“>Painting is about letting go & about choosing what to hold on to. Art history is what emerges through the ravages of time & survives through the ravages of critical authority.
“The World” & “The Planet” have two entirely different connotations. The World is primarily about human progression (anthropology); the planet is concerned with primordial cycles, nature.
As a human, an artist / mark-maker I wrestle between the two – I am of the world and of planet.
Painting is making millions of aesthetic choices without fear or hesitation. Unlike sculpture or installation painting takes up little space. I had planned only to use the 30ft roll-way on arches watercolor paper as a final product, a performance painting but I held onto the entire performance installation for three months. It struck a chord as to who I was between the world & the planet; giving birth & being given birth to.
It divided my studio & it halted my making new work. Over the weeks and months the mud dried. The hand ropes strung from the ceiling to help me pull myself along became like umbilical cords. And as the mud dried in the pits it became like the surface of the planet.
Two days ago I broke the mud pits up. Too heavy to keep as one Simeon loaded the dried mud into buckets & was astonished by how heavy it was. It was no surprise to me, when Derek & I drove the topsoil into Manhattan from Montauk it weighted his van down by 3 inches. This stuff is what constitutes the planet and the planet is WAY-heavy; this is stardust.
Being a professional artist since the age of 17 I rarely regret destructive choices in my process. I learnt very early as a painter – if you include all color you get mud. Being clear, creating new beauty is about using a limited palette & knowing when to stop. Making art is a very Zen practice.
The day after I recycled the dirt I was overcome with artistic regret. I erased a mark that was important & beautiful. But it took up space and was heavy. I justified – It was not a sculpture it was an experience, a performance.
Is naming something “Art” an attempt at making human existence permanent? Being a successful artist is not being attached to technique or a particular work but using that knowledge as a stepping-stone to new ways of working not an end.
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“The mess and filth we clean and control is in actual fact stardust. The Earth is the compacted dust of thousands of exploding stars. From dirt we came and to dirt we shall return and in between is life. We are custodians of the most magical substance – dirt, nothing more and nothing less – it is a grand job.” TB
In an instant one can reprogram experience & psyche by feeling the humanity behind the mark.
Painting, mark making, is a balanced combination of the scientific & the esoteric. Beyond intuitive it strips me to my primordial core. As an artist I use this to explore environmental – anthropological (eco-feminist) ideas.
I am interested in why & how we are here as a life force. Understanding the nature of life is within our individual selves. Our hair has our genetic code. Our skin, our organs all have cellular memory and are linked to the beginning of life on earth. I am fascinated to posses my body & I am fascinated by my ability as a painter to enter a visual mark and be emotionally and intellectually catapulted by it.
Making paintings is for me the ultimate form of contemplation, it is an experiment whose solution culminates in a painting that echoes the question and whose fierce beauty suggests the correctness of its answer or at the very least propels me to continue to examine life through the magnifying glass of painting.
I make paintings in the weeks and months preceding a performance with the medium I will perform with. In DUST TO DUST: dirt, earth pigments, ink, hair, water & watercolor paper. As I resolve these paintings a technique develops & leads me to want to more deeply penetrate an idea. The painting process becomes a method and this method informs me of what and how the performance will proceed.
Like my colleague fellow painter & performance artist Carolee Shneeemann, I am a painter first and foremost; performance art comes from that.
I am undoubtedly human, woman and sensual. I have to feel and be felt. And there comes a time in my painting when I am no longer satisfied to find painterly solutions for evolutionary, environmental & cultural questions. I have to get inside the picture plane – and so I plan for full body immersion in the painting and in the contemplation – a performance art piece. And the performance becomes group contemplation & it pushes us to a new level of understanding.
I am not afraid to get dirty, I am not afraid of the cold – I have a high discomfort tolerance, I am not afraid of the rare disorder of the nervous system I have (Friedreich’s Ataxia). Because of FA I ride a wheelchair and the control of my muscles is progressively difficult – WHATEVA! I am not hung up on having a static or mainstream identity.
I am not shy about the different way my body moves, my performances often being athletic. I am curious and keen to see & feel just how I do move. My physicality, my vulnerably is a privilege. No one else is wired to move the way I do – it is unique and awkward and beautiful. Challenge is life & life demands struggle. I want to explore what it is to be human and anticipate how we might next evolve.
