The tension in an Agnes Martin is that the painting does not allow you to get close

The tension in an Agnes Martin is that the painting does not allow you to get close – a kind of cool intimacy – her paintings do not envelope you – physically it is more of an optical experience of perception – eye/mind as Agnes Martin said, “I make non-relational abstractions.”

What is silence, emptiness, fear, interval, internal, inside, color, light, emotion, feeling, yes, no, maybe, sometime, tentative, sure, definite, traveling light.

Kirtan music is repetition – allows you to go inward and have more internal space.

Time never stands still but as the earth spins being on a high wire, there is a stillness in the air – a weightlessness without gravity

Painting and a loss of self (ego), is the deepest expression, that also allows the self to surrender to the medium.

In Tibetan Medicine, it is the heart through which the consciousness of the senses flow.

When a viewer looks at a painting, their perception is not limited to the two dimensionality of the object or its static quality.

The mind has patterns that are transitory where there is movement.

Being open when painting is a kind of groundlessness open to ambiguity that threatens the parts of us that want certainty. It is edgy uncomfortable energy of stepping into the next moment without knowing what will happen.

This is necessary to not be able to identify what you are doing, and that allows the process to unfold.

Better to fail at an honest attempt.

These drawings have to be done without looking.

Rilke “pulse is consciousness

January 26th

Optical, illusion, material, air, weight, drip, gravity, color, relational

letting go of struggle means more space and a richer time in the studio.

Can a geometric form be a gesture – at once contained but also open?

There are no straight lines in nature. Geometry is a mental construct that is adaptable to image making and mathematics. Nature is full of irregular edges such as ice – the way ice melts – glaciers.

The image maker creates a fictive reality within the picture plane of a painting. it’s structure, it’s surface – the concreteness of materials.

Morphic Resonance – each successive generation

One generation generating the next. A pattern is expressed.

The intestine is a vascular network of muscle layer

The stomach is a gastric gland and that functions

how we digest and process information

Looking at Guston’s Roma paintings at the Philips Collection – I feel what they mean, but I can not identify or name the feeling.

Werner Herzog film – Cave – paraphrase

Language refers to a certain culture – place – an image is timeless – what was before , what is present, what is future. This is why translation is so important.

These images in the caves according to one archeologist is where the Shaman energy and reality – the spirit world and reality have fused – there is no boundary. A story told about Aborigines always touching on ancient work – if they see it starting to deteriorate – and when asked – why are you doing it? – the reply – I am not doing it – the spirit is guiding me.

This is also the intersection where reality and dream meet.

How the mind works – a narrative becomes how it is constructed that conveys another narrative, that is fictive.

In reading Lolita by Nabokov, it is not so much about the subject – but the language of how it is constructed – sentences become expressions of inside Humbert’s head – reality becomes trauma inside his mind – like Austerlitz by Sebald – a blurring of what reality is, where a person who is traumatized lives inside their mind. The boundary between internal/external no longer exists – all is fused. Where reality and imagination meet – where reality and dream intersect.

The idea of symmetry and light connoting the infinite – the divine and the need to be grounded, to evoke patterns of flow and energy.

The images themselves – a creative fiction are what generate the energetic forces around us that are not seen but felt through the body.