Looking closely at a recent painting
Robert Hass begins his extraordinary collection, What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World, talking about the photography of Ansel Adams and Robert Adams:
What the two artists have in common, besides a name, is a certain technical authority. The source of that authority is mysterious to me. But it is that thing in their images that, when you look at them, compels you to keep looking. I think it’s something to do with the formal imagination. I don’t know whether photographers find it in the world, or when they look through the viewfinder, or when they work in the darkroom, but the effect is a calling together of all the elements of an image so that the photograph feels like it is both prior to the act of seeing and the act of seeing. Attention, Simone Weil said, is prayer, and form in art is the way attention comes to life.
There is so much in this paragraph I find compelling. What actually is the “formal imagination”? And what is that distinction between what happens prior to seeing and the very act itself? Every maker, writer, artist straddles the essential tension of attention and how it comes through us, but it is difficult to describe.
That issue of attention correlates with a passage from Philippa Perry‘s book, How To Stay Sane:
Be careful which stories you expose yourself to…The meanings you find, and the stories you hear, will have an impact on how optimistic you are: it’s how we evolved…If you do not know how to draw positive meaning from what happens in life, the neural pathways you need to appreciate good news will never fire up. … The trouble is, if we do not have a mind that is used to hearing good news, we do not have the neural pathways to process such news.
After reading that quote, a friend added this insight from the Persian poet حافظ Hafiz: “What we speak (or listen to or believe without questioning) becomes the house we live in.”
The “house we live in” is a perpetual construction site. Our thoughts, attention and actions constellate a space that is our artistic/emotional/spiritual/ consciousness habitation. While Hafiz is being metaphorical, the power of the form around the form—the self inside its house—has been particularly visceral for me as we live through the chaos of renovating the back rooms of our IRL home.
Through it all, what matters is how to bring something substantial into existence. I am reminded of literary critic Christopher Ricks‘s litmus test for how to recognize value in art: “That which continues to repay attention.”
Attentiveness is kind of how we build a concept of a self, psychologically. When something continues to interest us, it seems valuable. So I agree with Ricks.
I seldom read novels again, but I do return to poems I love, and to works of art (visual and plastic) that I love, and to music that I love. If the object begins to feel rote as a result, however, I kind of cease to love it actively. If I continually find something new in if it continually ‘repays my attention,’ it feels like very substantial and valuable art.
But I’m not entirely sure I agree with Perry’s caution about stories; also, doesn’t that seem to conflict with Wiman’s suggestion that we cannot be conscious and comfortable simultaneously? –Probably, I need to read Perry since this is just a brief excerpt you’ve posted. But I have to say my thinking aligns more with Wiman’s, and I do not think discomfort is necessarily a bad thing for us.
Thoughtful as ever Ann. As is often the case, I hold paradoxes easily and actually find them enticing. Not everyone feels that way however. Thank you for sharing this. You enrich my experience of things I write and things I read.
Ricks…..”continues to repay attention”. This artist wants his work to not only continue (on the wall) but in the heart. He does not make furniture. Can any artwork, even good work, continue to repay attention, to be not taken for granted?
While I am chary of the didactic, can an individual piece gain life and power and meaning when it is buttressed by the artist and her story and her oeuvre.
Attention must be paid, the man said.
Barlow, your photo above minds me of a planet? Are you working for NASA? I think Robert Ryman is.
Thanks George! I love when my paintings bring planets to mind. High compliment in my opinion. And sharing that NASA connection with Robert Ryman, in whatever sense, is a plus!
I like this post; Hass’s book is new to me, so I’ve ordered it. Technical authority, what it is, seems more understandable than formal imagination: being able (for a photographer) to use the camera, darkroom, alternative processes (or nowadays computer) effectively. I recall the “straight” print of A. Adams’s Moonrise over Hernandez NM was significantly less compelling than the print made with his complex dodging and burning. Surely good skill counts. All the photographers whom I admire, e.g. Paul Caponigro, Linda Connor, Flor Garduno, have in addition to technique that strong way of looking at the world that leads me to return again and again (like Ricks “repay attention”) to view their work. Perry’s words strike me as fit for the viewer of art; has the viewer practiced attention (“hearing good news”; I’d add that it’s not only good news that we might hear, it’s seeing something as it is without our prejudices)?
I agree with George: looking at the photo of your painting above very well might be from a space capsule hurtling around an icy planet, or it might be kneeling near the edge of the pond in the woods that quickly froze during the night. A willingness to suspend disbelief is necessary.