Exhibition/Screening
4 pre-performance paintings & 6 inch post DUST TO DUST paintings by Theresa Byrnes
DUST TO DUST performance installation ON VIEW!
& screening “The making of DUST TO DUST” – a 6 minute documentary by Kristiina Salaka
thru December 31st
@
SUFFER
616 East 9th Street (B &C)
December Hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday & Sunday 3 – 8pm
or by appointment – mail@TheresaByrnes.com | www.theresabyrnes.com
Thank You, to everybody in my life, throughout my whole life, for our every breath, for every chance encounter and for my ability to set a ball in motion and for the way the velocity of an idea in motion brings to itself a clearing and a force.
I am a high achiever; have always been. I am excited by and committed to a vision and nothing feels too difficult. New York streets are filled with resources and brilliant people.
I am not hot at applying for grants; but I am cool with reaching out in my community, the people I know and who know me, the people I meet on the street or wander into my studio… BAM and I have caught them, in a sparkling web of excitement and with a well thought out path to accomplishment.
In my last performance DUST TO DUST I had a crew of 15. The construction guy Derek Guadalupe I met one month before, rolling down 9th street as I was pondering how I was going to build this particular performance apparatus.
A week later I received an email from film student Kristiina Salaka, she wanted to make a short film on me. I suggested she document the making of DUST to DUST. Now, soon it will be on utube.
As the performance day neared the more people I instructed. I was micro managing from selecting dirt, mixing pigment, data entry, poster and costume design, colaboring with the composer to clearing the space for construction. By the day of I was wound tight. My instructions became shrill commands. Stress was damp in the atmosphere. I yelled at the team to not ask questions; just do what I say. An hour out from the performance and so much to yet be done, nicety and explanation was a luxury I could not afford.
The intrepid crew, new and old friends had trusted me thus far, had volunteered their time and energy without excuse or negativity. Now I demanded silent, committed action.
Kristiina smiled at me lovingly as I scream out orders. And in her sweet acknowledgement I remember her words to me “you are a great director, you know what you want and how to do it.” My crew, my friends show faith in me and have my back beyond money, recognition and even manners.
I am alone this Thanksgiving Day and night- an orphan in New York on this family holiday. But I feel no need to fill up my time with social stuff or my belly with food. I am truly satisfied and wholly grateful as I look back on my life; I have achieved all my visions with crews of human angels and now again with a slew of human angels and so it will be in the future as I concoct my next exhibition and see my 2012 performance though the fog.
Life rolls, from dust to dust, from one vision accomplished to the next. And for that I am supremely & radiantly thankful.
THANK YOU!
Derek Guadalupe – construction
Tim Cramer — composer
Bobbi Bennett — chief assistant
Sandra Casti & Art Guerra of Guerra Pigment co.
Kevin O,Hanlon – vidiographer
Rainer Hosch — photographer
Simeon Rose — live video feed
Karen Oughtred – stage manager
Louis Williams — general assistance & doorman
Daniela Mamon — adjustments to costume
Roger Norris – poster printing
Ed Marshall – Installation photography
Kristiina Salaka, Ama Teva, Andrew Stroker,
Eddy Menuau, & Hank for general assistance.
I am not afraid to get dirty, I am not afraid of the cold – I have a high discomfort tolerance, I am not shy about the limited and different way my body moves, I am curious to see just how I do move & I want to explore that. I want to explore what it is to be human and anticipate how we might next evolve.
Really I am not performing, I am experiencing. I do not rehearse, I do not learn lines – this is an authentic event, I embody contemplation. I am not an entertainer, I am not an exhibitionist the performance becomes a group contemplation.
My performances have had me hanging upside down, spinning in a circle & spilt out of a barrel of 60 gallons of crude oil, but this one, DUST TO DUST was epic, pushing me to a new level of understanding. I am recovering still. Cuts & grazes on my hands, arms and shoulders. Wounds in places never before open, like the tips of my thumbs, the tops of my shoulders.
In the months before the performance I was reading about the power of dirt, of topsoil and then including it in my painting: hair, ink, water, dirt absorbed into paper. Hair swept along, as we humans are – at the mercy of cyclones, earthquakes – nature. Using the focus of painting I recalled back and further back beyond human antecedents, to the moment when I gained osmotic independence, when will alone moved me no longer tied to the sea or rooted in the earth.
