Co-generation
"...we're prone to overestimate our own agency in nature....Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject."
Michael Pollan, in The Botany of Desire
Lately I've found myself engaged again and again in contemplation, analysis, meditation on what constitutes "nature" and "the natural". This is, of course, the ancient philosophic question of "the good". In visual art, it is that play between the geometrically perfect conception, a drafted representation of a thing in itself, and the shaky, sloppy, imperfect movements that more accurately record and express the psychic and physical being of the artist, his mutability, his reality, that I feel characterizes all "great" art. What is it "the struggle of the artist against his limitations" Vonnegut said... It is the search, the struggle, and finally the acceptance, that creates the human dimension that underpins the oeuvre, gives it power, beauty, truth.
So I took an architecture class at the local JC, what better way to understand the natural than to study the "man made"? I like the idea of a Human architecture. I also like the idea of a Natural architecture. Can the two ever be reconciled?
When I was twenty I flew to Spain from California to study language and architecture and art history and early modern European history and Spanish girls. (Face it, I'm middle class. So grateful to be middle class.) I landed in Malaga, where Picasso was born. I had not met Picasso yet (meaning, I had never come face to face with his work); he was just a name, a monolith. At any rate, late in his life it turns out he painted some tiles to adorn the facade around the entry way of a little church in his home town that I happened to walk by one afternoon on the way from the bocadillo shop to the beach where I would watch the children pulling sardines from the jetties and the breasts of Europeans girls with (perhaps) healthier senses of self than their American counterparts. At any rate, these little vignettes were strikingly "Picassoesque" depictions of the life of Christ. Real Picassos. Had his sloppy late style and bold color and facility with form and the glaze was thicker and thinner in some parts, suggesting hand painting, and each one bore his signature, that minimal, pictographic "Picasso" that adorns coffee mugs and posters and t shirts in gift shops from LA to Beijing to Moscow. I stood looking at them for a long time, thinking they must not be "real", that they had to some sort of imitation or knock off. Then I saw it. Above and to the right of the virgen's visage, on a field of Andalucian ochre, an eyelash, fossilized in the glaze. It was a mystical moment for me, to see the intimate human frailty of a Principality like Picasso; the demiurge made flesh.
As my friend Thomas says of paintings, "they are just a record of the life lived."
Michael Pollan, in The Botany of Desire
Lately I've found myself engaged again and again in contemplation, analysis, meditation on what constitutes "nature" and "the natural". This is, of course, the ancient philosophic question of "the good". In visual art, it is that play between the geometrically perfect conception, a drafted representation of a thing in itself, and the shaky, sloppy, imperfect movements that more accurately record and express the psychic and physical being of the artist, his mutability, his reality, that I feel characterizes all "great" art. What is it "the struggle of the artist against his limitations" Vonnegut said... It is the search, the struggle, and finally the acceptance, that creates the human dimension that underpins the oeuvre, gives it power, beauty, truth.
So I took an architecture class at the local JC, what better way to understand the natural than to study the "man made"? I like the idea of a Human architecture. I also like the idea of a Natural architecture. Can the two ever be reconciled?
When I was twenty I flew to Spain from California to study language and architecture and art history and early modern European history and Spanish girls. (Face it, I'm middle class. So grateful to be middle class.) I landed in Malaga, where Picasso was born. I had not met Picasso yet (meaning, I had never come face to face with his work); he was just a name, a monolith. At any rate, late in his life it turns out he painted some tiles to adorn the facade around the entry way of a little church in his home town that I happened to walk by one afternoon on the way from the bocadillo shop to the beach where I would watch the children pulling sardines from the jetties and the breasts of Europeans girls with (perhaps) healthier senses of self than their American counterparts. At any rate, these little vignettes were strikingly "Picassoesque" depictions of the life of Christ. Real Picassos. Had his sloppy late style and bold color and facility with form and the glaze was thicker and thinner in some parts, suggesting hand painting, and each one bore his signature, that minimal, pictographic "Picasso" that adorns coffee mugs and posters and t shirts in gift shops from LA to Beijing to Moscow. I stood looking at them for a long time, thinking they must not be "real", that they had to some sort of imitation or knock off. Then I saw it. Above and to the right of the virgen's visage, on a field of Andalucian ochre, an eyelash, fossilized in the glaze. It was a mystical moment for me, to see the intimate human frailty of a Principality like Picasso; the demiurge made flesh.
As my friend Thomas says of paintings, "they are just a record of the life lived."
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| first rain |
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| "organic transformation project" |
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| ditto |
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| notes, thinking through what "organic" means, and what an organic architecture might imply |
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| studies |
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| work in progress, trying to finish in time for Lunacy |
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| ditto |
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| beautiful mythologies are everywhere |
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| Pygmy Live Oak, Los Osos, Ca. Inspiration from creation, soon to be a new painting, possibly someday a building. |
Hi from Andalucía Jordan. I'm Lola, found you by Sherry Lyn's blog. I like the way you write in your blog. Inspiring honesty. Seeking for that in myself
ReplyDeleteI see lots of strenght and passion in your paintings and connected with that