Seeing, Feeling, Expressing

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens. --Carl Jung

After enjoying hundreds of visitors who came to my studio last night for First Friday, I realize just how much of an equation there is between making art and sharing it. That exchange feels magical when what we make is well received by others. We encounter that energy in concerts, in live performances and sporting events. Athletes, actors, dancers, musicians all perform to audiences and whether small or large, our creativity comes full circle when shared. 

For many of us who are makers, our creative selves are always reaching. I’m feeling an internal desire now to focus on emotional content in new work.  What is it that makes some pieces evoke a deep emotional response?

Colors, shapes, lines and textures can communicate feeling, either what the artist feels internally or their responses to the world around them. The Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s believed the best way to express pure emotion was to create nonobjective or totally abstract artworks. They saw the use of colors, shapes, lines and textures as vital to expressing deep emotional states.

What feelings or emotions do you wish to express through your works? How do you choose color, shape, line and textures to communicate those? 

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen. ~Leonardo da Vinci

Everything Connects

These are BillDings, one of my favorite toys when I was a child. And yay, they're back again in the toy market.

Note the amazing feature of this simple stacking toy -- the slots allow them to connect in multiple, unexpected ways.

Oddly enough, even just looking at this image of them again makes the child inside me hugely happy. These clown like figures have huge smiles on their faces as they hang upside down and balance on each other's shoulders, arms and legs. These little guys inspire creativity!

And they have real life counterparts!

This weekend my husband and I attended the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra's Pop Series performance, "Cirque de la Symphonie".

Fortune smiled on us with tickets in the second row while former Cirque performers joined the orchestra onstage and performed stunning acts to each musical selection. Being so close allowed us to see and appreciate their tremendous focus, concentration and physical prowess.

Alexander Streltsov's stunning, aerial moves on silk were one of the many excellent performances of the evening. Watching him soar as silken fabric rippled and billowed around him and the orchestra played a "Star Wars" piece felt magical.

Each act and performer drove home the same message to me. Every art form takes discipline, patience and practice. The artist repeats moves and gestures over and over and over until the sheer force of repetition burns them into memory.

Watching the tremendous concentration and focus in the performers' eyes and faces even as their diaphragms heaved and muscles trembled from exertion, I can appreciate the practice that goes on daily behind-the-scenes to create that seemingly (unless you ARE in the second row!) effortless defiance of gravity.

What do Cirque acrobats performing with our area symphony offer me as inspiration for my daily artistic practice? First, stimulation. Our artistic selves thrive by watching, listening to and appreciating other artists.

Second,the recognition that the ingredients to accomplishment are the same. Desire and practice build our expertise in our chosen field, whether that is playing the tuba, juggling or oil painting.

Third, putting something out into the world from our creative centers is not a matter of how large or how small the rewards are. The concert program, by Cirque de Soleil standards, was tiny, with just one or two performers on stage at a time. Yet I was entertained and satisfied and delighted with this "bite size piece" of Cirque's dazzling choreography and physical artistry.

This means that practicing our art form, whatever it may be, from a place of passion and attention can have as much worth and impact on a small stage as in a large, lavish production.

The Writings of Agnes Martin

"Martin, Agnes, "I Love The Whole World," 1999. Acrylic and graphite on canvas.

On Friday, I finally picked up the books I ordered through inter-library loan at our local college. Agnes Martin: Paintings and Writings, a catalogue published in 2000 by the prestigious Pace-Wildenstein gallery in New York City, combines ideas about artmaking that Agnes put into writing with 15 paintings completed in 1999. All the works are acrylic and graphite on canvas, all are 60" x60" and have titles like "Happiness-Glee", "I Love Love", "Innocent Love" and "Lovely Life." Agnes always painted in a square format -- in her younger years she worked in a 80" x 80" format, but as she aged the larger canvases became too difficult for her to manage and she shifted to the 60" x 60" size.

At the time this exhibition and catalogue were produced, Agnes was 87 years old. In the final years of her life, she lived in a retirement home in Taos, NM, but still drove to her studio every day to work. The paintings in this exhibition are different in coloration from Agnes' earlier works, which were mainly shades of gray and white with her characteristic hand drawn graphite lines. These later works introduce muted pastel washes of earth red and sky blue, greens and yellows. Nancy Doyle's profile of the artist at www.ndoylefineart.com/martin.html suggests that these colors may be Agnes' response to the white desert light and the colors of the earth in the southwest.

Even as I started reading the essays interspersed between the images of the paintings, I noticed Martin's writing is as spare and condensed as her painting. Like her art, her writing seems to contain a wealth of insight distilled from experience into each statement. In the essay, "What We Do Not See If We Do Not See," Agnes declares that she wanted to "live a true life." Living this true life meant seeing the joyfulness in reality, maintaining an awareness of beauty, innocence and happiness because without them she believed one could not make works of art.

In the essay "What is Real?", written in 1976, Agnes wrote, " Works of art have successfully represented our response to reality from the beginning. The artist tries to live in a way that will make greater awareness of the sublimity of reality possible. Reality, the truth about life and the mystery of beauty are all the same and they are the first concern of everyone."

Agnes concludes, "There is a purpose in our lives and it is in operation every minute. When we are right on the track we are rewarded with joy. We can know the whole truth with a request to our minds. If we are completely without direction we can withdraw and our minds will tell us the next step to take." I remembered a similar comment Agnes made in the interview with her in the New Art City DVD. Agnes found that connection to an inner voice that revealed insights to her and answers to questions as she worked.

It is that very connection that I depend on more and more with each new piece of work; that inner voice increasingly guides and shuts out the chatter and clutter of marketing, promotion, sales. The making of the work is now central, the connection to that center within fuels and guides the exploration.

It is possible to track Agnes' artistic evolution from her early days in New York City as part of the Abstract Expressionist era of the 1940's and 50's through her seven year sojourn from doing any painting at all followed by her choice to live and paint alone in an isolated part of the northern New Mexican desert. Studying the unfolding of an artist's life and work can be a rich source of inspiration. Alone with her work and a quiet contemplation of nature, I find great inspiration in Martin's leanings towards Asian philosophy and her connections with nature. How fortunate we are to have access to so many artists through the enormous documentation in both books and film of their work and ideas and inspirations.

As Nancy Doyle writes in her profile of Agnes, "Her work was influenced greatly by nature, however not in the sense of replicating nature - rather, she wanted the viewer to experience the same feelings they have when in front of nature. Some of her titles allude to nature - to leaves, rivers, flowers, etc., but her work has more to do with expressing positive inner states of existence. She has been associated with the Minimalist movement, but her work is less rigid, less cerebral - more spiritual in inspiration than Minimalist. She shared with her friend, the artist Richard Tuttle, certain attitudes about art and life, which stem from their interest in eastern philosophy - the ideas of ego-lessness, humility, and the Tao - in life and in art."

Many of us are drawn to art that attempts to express these "positive inner states of existence." Increasing numbers of western artists have been drawn to Asian philosophy. The works of those artists whose true inner selves seem to radiate through their imagery, marks and concepts are those that currently inspire and encourage me in my own artistic journey.

Let me close with this last quote from Martin's writing. because the advice it contains is vital for all of us:

"Make happiness your goal. The way to discover the truth about this life is to discover yourself."