In “Dust To Dust” I rose from the mud, pulled myself along the 30 foot long stage, rolling, lurching, dragging my body, cutting my hair, tossing pigmented dust, spilling ink, water misting me from above. I was completely in the zone, contemplating the beginning of life, the surge of will and the end of it. I was so focused rising from the mud, moving with it & returning to it.
Micro managing for a month to make it happen: calling in people to help, writing releases, amassing hardware, commanding crews – tension mounting from producing to performing within a breath.
Finally I found solace in the mud. When I was put in the pit it was cold but soon the mud was warm like my flesh. It softly and quickly responded to my shape, my heat like the perfect body pillow – it copied me until it became me. I began to drift and I was in the womb – the womb of the earth.
The 30 foot path was a life, the effort & the stress, passing through limits to find a way, to inch along. And at the end was another pit of mud. When I pulled myself into that pit it was death and release, and it felt like going home.
Performance over, I was lifted out of the mud & carried outside to be hosed off. Left alone for a moment I began to panic – like being ripped from the womb I began to shiver and wail. I was disorientated and nauseous, the sand, dirt & pigment were gritty in my teeth.
This was not hypothermia this was shock.
I had traveled to the beginning of my life force and forged a new understanding of the end of one lifespan. Earth, dirt, dust soil was a shape shifting device. It nurtured, composted and transformed.
Something snapped in me and I screamed like a banshee. Maybe it was the open wounds absorbing dirt and pigment, maybe it was the release of pressure after a month of organizing, maybe it was the jolt of temperatures and of reality, maybe it was the power of contemplation reaching understanding, maybe it was the combination that caused me to go into shock, to convulse, tremble & babble incoherently.
Now my wounds heal rapidly and my muscles ache healthy like after a good workout. Although exhausted I plan my space around the massive performance installation so to continue the contemplation, further informed, in paintings.
The Performance Installation is on view thru December 31st 2011.
Hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday & Sunday 3 – 8pm
Or by appointment contact – mail@theresabyrnes.com
My performances pieces are as new to me as they are new to the audience.
I do not rehearse; I prepare for full body contemplation.
Making paintings in the weeks and months preceding
with the medium I will perform with:
dirt, earth pigments, ink, hair, water & watercolor paper leads me
to desire, to want to inhabit the process; to more deeply penetrate an idea.
My heart will pound when I climb from the pigment to perform.
From primordial humus to osmotic independence – I move.
And like in painting I understand the medium’s properties,
its behavior under manipulated conditions.
Moving from one primordial state to another,
my dialogue with that and my feelings for the spot-lit concept will be
a fresh once in life time event.
Laying it all on the line, knowing the construct,
understanding the reactivity of the elements
and entering the performance as an experiment:
Beauty beyond the safe or the proven is what I strive for as a painter.
Life oozed from the ocean and into the earth 2 billon years ago.
ALL living creatures including humans rose from that.
Between the passive moon and the active sun is the earth.
We humans roam free with the pull of the tides still in our organs.
The mess and filth we clean and control is in actual fact stardust.
The Earth is the compacted dust of thousands of exploding stars.
I emerge from the salted mud,
I mark my way across the 30 foot painting surface
leaving my hair and imprints of my form.
From dirt we came and to dirt we shall return and in between is life.
We are custodians of dirt nothing more and nothing less – it is grand job.
To make a tax free contribution to the production cost of dust to dust – www.TheTheresaByrnesProjects.org
or email your pledge to – mail@theresabyrnes.com
Hair, dirt, earth pigment, water, paper; materials I have been using in my new painting. While painting I contemplate our human relationship with the earth, with nature. In this performance I commit my entire body to the contemplation and to the painting of a 30 ft work.
Dirt, mud, dust is a substance laden with biota, the primordial glup we came from and shall eventually return to.
DIRT IS LIFE. DURING OUR LIFETIME WE ARE THE CUSTODIANS OF DIRT – THE MARK-MAKERS – All LIFE RETURNS TO DIRT.
On Wednesday November 9
7pm sharp – 8pm
Limited Seating
Eleven years since I moved to New York. My apartment in the East Village is sanctuary. My studio/gallery up the block is what ever I want it to be. No strings, no commitments but to keep my body strong and my intellect expanding so I can make art.
Seven years ago I installed a birdhouse high up and just outside my bedroom window. This spring birds moved in. I saw them stashing in stuff for a nest. I felt so honored and excited that they trusted me enough to settle. When I slept I sensed them resting too and sent fondness to my bird tenants, expectant for their eggs to hatch like family.
