an honor degree from a major university. Additionally, I studied Humanities in high school with the mad Hungarian pianist who demanded that all graduates of HIS school be classically, culturally literate. And I've combed the painting galleries of major museums in seven or eight major cities, exhaustively and repeatedly, looking for the Inspiriting Spark. I don't think I've been THAT lazy.

So why have I never heard of the Transcendental Painting Group? This is it! This is The Stuff!

The TPG manifesto stated that their purpose was "to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light and design, to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual." The manifesto included the statement that "the work does not concern itself with political, economic, or other social problems." Arranging exhibitions of transcendental work that would "serve to widen the horizon of art" became the focus of the TPG's activity.

One of the most significant accomplishments of the TPG was to bring the term transcendental to prominence within the semantic dialogue. The TPG's application of the term to their art advanced the meaning assumed by the terms abstraction or non-objective. The term transcendental allowed expansion of the ideas already behind each artist's work and established the concept of the sublime, a word that conveyed high spiritual and intellectual worth. Because a transcendental painting represented an ideal condition or one of expanded awareness and acceptance, the TPG believed that it held the potential to serve as a powerful icon for enlightened cultural values.

Difficult and perhaps seemingly obscure terms such as spiritual, transcendental, quality, or ideal were part of the transcendental dialogue. At the time, the group was aware of the difficulty involved in defining these terms and made a genuine effort to explain the TPG's ideals through lectures, newspaper articles, and the group's manifesto. These terms generated confusion, fear, or dismissal. For the TPG, spiritual was meant to convey something other than religious meaning--rather, something that was reached from a process of refining integrity, skill, knowledge, and experience into an artistic statement conveying openness and acceptance--and something that was ultimately inspiring for the human condition. The term transcendental was tied to quality, as was the concept of ideal, because no work lacking in quality could represent an ideal, and therefore could not approach the spiritual.

Well, THAT'S not very PC, is it. Silly question.

Agnes Pelton, according to the essays I found about her, spent the final thirty years of her life in the desert, painting spiritual energy through abstraction from nature. I could BE this woman.

'Mount of Flame,' Agnes Pelton

Wow, wow, wow. I suppose, for the sake of being My Own Artist, non-derivative, progressive etc., I should explain why I am NOT Agnes Pelton; the technician in me notes that she, like Georgia O'Keefe, seems to have labored under the Old Master paradigm of creating a flat-surfaced image with a homogeneous paint quality. The images, although abstract, are still vaguely illustrative, and thus can be engaged with on a literalistic level, as 'depiction.' Whereas I, schooled in the SFAI 'piece of the floor' aesthetic, am integrating a range of textures and surface refractivities into my paintings, to better convey the multidimensional aspects of transcendent experience.

But gosh, they're gorgeous. I want one. I want ten. Someone send me one, please. Woo hoo.

This almost makes up for my last few trips to Chelsea, which have been largely dispiriting. I will refrain from cataloguing the 'art' I viewed there, except to say that most of it was ugly and/or lame, boring, puerile, derivative, tepid, negative, and narcissistic. I am making a bigger effort to Reach Out, this year, but when you trudge through gallery after gallery of pure hubris, it kind of makes you question what you're aspiring to.

This is what I'm aspiring to. It's lovely to be reminded.

Layered intent

Desert Cat has a burning question:

In the specific way that you employ these mandalas in your paintings, what do they represent? (I'm ruminating on that "Meditation" one in particular at the moment, but there seems to be a common theme to their use in many of your recent paintings.)

DC, for me the mandalas work on a number of levels simultaneously; each of these levels comes into play in each painting, and they are all equally important. In no particular order, they are:

1) A meditation practice, in and of themselves, in the process of drawing them. I am opening myself up to receive guidance about how to work, while working within the same stringent form.

2) A metaphor for an underlying holistic order, independent of space and time--what Bohm calls 'the implicate order'--which determines how the physical universe unfolds. Since mandalas are circular and symmetrical, they work rather like cut-paper snowflakes--one gesture can simultaneously create form in many different physical and temporal locations.

3) Chakras.

4) Celestial bodies.

5) Organic growth patterns.

Sometimes the lines of force both within and without the mandalas represent kinetic trajectories as well--orbits, currents and gravity.

Thus, these paintings can be read simultaneously as landscapes, mindscapes, microscapes, and metascapes.

And it is quite late, and you can perhaps tell that I just got in from Opening Night in Chelsea. The powers of deconstruction are upon me...

After the Fact

Anonymous has a question, which Chris doesn't think I should answer. But being basically self-absorbed, and thrilled with the attention, I will answer it anyway:

I'm not an art person. I know nothing. I have neither the vocabulary nor the sensibility to discuss it. If anything, I like nice old historical portraits of individuals, where one knows just what one is seeing and whether it looks pleasing or ill. But 'Heart' affects me unlike anything I've ever seen before. How odd and bewitching! Please explain it to me if you can, what this painting is supposed to represent and elicit.

Well, Anon, please take all of the following with a huge handful of salt, because this painting (and just about all of the good ones) was created intuitively, without attempting to literally depict anything, either an object or an idea. Each new painting is a function of everything that went before, both a sum total of my experience with painting, and of life experience, and ideas floating loosely around in my mind.

With that said--it was based on a mandala I drew last year:

which is one of my favorites, being particularly baroque and organic. The painting, instead of just being a bigger, colored version of it, is a bit like being hit in the face. At least, that's how I feel when I stand in front of it.


Compositionally, it's a pretty simple assembly of three more or less circular forms, one ornate, one small, one dark and messy. Colorwise, it's also very simple, with the whites over gold and rose giving it a feeling of glowing from within; however, the broken sections of deeper rose in the mandala have the feeling of cuts or wounds.

The color of the small circle specifically gives me a tight feeling over the solar plexus; I didn't analyze it much farther than that.

Take the rest of this as metaphor, if you like; or don't take it at all.

Yoga philosophy postulates that our bodies have seven vortices, called chakras, at major nerve plexuses--root, genital, solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye, and crown. Each chakra, when functioning properly, takes in information from the world around us and processes it, helping to build our world-view and sense of place in the world. However, most of us have 'blocks' in some of our chakras, which mean that we are 1) not taking in information through them, 2) projecting information out through them that we then read as coming from outside, or 3) defending against the miasma of clogged energy brought about by past traumas and fears.

This painting is not a literal illustration of a blocked heart chakra, the way Alex Grey might paint it, but rather an attempt to convey the feeling of having such a block; the muddiness obscuring something which you can intuit is whole, intricate and symmetrical, but which you cannot completely access.

Blue Orchid