In the Zone
My teenage sweetheart's parents were delighted and relieved to learn that I had found myself, and that we shared an interest, which was art. I was invited to dinner with my girlfriend and her parents, to clarify my intentions, which I took to mean my artistic intentions, and which were, at least, not at cross-purposes with my girlfriend's parents' implied concerns for their daughter's future.
I still blush at my youthful temerity accepting that invitation but, as my girlfriend said, we couldn't go out otherwise. Needless to say I was no match for their coordinated wit. Art was, for my girlfriend's parents, a cultural plaything. The experience probably had much to do with my obsessive defining, and refining, in writing, and re-writing, my notions, both artistic, and otherwise.
It's not like me to be content to just paint and let theory be damned. I have consistently, and conscientiously, sought to align both tendencies. It is my answer to the question of why I do, what I do. Getting started is not a problem. I have never wanted ideas. It was always after completion I had to ask myself, why? Given this personal disclosure, which I hope serves for background context, some objective observations concerning my methods—in theory and practice—may be appropriate.
Provisionally, let's say that painting is an intuitive thing to do. It's not like architecture -which follows a plan, never improvising upon the spur of the moment. That sort of arbitrariness is to be avoided for going over budget, for one thing. While he is practicing architecture, therefore, the architect's mind is constantly preoccupied with measuring, analyzing, visualizing, and so on, all rational faculties of the mind. Artists don't work that way.
At one point, not long ago—but after many years of practicing the art of painting—I began to notice random thoughts filling an otherwise empty head of mine. Was I becoming bored? Certainly my head was, before, less full of care. As a student and after, as I advanced my mastery of the medium, so it seems to me now, I was, then, more preoccupied with familiarizing myself with the many fine points of the medium, of technique, and of the purpose, of painting.
The reverie that returned most often was the recollection of that dinner with my teenage sweetheart and her parents. As I said, I was embarrassed even then by my own candor. To be specific, it made me cringe. It still does. While my reveries as I was immersed in painting were not inhibiting—unlike writer's block, for instance—they were distracting. Demanding would be a better word. Better still, the reveries were insistent, like an innocent—but importunate—child.
For intuition to guide the hand it must not be halted at random by distractions. The problem, for me, became one of how to mute the distracting recollections -which contributed nothing to the creative process. Unbidden thoughts cannot be banished from the mind—as in Zen meditation—as the creative function of the mind must operate at some level beneath consciousness. Painting is not meditation.
I made up my mind to do something about it; to not suffer, helplessly. I would pause, while painting, to jot down short notes—just a word or two—for later. That, in itself, provided immediate relief. Later, these jottings were duly entered into an ongoing list. Free association led to further memories, and so on. I began putting them in chronological sequence. The outline of an autobiography emerged.
Now, I can think of nothing more tedious to read (or write) than an autobiography compiled from free-associated personal recollections. That's therapy. What I did find interesting was that, as the compilation grew larger—more encompassing—the distracting thoughts, while painting, went silent. And, if they returned, or new recollections came to mind, I punctiliously jotted and edited the compilation and, lo, the static thoughts dispersed again.
I find an empty mind congenial to painting. Physiologically (so I conceive it), it is the central nervous system—without mental interruption—directing, and receiving feedback from, the peripheral nerves, which it does without assistance from the reflecting mind. Metaphysically, it is what the Greeks meant by episteme, and we moderns mean by epistemology. It is a specific kind of “knowledge,” acquired by practice -not by reflective thought, nor by deliberate study. It is cognition unmediated by the intellect.