In 2006 on the way to my Chelsea studio I had rescued a fallen fledgling sparrow from the wheel of an SUV. Achieving, running around, building, designing, even painting became all at once secondary to the magnitude and supreme beauty of nature. In the days that followed the little bird got stronger. I fed it baby food and water from an eyedropper. One morning there were no chirps. Little bird was laying down. I scooped it up in my hands. It was dying. I felt the enormity of its life force. When it took its lasts breaths of life in my hands, tears streamed down my face.
I made a painting called SPARROW DREAM. That’s the thing about painting you can paint the intangible, you can make the breeze visible, you can paint the story of your heart being opened to be comprehended in one glance, even before you do fully.
Yesterday as I rolled out my door I glanced up at my birdhouse to see Daddy sparrow bring his little chirping glories worms and things to eat in his beak. Now the baby birds are born my heart feels more than ever opened. That is the ultimate anniversary gift!
Top painting – Sparrow Dream 2006
Below painting – The Wind, 2005
My painting process has changed dramatically. I am out of control inspired, fiercely brave – ready to knock out blank space with an uber-alive mark. I sustain that pumped focus for fifteen hours straight, for days on end. Most of my career (age 16 to 40) I have worked up, and on entire exhibitions at once, paintings spread out over my studio, all at different stages of completion, different mediums, different sizes, on floor, wall and table. On a ferocious mission for the space, my mind, my hands, the images to all sing together. Exhausted I hear it and sleep so deeply satisfied and with paint on my skin.
What irreverent fire hides behind these eyes of mine. Wet images take shape and lay in my studio, my secret, my soul, my great love, my mind and the obedience of my body as tool with steady stamina.
And now at 42 I still have the power, the fortitude but I am no longer a loose cannon. Now I hold the energy a while, I understand what paint can do, how it behaves and what it means a little now. I work in smaller spurts. I know I could flood the East Village with paintings but I also know my affair with creative energy is endless. I do not want to run and go bezerk with it anymore, I want to sit with it, be it and act on it in calm, contemplative form.
Gone seem to be the days of being overwhelmed and besotted with mark making; now I have steady love.
A recently completed portrait now hangs in the window of my storefront gallery/studio. The little boy now fronts an exhibition of my abstract paintings. The portrait is a combination of three paintings I had in mind to do of the boy. As I painted I saw that I was synthesizing all three in one piece. The brain has a way of unifying, amalgamating images. In painting I am not big on editing or reworking. A painting should have a voice of its own, you should know your subject and your tools so well that the image falls together in one to four rushes so it maintains the confidence and restlessness of a child not the voice of the artist struggling for a likeness. Value does not equal effort; value equals effortlessness.
I must be the subject and paint it from the inside This portrait being three in one forced me to fiddle around with tiny brushes correcting miniscule details so it came into focus as one boy in one moment. The approach required for this painting to be resolved ran counter to how I like to work. But every painting commands me to understand painting more fully or open humbly to not knowing it fully.
I am a painter. Oil paint, enamel, acrylic, ink, watercolor, graphite, pastel, canvas, wood, paper, metal, performance art, abstraction, portraiture. I do not care to fit into a mould; I want to explore.
Painting is mercurial it slips between being known. Its allure is that it can be anything you want it to be. I cannot rest happily on one trick or technique. People may think they know me, my work, but it is an aspect of my lifelong romance with painting. I still feel butterflies because paint is my connection to the infinite.
I do not wish to know who, why, or what I am. Knowing is illusory and seems stagnant. I am not interested in fame or wealth or even happiness. I am into feeling life as transient. Paint is a trail tracking and connecting my body to the environment and the supreme force of nature. Human concerns, mundane survival requirements and emotion based on self are boring to me and if you base a life time on maintaining the illusion that you matter I think you are missing the boat.
Selected Paintings – Theresa Byrnes
@ SUFFER
616 E9th Street (B & C) New York
I found a stack of beaten up weathered plywood on the corner of 9th & C. I flagged down a passer by to lug it to my studio up the block. It was Summer 2010 and I knew I now had the bulk of the materials for my new series.
When I arranged the wood on my worktable the conversation begun. How as painter I would collaborate with the beauty already in the marks and gestures made by the ravages of time?
