Day: August 29, 2022

The continuous search for the unseen is found in the Japanese practice of Reiki, a technique for accessing the ‘life force energy of the body.’ In this practice the hands are the conduit that connects what Reiki Master Horoshi Doi calls Hado, a word for wave energy.

As Horoshi Doi comments, “ the consciousness and the rhythm of the earth are programmed into the human body and constantly influence human life. For instance, the breathing rates for humans is eighteen times per minute which is the same as the ocean waves.”

I completed Reiki Master training in 2013. I learned how my hands could become a conduit for energy to flow.  

I believe the creative process taps into the unknowable truths that surround us. Like the circulatory system, blood flow, lymphatic system and the flow of water we experience in rivers and streams. All that is movement is energy.

The experience of viewing the Marina Abramović’ installation at the Jerusalem Biennale 2018

There she created a video screen with a huge grid where each square was filled with individual recordings of Tibetan Monks and Nuns chanting the Heart Sutra. The cacophony of sound expressed energy, hence the artist called it Waterfall. Because when Abramovic’ closed her eyes and listened, it sounded like flowing water.

The encounter of viewing a work of art can be a very powerful experience that involves all the senses, depending on how open and vulnerable one allows themselves to be as the viewer. By simply looking one can be open to the unknown possibilities that seeing can afford. An authentic experience in seeing is going beyond one’s sense of perception to a heightened  consciousness that is activated through this experience of observing and feeling through the senses.

The Octopus has three hearts, and its blood is blue.

A drop of blood equals a raindrop.

Werner Herzog, ‘The Twilight World’

“ the heart of a hummingbird beats twenty times a second, twelve hundred times a minute.”

Notes from lecture / American Embassy / Ankara

What most interests me is the fluidity of time and how the present moment can be expressed within the formal structure of the painting. Because simply put, right there on the canvas is where my thought and materials reach their deepest level of engagement with the natural rhythms around us, and the energies of the body.

The process of painting for me is always one of change. Everything that takes place on the surface is in the act of flux, shifting and thus activating the surface. 

The issue is not what to paint, but how to paint according to how I am wired — my neurology.

So the question is how to make meaning. How far can painting be pushed? How can something that is just paint become so much more than an inert material on a two dimensional surface that extends two and a half inches from the wall? How can a Painting be optical and an object at the same time?

The musician Yo Yo Ma once stated that while interpreting the music of Bach, he was searching for the DNA of the piece, of the structure. 

I find there is an underlying pattern and structure to all things inherent in nature. I observe the murmuration of birds in flight, and the instant shutter of a camera as marking time’s unfolding presence. My eyes adjust to these slipping glimpses, the arbitrary nature of seeing where the inability to hold this data all at once becomes the totality of my experiences, something I need to sustain through painting. Painting becomes language when it starts building associations one feels in the body, of relationships while painting. How we touch things, how we relate with other people, our relationships. As I paint, these feelings come up. How can I have two colors touch or not touch. Emotion is stimulated by color and how I touch the paint. 

One pursues visual ecstasy out of deep necessity.

Experiencing light on the horizon poses fundamental questions. Science is a rational explanation whereas the experiential conveys the infinite possibilities, including the magical. 

The horizon can be confusing like the light at dusk. Ambiguity of heaven and earth. Of moving between one realm of consciousness to another. This is what happens when painting. The deeper one goes the more palpable is the feeling.

Earth follows heaven
The human body follows the earth
The mother of 10,000 things
1,000 kisses deep

The four directions

One can see beauty only because of ugliness

Hold fast to the center
cool light of the moon 
the sun is laughing.

I am in Washington and the colors are grey and have a film over them. I see an orange Gerber daisy and the color is so clear and so intense. I say to myself that is what I want in the painting.

Reading Patrick Modiano and seeing the photographs of Robert Capa brings up loneliness and the absence of color. The grey gradations of shadow are the residue of Occupation and War.

A form based on fragments – Poland – national borders have changed over and over through the centuries – where multiple ethnic groups Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Germans, Ruthenians, and Jews, have lived side by side in a cacophony of languages and experience.

I am reminded of when I first heard the Sun Ra Arkestra perform.

Central European history — Olga Tokarczuk
“questions reality more. It’s more distrustful of permanent things.”

In ‘Flights’ a character says,
“Constellation, not sequencing carries the truth.”

“It is an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates is; it binds the galaxy together.”
— Jedi Master Obo – Wan Konobi

Painting is a rational progression of irrational thought. We have our biological age that is different from our painting age. 

The power is in the paint
The energy
The image becomes a portal to hold the energy

Perception is not necessarily truth. We have seen that a lot in this country. But perception can be very powerful and even dangerous. The idea that you can have free thought and choice in a Democracy is something we no longer can take for granted. It is all threatened. 

A note of color and it’s relationship can become a heightened feeling. 

The line is like a vein that conveys a living pulse.
The geometric construct of a line is a mathematical abstraction, whereas in nature there are no straight lines.
The cumulative layers of a painting while using an underlying geometric construct play against the intuitive meandering of the body that convey a living pulse. 

I had a background originally in ceramics with a focus on high temperature porcelain influenced from China and Japan, along with the influence of Korean tea bowls. I learned that Korean tea bowls were warped because they would place the wet clay bowls in the sun to dry – that the irregular shape was not a form of mannerism but rather necessity – how awkwardness expresses truth.