That Which Persists

Golawon. Acrylic, oil, Galkyd, powdered pigments, substrates minerals on canvas, 54″ x 72″.

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“Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.”

–Lucien Freud

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Writers and artists actually talk about this concept a lot although they typically employ different terminology: themes, tropes, proclivities, inclinations, gestures. The fact is that none of us create something out of nothing. There’s trace evidence of us, like errant DNA, that can be found in our purest attempts to step outside our particular place in the world.

Certain things may run so deep in us that they can never be erased, like the print of our hand. Favorite writers like W. G. Sebald, Henry James, Marilynne Robinson, Sally Rooney and Tom Stoppard (to name just a few) have signatory gestures that I have come to expect with their characters and narratives. Confined to a wheelchair at the end of his life with nothing but scissors and paper, Matisse created cut outs that are elementally Matissian. And after dementia obscured any knowledge of who he had been, Willem De Kooning continued to paint large canvases that were elementally De Kooning-esque. Oliver Sacks claimed that “’Style,’ neurologically, is the deepest part of one’s being, and may be preserved, almost to the last.”

As particular and personal as the work of each artist is—in the spirit of Freud’s prescient quote—this is not just an artifact of “me, more about me, me and mine.” Something transpires when an artist puts work out into the world: it takes its place in the grand fabric of the collective consciousness. It is this distributed version, shared by many, that matters most, not the idiosyncrasies of its maker.

When I look back on my writing and my painting, I see patterns that continue to morph and replicate. They feel indelible, inevitable. Instead of viewing these tendencies as a limitation however, perhaps it would be more conducive to see them as my particular constellation of cracks. In the words of Leonard Cohen, “There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.” It is the light after all that matters most.

Over the last few years one persistent theme has been moving from an occasional leitmotif to dominant theme. Like the concept of Ohrwurm–that song you just can’t get out of your head—this is one I keep circling around over and over again. The core of it is simple: we need to achieve a different valence from which we think, feel and perceive the world. This new and improved consciousness—for want of a better term—exists outside the dominant hegemony of logic and linearity. So how would this happen? Do people achieve it one by one, or can it occur in a global minute? Are there steps that must be taken? Can sheer willing make it so? I don’t have answers to those questions, but I do have a strong suspicion that visual language plays an essential part in bringing that change to bear.

From a recent curatorial statement written for the Pell Lucy artist collective:

In the words of Blackfoot wise elder Leroy Little Bear, ‘The human brain is a station on the radio dial; parked in one spot, it is deaf to all the other stations…the animals, rocks, trees, simultaneously broadcasting across the whole spectrum of sentience.’ Everything points to a planetary future where humans will need access to that broader spectrum. The visual language of art can play a crucial role in moving the dial.

Versions of this way of thinking about things are embedded in my writing, my art, my preferences for reading, my way of perceiving the world. Part cognitive, part philosophical, part visual, part mystical, this is a state of being I long to embrace fully. Rather than treating it like a bad penny—“Oh, it’s you again!”— I am coming to regard it as my foundational light source.

I see a similar consistency and a steady adherence to particular ideas when I encounter the works of my favorite thinkers, feelers and visionaries: Rebecca Solnit, Laurie Anderson, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Donna Haraway, Kathryn Schulz. For all their digressive brilliance and creative expression, they each have a handprint I have come to recognize.

I also see a handprint in the words and images of my friend and colleague Taney Roniger. She is a visual artist, writer, and educator who has been plumbing “the relationship between art, science, and the spirituality of immanence” (her words) for several years now. Her recurrent themes are ones that I resonate with as well, especially when articulated with the grace and intelligence of her many articles and essays.

Most recently she has published, You Are Therefore I Am: From Dualism to Allocentrism (and What Any of It Has To Do With Art,*) in Interalia Magazine. Her core ideas are laid out once again in this latest essay:

In what’s known by some as the Relational Turn, a new understanding is being articulated, an understanding that recognizes the distinctions between things but that locates the very thingness of each thing in the web of relations sustaining it – social, biological, ecological, and cosmic. “Interbeing” is Thich Nhat Hanh’s beautiful word for it, and while still largely inchoate, the vision it promises should give us much hope…out there on the axis of otherness lies an unexplored wilderness: that vast expanse of world that is decidedly not-me – human and nonhuman, animate and otherwise, spiritual, material, and however else we want to conceive it. I’m calling it an allocentric turn, away being the general direction, but above all it is a step in the direction of a more accurate worldview.

The language and the shape of her passions are personal and yet universal, an autobiographical portrait at this point in her life. While our intentions are adjacent to and aligned with the unified consciousness described by Thich Nhat Hanh’s term interbeing, we are coming at that commonality from different directions. Even so, her closing paragraph is one that speaks for us both:

But for now, we have a choice to attend: we can cling defiantly to our unraveling separation and involution, or we can willingly, courageously, and humbly make the turn, extending ourselves outward to meet our relations. In anticipation of the latter, perhaps art will rise to the occasion and, in the role of gracious host, initiate the introductions.

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* The essay is accompanied by art from three artists—Seana Reilly, Leah Raintree and me. That is wonderful company to be keeping.