Bonnie Veblen
  Wondrous Suchness: St. Mary's Project 2009
     
     
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On Communication, the Earth, and Meaning in Art

In her book, Has Modernism Failed? Suzi Gablik describes the current situation of Post-Modernism in the art world, where artists today can literally say anything in any conceivable way, and this is okay. (1) Some say that art has been liberated—liberated from tradition, from rules, from ritual. The problem is, if anyone can say anything, then what is actually said becomes less and less important. (2) With such “freedom of expression,” what meaning can art hold? What does it matter that we make art at all? Moreso, if there is no order, no tradition, no ritual to art, then we, as viewers, never know what to expect, and often walk into galleries with apprehension, fearing that we won’t be able to understand what we see because it seems unrelated to how we actually experience life. We fear that we might feel bombarded or unintelligent and so we must put walls up, we must be guarded as we go to galleries. Or else we just don’t go.

This is hardly a way to communicate. If you throw all the rules out, looking at art today becomes about survival—not taking in to survive, but shutting out. If looking at art is about shutting out, it is not about really listening, really seeng, really feeling. It is not about communication. It is not about understanding. In fact, in this last year it has been through finding artwork that I do relate to that I have come to see it as a potentially connective means of communicating.

The problem of being distanced and disconnected from our surroundings might seem as though it only exists in the art world, but it is in fact much more pervasive. One place that I see it is that each day we are bombarded with images and information in the form of advertisements, sounds, and products, and we have learned to tune these out very effectively, for we would completely overload if we let them all in. And having practiced shutting so much out, we even question the significance of harmony and beauty, denying that these qualities have any effect on us .(3) As a result, we have begun to forget what it is to really be open, to be unafraid of letting our surroundings permeate us, to be where we are when we are there.  

Further, we have lost our ties to the earth—most people have no idea where their food comes from, not just the place, but how it’s planted, harvested, and even cooked. Most people have no idea what animals or plants live in their area or what seasons and times of day they will be seen, or which phase the moon is in currently. With such a reliance on the abstracted numbers of scientific data and being so distanced from our sources of sustenance, we no longer know how to understand the earth as we live and experience it. We are forgetting how to feel, to listen, to see, to taste, to smell. We are forgetting how to be with this world.

And how sad is this! We, as a culture, are missing out on the nourishment and sense of connection to our surroundings that our everyday experiences can provide us. In the words of David Abram, “This landscape of shadowed voices, these feathered bodies and antlers and tumbling streams—these breathing shapes are our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate.”(4)

In my experience this year, I have come to realized that all my life, I have been trying to figure out one thing: how can we be in this world in a way that helps to create sensitivity, compassion and understanding? There are two interrelated parts to this, one of the heart, mind, and body—of taking in what surrounds us—and another of the voice and our marks left on the world—of giving, of communicating. In our society, this simple way of being sensitive, compassionate and understanding seems to have been forgotten.

My artwork is an important part of my attempt to reconnect—both letting my surroundings enter me, and also giving to others artworks that help them find our natural surroundings in all their varied and wondrous moods. I do not want to overload the viewer with extremes of sensory input or present them with something so abstracted that they don’t have a way to connect it with reality. Instead, I aim to translate the branches, horizon, buds, and earth I see, which are at once mundane in their recognizability, and wondrously beautiful in the momentary light that moves on and through them. It is the experience of alternately wondering at the world, and meditating on things in their suchness that I enjoy so much in other artists’ works and it is this experience that I wish to translate in my paintings for viewers because this is how I see and experience the world—with wonder for the everyday.

On Suchness and Wonder

In my artwork, I paint what I see. Looking outside my window, I see the light as it moves across rooftops, branches, blossoms, and leaves. I see the air and sky—the spaces that surround and envelop these forms, these beings—and I see the horizon, that visual reminder of the beyond. In Taoism and Buddhism, this experience of things as they are is called “suchness.” It is summed up in the word, “this.”

When I first saw one of Giorgio Morandi’s paintings it was in reproduction, and honestly, I simply didn’t get it. His paintings looked like nothing special, just plain, chalky whitish bottles in different arrangements, but my attitude changed when I saw one in person. Only in person could I see the surface of the painting, which had been built up and scraped down repeatedly, continually adding layer upon layer of paint until it reached this state of density that I saw before me. Moreso, the painting had a very different feel in person. It was intimate. Sure, these were plain bottles I was seeing, but they were very carefully considered, meditated on, even. The care with which Morandi treated those bottles in their subtle color, composition, and working was palpable. Like Morandi, I have been meditating on the everyday, painting only what is outside my studio window for this last semester. I have worked and reworked paintings, attempting to translate the trees and horizon that have become so familiar to me, and yet, like Morandi’s bottles, they are always different somehow.