Painting, being an artist is about seeing truth not just about making marks – it is an interplay & interpretation of marks already made by time, by the elements and by society. After September 11 2001 I was thrown into shock creatively. I questioned why there was such importance put on making art archival in a collapsing civilization. I realized that obediently painting within the rules was playing by the rules of the world market, a market based on the idea of the supremacy of progress and newness.
Finding workable & worn fragments to paint on was rare. I found my first batch in December 2001 at a junkyard in Penn State. “Big Wood” is a work from that time & it is in this show. In 2002 I found the fragment for “Eagle Smoke” on East Houston Street that is also in this show. To me finding bunged up ply was like finding treasure.
During the painting I am always aware of not overpowering the vulnerability of the surface but to work with its lines, flakes and chips – it had started a sentence and I want to finish it. The accidental & brutal marks are masterful in boldness & sensitive in deepness it is a challenge for me to approach the piece, put my marks on it so it all comes together, so you can not separate who did what, nature or the painter.
The materials and the painting aproach itself have a philosophy & meaning all its own – the supremacy & poetry of nature over our idea of progress.
When I had finished my performance, The Measure Of Man on the back of a truck on Xmas Eve I was euphoric. Being up there on that circle, staring down the idea of the perfection of mankind, oncoming traffic headlights spotlighting me, bleeding crude oil, ice cold wearing a full length bikini. Fierce defying the elements and confronting the symbols and products of our beliefs. Sitting in a diner afterwards I glanced at the TV above the bar and there was some red carpet event were the beautiful & the famous were pouting and twirling. Augmented, bleached, plucked and be-gowned they posed. I still had black traces on my neck, in my pores & hair. I looked like a homeless woman but I felt true glamour and beauty in the seeking of truth and having the guts to embody it.
DIRTY GLAMOUR
Recent paintings – THERESA BYRNES
Opening Reception 6 – 9pm
Friday Feb 11 FEB 11 thru March 6
True beauty is not shiny, packaged, new, modified, augmented but the graceful death of matter.
After September 11th 2001 the imperative to make paintings archival, to exist for centuries, seemed suddenly ludicrous. The vulnerability of the human species and its civilizations became central to my concept of beauty and art. Histories, lives, architecture blown to bits, fragments of shelter, weather-worn – that is material to be relied on.
I paint on old plywood fragments; I let its decay direct the becoming of the painting. My works on paper use oil, salt water and human hair. It is a mix we spill into the oceans. I use what we want to hide and forget as a medium; as an artist that is a powerful pigment. I harness the results of destruction to make art, to find beauty in our missteps and to document them.
Glamour has a past; to achieve its polish requires cultural hegemony; to resist is to re-define beauty.
“…Byrnes is a provocateur whose sometimes uncomfortable offerings are designed to provoke a reaction in her audience. And by placing her body and mind at the centre of her art she challenges her own interpretation and her own vision. It is no surprise that her work has a strong evolutionary thread. It is organic, earthy, and, like the cycle of life theme of many of her paintings, it grows. Uncompromisingly she is woman’ channeling life, death, fear and joy, through an exposed, vulnerable human shell. It is all on the line, and that is the wonder of Byrnes’ art.” – Martin Newman, art critic The Daily Mirror, London, 2010.
SUFFER 616 E 9th Street (B & C) HOURS Thursday–Sunday 2–6pm
As is pictured in my autobiography, "The Divine mistake" the first Self portrait in Blue I painted was at 14 years old, 1983. I used to paint a Self Portrait in Blue about every 2 years until 10 years ago. I had found that the depth of my emotion could sometimes only be relieved if I painted it out in the form. It was a surprise to me in January of 2002 that I commenced "self- portrait in Blue, NYC" having been a devoted abstract painter for near on a decade.
In mid 2003 I was commissioned to do a portrait of a boy. I did 22 paintings, 2 major works and 20 oil studies, renewing my relationship with figuration. In November 2004 I opened an exhibition of 112 abstract paintings and now I am being commissioned to do another portrait.
It is odd to be doing both. I was critical of artists who do both abstraction and figurative work; I saw it as lack of commitment and focus. Some people see skill only in artists that can render the recognizable. I never needed to prove myself to anyone, I paint how and what I feel driven to. Some assume abstraction is a weakness rather than choice. Abstract painting is more challenging than representational painting for me as there is nothing to copy from. Portraiture is analogous to painting the clock and abstraction the tick-tock, when the individual brush strokes a portrait embody the force (the tick-tock) then it can capture the essence of a human life as we recognize it (the clock).
