the pilgrim

This Immense Journey

(or a pilgrim making his way through the world)

Last fall after my performance works I give a go at painting once again and made a number of physical paintings which were very exciting and demanding, very tactile with every move requiring another or not. This quote by Gerhard Richter says it well.

Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless. It demonstrates the endless multiplicity of aspects; it takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view. 

So I left the paintings alone for a week when I went to take my son Roman to Oberlin College where I found a used book, in a five and dime store, The Unexpected Universe, a collection of essays by anthropologist Loren Eiseley, published in 1964

I was very taken by the essay which is the title of the book, The Unexpected Universe, which gave me a profound and haunting sense of that which lies beneath and beyond reason, science and knowing.

The title itself suggests that the universe is full of unexpected phenomena, insights and experiences which challenge our preconceived notions about reality

As Eiseley would write, “When the human mind exists in the light of reason and no more than reason, we may say with absolute certainty that Man and all that made him will be in that instant gone.”

When I came home I put aside the 8 or 10 paintings (I was trying portraiture paintings) I had been working on and found myself looking to make pictures that conjure this something beyond and beneath the phenomenological real.

I discovered the British painter Ken Kiff and indeed just fell in love with his whole world.

Like his lodestar Marc Chagall, Ken Kiff had no use for angst, or macho painterly grandeur. Rather he was an artist who above all essayed tenderness, nurturing the surfaces of his paintings into dreamy, almost psychedelically chromatic visions in which compassion was the whole of the law.

Central to Kiff ’s project was the ‘Little Man’, a recurring naked, baldheaded figure whom the artist’s great champion, the late critic Norbert Lynton, described in a 1988 catalogue essay as ‘[Kiff ] himself, a pilgrim making his way through the world’.

Where there are systems, there is tension — especially among the divergent designs of humankind and nature. (Well, I thought what about paintings!) Exploring these themes as well as time and decay I feel into a swirl of wonder and started from the work of Ken Kiff to bring more and more images of paintings into photoshop, thinking, well I am just playing around looking about for an image to paint.

I feel in love with playing with these paintings (their phrases, colors and brush marks, their stories) and in studying them came to “paint” with them (yes I thought, you can ‘paint’ with photoshop with paintings, just look at the lovely David Hockney’s.)

So soon I was lost in the different brushes in photoshop. “It’s like I am painting with paintings.” I told myself. How marvelous these painters are.  And so it was a  performative conversation about painting. Something in this I thought terribly exciting. We are inundated with painting (that’s great) so why not paint about paintings. In doing this I came to know these painters even more intimately.

I sent them to a few friend. “Well what do you think? Thoughts? Any particular favorites? A friend wrote, “Are these Photoshops that collage pieces of different painter’s works together? And you plan on printing them?”

Well, the answer is yes.  They seem to me both a story about painting and stories of an unconscious cosmic fable.

August 19 2024