Maurice Blanchard said, “The everyday is platitude…but in this banality is also what is most important. It brings us back to existence in its very spontaneity and as it is lived… it escapes every speculative formulation, perhaps all coherence, all regularity.”(5) When we can see things in their suchness—things as they are—there is a “wow” that we experience, a wow of amazement at seeing anew something so familiar.

At a workshop that I attended this spring, the woman leading it pointed out that we do not say “wow” anymore. “Wow” “Wow” It is such a simple response, of amazement and love for the world. Kids have no problem with this, but as we grow up, we are so busy with where we are going, or what we are looking for, that the actual wonder of our basic experiences goes unnoticed. But how wondrous it is to see. All this light in the world, these shapes and forms that echo one another, and we are too busy to notice them. It is this wondrous suchness that I wish to live and to communicate throughout my life.

On Painting, Light and Space

A large part of my experience this year has been in finding painting, a medium to which I was drawn, and at the same time very apprehensive about. Now I feel very connected to painting and even paint itself, which is so sensual that to look at it is to feel it with our eyes like a body. In Repose, John Singer Sargent’s use of thick daubs of paint asks us to feel the bodily surface of the painting as much as he asks us to feel the room and the rest embodied in the woman’s reclining posture. This sensuality in both material and subject is a quality that I aim to create in my own paintings. I wish to engage the viewer with the forms of trees and buds and branches as they are in various kinds of light through the bodily materiality of the paint.

What’s more is that when we see light in a painting, we are able to feel light as having a body—the fragile and immaterial qualities of light are joined with the dense and sensuous qualities of paint. The Romantic paintings of James Mallord William Turner do this especially well. In the 1800’s Turner was perceived as pushing the envelope of landscape painting by more closely translating how we see our surroundings as a field of shifting, integrating colors rather than as distinct and discrete objects.(6) The harmonic sensitivity of his palette creates a soft yet wondrous luminosity through which oceans, hills, rivers, trees and valleys are conveyed. Some of Turner’s later landscapes dissolve in and out between form and light ,(7) which makes them feel ethereal and transient, and yet this is balanced by their layered materiality, which makes them feel like they are surely here.

The dissolve of landscape from the clear into the obscure is also an element in the work of contemporary painter, Jake Berthot. In Berthot’s lighter paintings, illuminated forms emerge from the deep browns and blacks.(8) The paintings glow with an internal luminosity, but this light is partially hidden by darkness so that the familiarity of landscape is enveloped in the unknown.(9) His paintings are mysterious—at one moment you think you know where you are, but as the forms dissolve into one another you are not so sure. This mystery is yet another way to get to the “wow” of the wondrous, a mystery that I find when the evening is falling into night. Like Turner and Berthot, I experience landscape as a play of shifting light and shadow into which forms dissolve. My drawings especially act in this way, the trees beginning to dissolve and merge with their surroundings, and I’m interested in pursuing paintings that do this more.

While the Romantic artists painted vast landscapes in all their grandeur, helping viewers to feel a sense of wonder for the infinite, my own paintings function quite differently, cropping closely in on the trees and rooftops, and not giving the viewer much space in which to move, yet they still convey a sense of wonder. Rather than always expanding outward, trying to encompass all, I have a tendency to create compositions that have more flat abstracted spaces and that always brings the viewer back to an element that is near and present.

These aspects of blocking the viewer’s sight and creating flattened spaces are similar to the paintings and drawings of the Post-Impressionist painter, Edgar Degas. In our work, both of us set up compositions in fairly shallow spaces, that are about what is open and closed, what is near and far, what is clear and obscured, and what is seen and unseen.(10) Like Degas’ later drawings and paintings of dancers, I choose cropped frames that push the viewer close to a more clarified subject, which is set against a more abstracted background, pictorial elements which are informed by photography.(11)