In the past I have been tormented, questioning my motivation for re engaging the figurative and being disappointed in my wavering faithfulness to abstraction. Am I going backwards, am I loosing consistency?
Now I glide between the two disciplines, no longer judging my self for working in two genres. Ultimately I love painting, I love the full spectrum of what paint can do through me. With a calm mind opposing forces inform each other. Skill and chance is a dualism I love to juggle. I became an abstractionist when I felt the movement of the brushstroke being restricted by the form, and now I do not feel restricted by it, I am experimenting, exploring and playing with the varied extent of my ability.
11/15/2007
Figuration / Abstraction & Performance art
Theresa Byrnes
Performance art came from seeing the becoming of a painting as ritual and also a commentary of a current way of seeing. As a painter primarily, I am privy to watching paint and my handling of it perform. It is that intimate relationship with nature, the laws of becoming that both mesmerize and excite me.
Through a life dedicated to art making I live outside the bounds of security. My performance art arises from a stirring to articulate eco-feminist ideas and social / political conclusions I have come to, on war, ecology, veganism, world resources. All my performances urge the viewer to feel global issues as personal issues, choices.
The language of my performance is paint with me inside it. My body is not the brush, I am inside the creative process itself, no separation.
I do not rehearse a performance, and perform it only once. I spend months organizing, finding soundtracks, color, choreographing, planning etc but the final performance has to have the same spontaneity and thrill as I experience making a painting in my studio. I want to bring the viewer into the intimate and sacred act and imprint upon them a concise message.
A picture can paint a thousand words and my impulse is to throw my body into it, fully commit to the paint, to the art making process and let my life as a female artist contextualize; historically, culturally & philosophically the message particular to the piece.
My portrait / figurative painting documents intimately the human experience, abstraction documents the natural forces of life and my performance art unifies the two and provides a conclusion particular to a contemplation.
9/28/2005
"Light, space and time blur into one, seeming to be truth but really it is just
blurring - painting."
20 years ago I had my first exhibition. My paintings were figurative. Figuration was my apprenticeship. Through 10 years of painting representationally I learned the magic and technique of painting.
I explored the brush stroke, to make portrait, figure or scene, until I just wanted to explore the brush stroke itself. I didn't want to arrange marks to make an image of something known. I chose painting to show me what was unknown.
In abstraction there is nothing to copy. Abstraction is like jumping off the earth into the universe, letting go of mother's hand and stepping into the ether of thought.
I find myself in the great void of potential. This subject does not dictate its structure to me but demands I release all ideas of knowing and open to new ways of seeing. When I paint I feel like an explorer of new paths and am privy to the experience of beauty unfolding in ways I have never seen.
The medium becomes almost irrelevant; it is the intent that gives my work consistency. My approach is not about finding a style but rather using style and medium as a vehicle.
As a child I wanted to be a scientist. My parents supplied me with science kits. I would sit on our concrete driveway warmed by the sun, ignite the Bunsen burner, set out the elements and chemicals, discard the instruction manual and endeavor to make dramatic explosions of color and froth.
I had to have an immediate reaction to feel I was going where no one had gone before. I longed to be delighted and surprised by the result and then think back to understand the technique. Experiment led to technique - not the other way around.
My parents bought me my first oil painting kit when I was five. We would go out as a family and set up easels to paint en plein air. Dissatisfied with science kits, not wanting to work with manuals I returned to painting. It was dangerous, it was not child proof and it gave me the thrill like nothing else could.
In this series I work with the flow of water and the reactions of certain colored inks added together by an eyedropper. I layer paper to manipulate the stream and create shapes (inkling # 1 & 2, Shuffle, Merge). I remove the layers and they become works in themselves (Road Trip came from Stone, Frond 1-3 came from Greenhouse.) I have disconnected from the surface. As Leonard Shlain explains in Art and Physics, "The crack between cause and effect, a brief moment occurred which was out of control, like the gap in a spark plug, this moment is what Aristotle once proposed as Potentia."
Dr Masaru Emoto in his book "the Message of water" photographs the molecular effect on water by thought. His results show the dramatic effect thoughts have in shaping water molecules.
Painting with the basic element of life intensifies the experiment of creating reality with thought. I pour water, it pools to rivulets running with colored inks that merge in curves of paper becoming landscape, geological and biological, mirroring nature in the unifying patina that suggests both the outer and the inner world.
In physics, mathematics and nature there are shapes and structures which appear irregular and random, but nevertheless have a special pattern of regularity called self similarity. The term fractal was invented by the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot in 1975.
One God is made up of 112 ink drops causing fractalizaton. It represents the cornucopia of souls that make up humanity and is also reminiscent of the individuality of each and every snowflake or of stars popping in the night sky. God is every particle; I am reminded of this by the uniqueness of every humble ink drop.
Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix once speculated "it would be worthy to investigate whether straight lines exist only in our brains". Leonard Shlain writes "The Western adherence to the illusion that the link between objects in space and events in time is a straight line is similar to belief in a religious dogma". There are no straight lines in nature, except for the horizon and even that is curved.
American minimalist painter Agnes Martin has me enthralled by her work. Her straight lines are tinted with human frailty. Imperfection blurred by seeing the painting as a whole, iconic and essential like the horizon. Her repetitive, delicately dispassionate minimal lines are sublime and move me like the ocean's current. I feel it but do not have the reserve to express in that considered repetitive way.
The cut out and placed strips I use to create Strings 3 & 4 add repetition with out forcing me to meditate on the mundane. With this technique I can utilize structure while maintaining my passionate and explosive approach.
The strips started in 1983 where I applied masking tape diagonally on canvas and spray gunned paint, in 1994 I represented trees and buildings simultaneously with single lines and in 1996 I made 14 Foot lines by rolling on a dolly on my back, with the canvas above, making a continuous line with an 8 inch brush while in motion (On the Way To the Awakening series). In 1998, with the Nature Behind Bars series, I made splatters and daubes with a row of ordered lines in front. And in 1999 in Four Digging Sticks, four vertical lines represented my four appointed aboriginal mothers (I was accepted into a Yolngu clan in 1990), symbolized as digging sticks, the female tool for harvesting water from the earth.
Now in 2005 Strings 3 & 4 reflect on the theory of super strings. String theory requires the universe to possess more than three spatial dimensions and offers the first self-consistent approach to combining quantum theory and general relativity into a single unified theory of all physical phenomena.
When I was a child I would run around on hot summer days in my Aunty Agnes's back yard with my cousins. I would run by the old wooden paling fence. What was behind was obscured, dissected and abstracted by the spaced intervals of line. As I ran past it created a strobe effect. Foreground and background were separated but inseparable. Straight lines represent our assumption of sequential time. As I ran by the fence, form and order became music and what was clear and upfront became unknowable like behind.
A unity of self occurs while painting and through that state comes art. Rene Magrite called this "presence of mind". This state is the heart of being an artist.
Art like science is an endless experiment, and it is never finished. Life and truth are constantly evolving and I am committed intently to continuing the experiment.
1/2/2005
TANTRIC PAINTING
I am on a date with God / Goddess. Paint is the copper wire conduit
connecting me to the divine. Painting - a prayer or mantra, yet
active and ecstatic. It combines the desire to unite with God with
the sensuality of physical being. It strikes a balance between
humility and ego; recognizing the doorway, intuitively selecting a
color, making shapes and marks without hesitation. And like pools my
paintings reflect back memories of the transcendent painting process
- celestial and molecular, they explore deep within my own biology,
to the vastness of the universe, to the comfort of earthy nature and
its cycles, to intellectual awakenings and esoteric truths.
The true reality of The Void is attained by observing and
experiencing the oneness of diametric opposites: the union of
passive and dynamic, mind and matter, male and female, the base and
the sublime.
Sadhaka (the Tantric adept) uses tantric paintings, among other
tools, to achieve the religious experience of liberation from being
chained to the false realities perceived by the human senses. The
sadhaka's meditations inform him or her that the nirvana he seeks is
non-existence, the great bliss of The Void. Through contemplation
and ritual - seek what philosophers have called "enstasy." A term
that embraces both ecstasy and profound attainment of wisdom, the
state of enstasy is, in fact, that state of nirvana when one
recognizes The Void, the absolute reality that everything is
nothing. Meditating on the ecstasy, feeling a surge of joy or thrill
bringing it from the base to the crown, harnessing ones divine
energy to clear the body, cleanse the mind and revitalize the
spirits.