On Landscapes and Essences

While Degas and I are both seeing in similar ways, we have very different subject matter. My work is grounded in our natural surroundings, though the cropped aspect of many of my drawings and paintings makes them different from more romantic depictions of landscape. All of my paintings are meditations on the changing light and weather that the landscape endures. Similar to the landscape paintings of Impressionist painter, Claude Monet, I aim to capture the essence of the particular light at a time of day or during a particular sort of weather and translate that for my viewers. In Antibes seen from the Sails Gardens (1888) Monet translates the clean air of a bright, sunny day so that we feel the clear light and bright colors of a tree and waterway. Here, he meditates on the bright, sunny light from a very particular location. Similarly, in my painting, storm rising, afternoon falling, it is the shifting light on the horizon, the swirling clouds, and the motion of the tree branches as they move in the wind that is most felt. This painting is a meditation on the moment of when a storm is rising, and like many of Monet’s paintings was done in several sittings at the same time of day, during similar weather. The sensitivity to a place as it exists in all kinds of light and color is something that I—like Monet—aim to convey in my paintings by limiting my subject to the immediate landscape outside my window.

I also see my more cropped paintings relating strongly to Monet’s water lily paintings in which he narrowed his focus so that we only see the repeated clusters of oval forms on a flat mass of swirling color—the lily pads as they float on the water’s surface. Water Lily Pond (1916-1926) is a highly abstracted representation focusing more on the light, color and general form of what he was seeing, and relying on our ability to recognize these simple forms or schema in order to ground us in reality.(12) Monet’s water lilies are not an attempt to convey the individuality of each particular pad and flower so much as the essence of the water lily, and the light and color he was experiencing. Similarly, my painting afternoon oak is less a description of a particular place or tree than a meditation on the essence of the blossoming oak tree and the branching patterns that we find in nature. Like Monet’s water lilies, I use clusters of repetitive linear marks to indicate the yellow blossoms, which hang in front of the dark branches of the tree, and beyond is a mass of more abstracted color—the horizon of other trees obscured by more blossoms, similar to the reflective surface of the water in Monet’s paintings. The growth pattern of the tree is distinct, but each blossom itself is generalized, very much like how Monet’s water lily clusters are distinct in shape and number but each pad and flower is generalized to an oval. A general attention to forms, and particular attention to light and color ties my work strongly to Monet’s and that of the other Impressionists.

On Distance and Intimacy

In the last few months, several people have asked me if I’m interested Gerhard Richter’s paintings, and this is not surprising, since there are many similarities between our work. Richter is a contemporary artist who paints both abstract surfaces as well as from blurred photographs, two ways in which I made work throughout this year. Richter is primarily interested in paint as a means of depiction, and his use of photographs as sources is meant to only deconstruct the photograph, pointing out its shortcomings. However, in this body of work he is still choosing to depict subjects, and we do make meaning from and about these subjects, even if he is mostly interested in the paint itself.

His landscapes in particular depict romantic vistas, yet they do not affect me very strongly because they are landscapes that we have come to expect to see pictured in our highly imaged world. What should be a breathtaking landscape has become flat, dull, and uninspiring the more we have seen it or images like it in photographs. In his use of photographs as source material, Richter is pointing to and commenting on our culture’s overuse of landscape as the vista.(13) Rather than delighting in the wonders that we can find in nature, he is just creating more and more images that have lost their resonance and is in effect putting more distance between his viewers and the land, all in the name of being interested in paint and dismantling the photograph.

This desire to point out or deconstruct our culture’s way of seeing is fairly central to the current situation of Post-Modernism in the art world where many artists have chosen to take on the role of a commentator, a role that, frankly, I’m not very interested in. I recognize the importance of waking up to our engrained cultural norms, but if we are always taking everything apart and pointing out how it’s failed, how can we ever really live life or move in a new direction? In my paintings, I hope to do the opposite of what Richter does in his paintings of photographs of landscape, engaging people with the beauty and wonder of our surroundings, helping people to see this same landscape anew.

While I do have a desire to capture my surroundings and translate them for the viewer, a desire that is strongly linked to the photographic, I do not want the more distanced technological mediation that the camera inserts with it’s view. This relationship with photography and the idea of capturing the essence of something is very much related to Impressionism. In the mid to late 1800s, photography was really beginning to take off as a medium, and yet the Impressionist painters continued to paint, to mediate what they were seeing through their own eyes, minds, and bodies rather than the mechanical lens of the camera. While it is true that I have used photographs this semester in order to explore compositional variations, I have relied on the living landscape as my main source from which I paint. In painting, I am still translating what I am seeing, providing for my viewers a mediated object that exists between them and the actual land. However, I am narrowing this gap by being able to engage with my surroundings using my own mind and body, a method that allows me to accumulate an experience through time rather than in a single instance.