These paintings follow in the tradition of ancient Indian Tantric
painting, as meditation aids to further enlightenment. I hope they
transpose my painterly voyage to deeper wisdom fueled by ecstasy to
unleash spiritual liberation, and that they act upon you.
3/25/2004
Figuration/Abstraction.
As is pictured in my autobiography, "The Divine mistake" the first Self portrait in Blue I painted was at 14 years old. I used to paint a Self Portrait in Blue about every 2 years until 10 years ago. I had found that the depth of my emotion could sometimes only be relieved if I painted it out in this form. It was a surprise to me in January of 2002 that I commenced "self- portrait in Blue, NYC" having been a devoted abstract painter for near on a decade. I just finished the work, pictured here - oil on canvas, 26 x 52 inches.
Self Portrait in Blue, oil on canvas 2002 Self portrait in Blue #1, oil on canvas 1984
Beneath these is another portrait of my private commission subject, "Boy and Sky", oil on linen, 24 x 28 1/2 inches. He recently went into the hospital for critical brain surgery. I thought what better way to send him love and strength but to focus on him by painting him. He is home and recovering well and I feel closer to knowing his indomitable spirit. Toward the end of the painting I got emotional and dissatisfied with the image. I began to scrape it back. To my amazement it had mostly dried, which does not happen with oil paint in 2 days. As I was scraping with my palette knife the saying, as in art, so in life, rung true. My little subject is a miracle boy, he has survived every operation since his difficult birth, refusing to leave life and his face and spirit also refused to leave my painting. So I left it in tact with scrapes and peals, depicting his eggshell like fragility and his image blowing away but remaining.
Between the portraits I am working on a series of abstract enamels on aluminum that truly rock my world. I am utilizing the chemical reactions of certain colors to get desired effects.
It is odd to be doing both. I am critical of artists who do both abstraction and figurative work; I see it as lack of commitment and focus, flakey and hokey. And certain people see skill only in artists that can render the recognizable, I never needed to prove myself to anyone, I paint how and what I feel driven to. There are even those who assume that as I became disabled I also lost my ability to paint representationally, implying abstraction is a weakness rather than choice. In the past month between high productivity I have been tormented, questioning my motivation for re engaging the figurative and being disappointed in my wavering faithfulness to abstraction. Am I going backwards? Am I loosing consistency?
Now that I am gliding between the two disciplines I am no longer judging my self for working in 2 genres. Ultimately I love painting, I love the full spectrum of what paint can do through me. With a calm mind opposing forces inform each other. Skill and chance is a dualism I love to juggle, I became an abstractionist when I felt restricted by the form and now I do not feel restricted by it. I am experimenting, exploring and playing with the varied extent of my ability. You can not judge process just be transformed by it.
2/12/2004
Tomorrow I will be in ANTHEM Magazine wearing designer - LIZ COLLINS fab clothes. And there is a little interview too.
1/27/2004
CHOOSE TO REFUSE
Butchers Paper Ecofeminism Feeding blood to suckling calves, eating spinal cord in t-bone. Hot dogs and pies, mass food People don't think, don't know Are kept in the dark To turn a massive buck To fund election And we suck the blood Of a deal Made real By advertising and normalizing.
I wrote this poem on January 3. It was the point on which I exited a night and day of hysterical crying. I often find that before a new series of work bursts forth I get hysterically emotional. I am grappling with ideas and thoughts that seem too big for me, lost by the endlessness of them I feel hopeless and frustrated. It is the birth of clarity. The catharsis projects me into my new work.
From this I now am developing a new performance piece, a short video and a series of paintings. Enamel on aluminum is the medium.
1/13/2004
I just finished a commission. It originally was to be two portraits but I became obsessed with my subject and did 22 studies in oil and 2 major portraits (oil on linen). When I began my professional career as a painter 18 years ago portraits, still lives and the nude were my thing. Ten years ago I got board with figuration and dropped the representational bag. I became more concerned with expressing and exploring philosophical ideas through abstraction (and later political ideas through performance). Abstraction liberated me from the mundane and from the world of the ego.
When I was asked to do the portrait, there was no doubt in my mind. I had already met the subject, a 2 year old boy who had defied the odds to be born. He was a little miracle and I was driven to paint him.
3 Months later all the paintings are with the family. They love them and my love for figuration has re emerged.
Painting is about letting go & about choosing what to hold on to. Art history is what emerges through the ravages of time & survives through the ravages of critical authority.