Like Richter, the contemporary photographer, Uta Barth, is interested in the overuse of the vista, and has created an entire body of work around the blurred backgrounds that we expect to see behind people in snapshots.(14) However, Barth’s work, and especially her sequences of landscapes and interiors where weather and light change subtly, do resonate with me because they speak about being with our surroundings through time and thus regain an intimacy that Richter’s singular images have lost.(15) Barth’s works also tend to focus on a very small corner, the floor, or a foggy view out the window rather than a typical sunny one, and so she is creating intimacy with the less-noticed aspects of our surroundings that are nonetheless beautiful and engaging when we take the time to see them. It is the aspect of intimacy with our surroundings over time that I relate to in both Barth’s work and in the paintings of the Impressionists, and that I hope to convey through my own paintings through their meditative aspects.

A contemporary artist whose work is formally very different from my own, but with whom I find many connections is James Turrell, who also wishes to create intimacy between his viewers and elements of nature. When we first see one of Turrell’s skyspaces, it seems to be a solid floating rectangle of subtly shifting color that we could almost touch and hold, but on closer inspection, we realize that he has opened up a gap of ceiling to reveal the insubstantial, airy sky above. In this way, Turrell helps us to see and experience light as a distinct, ephemeral presence that is at once vast and intimate.(16) When art critic Richard Dorment experienced one of Turrell’s skyspaces as night fell, he said that he felt “connected to the sky in a way that has never happened before.”(17) Turrell helps viewers reconnect to the natural elements of space and light by helping us to see them anew, as I aim to renew the viewer’s connection with the wonders of light and growth in our everyday landscape.

On Continuing

From here, I intend to continue painting—to work on conveying the wondrous experiences of our everyday surroundings. Until recently, I haven’t been so aware of creating blocked views, flatness, or wider and more cropped frames in my paintings, but now I’m interested in actively questioning these elements and seeing how I can work with them to translate a particular experience with the land for the viewer. What happens when we are allowed to wander, to move through a space more? And what happens when we cannot—either by being blocked or by not having much depth in which to move? How does this affect our understanding of place and essences of beings within that place? How do we come to know a trees or blossom’s essence? How do these understandings of our surroundings affect us mentally and emotionally? I don’t have answers to these questions, but this body of work is a start on them, and I want to keep painting so that I can learn about them more. While many questions and possible paths lay out before me, and I do not know exactly what will happen in my artwork or in my life, I do know that more will come. More will come.

 

Sources Cited

1. Gablik, Suzi. Has Modernism Failed? New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984.

2. Ibid.

3. Viso, Olga M. “Beauty and It’s Dilemmas,” Regarding Beauty. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1999. 87-133.

4. Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1996.

5. Uta Barth: In Between Places. Ed. Sheryl Conkelton. Seattle, WA: Henry Art Gallery, 2000.

6. Gage, John. J.M.W. Turner: ‘A Wonderful Range of Mind.’ New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987. 1-19.

7. Warrell, Ian. “Into the Light,” J.M.W. Turner. London: Tate Publishing, 2007. 203-228.

8. Fyfe, Joe. “Jake Berthot at Betty Cuningham,” Art in America. September, 2006.

9. Ibid.

10. Arikha, Avigdor. “On Two Pastels By Degas,” On Depiction. London: Bellew Publishing, 1991.

11. Kosinski, Dorothy M. The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso. Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1999.

12. Gombrich, E.H. “Formula and Experience” Art and Illusion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960.

13. Viso, Olga M. “Beauty and It’s Dilemmas,” Regarding Beauty. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1999. 87-133.

14. Conkelton , Sheryl. “In Between Spaces,” Uta Barth: In Between Places. Ed. Sheryl Conkelton. Seattle, WA: Henry Art Gallery, 2000.

15. Ferguson, Russell. “Into Thin Air,” Uta Barth: In Between Places. Ed. Sheryl Conkelton. Seattle, WA: Henry Art Gallery, 2000.

16. Herbert, Lynn M. “Regarding Spirituality,” Art 21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001. 68-77.

17. Dorment, Richard. “Light, Color, Space,” Grove Book of Art Writing. Ed. Martin Gayford and Karen Wright. United Kingdom: Grove Press, 1998.

 

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Contact: bvveblen@gmail.com