I recall H__’s lively walk as a lively line of head and body bobbing, arms waving, torso to and fro. The line—the undulant line of movement—is a large part of his presence.
I read something this morning, “Anything that is static, forget it. Work entirely toward the dynamic.” (R.B. Fuller advising college administrator on building types for a new university.) I have slowly weeded static elements out of my work and seeded dynamic systems in. Static here means a sluggish aspect or familiar convention that impedes vitality.
I have sought to make art that manifests the prevalent bracing and intriguing aspect of nature: change.
Art is the work that you must do to organize your appreciation of living. (In the case of visual art, the shelter wall is a good place to consider these efforts.)
Niels Bohr: Our task is not to penetrate into the essence of things, the meaning of which we don’t know anyway, but rather to develop concepts which allow us to talk in a productive way about phenomena in nature.
A museum of older European art offers fragments of ideas, dreams, stories, and histories. The picture gallery offers a series of apertures similar to knotholes in a construction fence. The museum is filled with windows to imaginary places. Dreaming—the sense of space and possibility generated from tiny fragments of information.(I am surprised that, as a child, I imagined so much—almost infinite— space in Disney’s Alice and Wonderland. Now the world depicted there seems limited and small.) The best traditional paintings suggest space and time different than the space and time the present viewer is in; they transport the viewer by telling a story. Yet the power to hold attention comes more from the liveliness or vitality built into the work. This vitality emerges from the elements of a painted picture—rhythm, line, color, tone, pattern. The quality of the arrangement of these parts depends entirely on the quality of the artist’s assessment of the world. The beauty of new art—the work that has evolved from the tradition of pictures—is that its references are not important to the experience. The new art does not suggest an imaginary or historical place but amplifies the living present. Its references are not important to the experience. The best of the previous art integrated all of the elements—didactic, narrative, and formal—and presented them equally; the work’s presence grew from the vital interplay of these elements. The experience of the newer good art is of the objects itself: its rhythm, line, color, tone, and pattern. The importance of reference has been subordinated to the work’s presence. Thus the museum displaying these more recent works becomes a simple sheltered interior, preferably with generous daylight, and without the dream-like windows provided by the older work. The light in the museum comes not from looking through gilded framed windows to illusions of old Holland or Florence but from actual windows, skylights, and doors.
One morning I woke up before dawn and turned on a reading light. An hour later I still read by the bulb light. I decided to check for sunlight. When the bulb went out the dawn appeared. The size of my experience jumped from three feet of cave light to 93 million miles of radiance. I was startled by the pleasure of this huge sensation.
Mughal-Persian architecture is characterized by an interlocking relationship of indoors and out. The enormous walls of Shah Jahan’s palace seem like interior and exterior walls simultaneously. The closest thing to it in western architecture occurs when the outdoors invades a building creating a ruin. In the twentieth century the best building designs have a healthy relationship with their locale—Poissy, the Barcelona pavilion, Ronchamp, Salk Institute. These are not tents or indigenous structures. These buildings bring together the newest building abilities and the most refined abilities of artistry. (Artistry is the coordination of mind and intuition directed to an end.) Vermeer’s paintings, as perfect as they are, reflect an attitude with the out of doors that is particular to the seventeenth century in Holland and therefore are evocative of another sense of the relationship of outdoors and indoors. In a decent twentiethcentury building his paintings become relics and unfortunately vulnerable to nostalgic admiration. When I imagine different artwork in a transparent, open-plan room (a room with a large view of something), the best new work seems more at ease.
Art and Science are the twin engines for configuring human experience into language. At the very least, language is required to consider experience, and, at most, it is required for experience.
Niels Bohr: What is it that we humans depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such that our messages do not lose their objective or unambiguous character.
All manifestations of humanity—all art and all science—are most pure and most effective when their means are the most economical.
Keep it simple I have been advised.
The weight of care dissolved when the elegant exploration of interval began to play this morning—Bach’s cello suites performed in Vezelay’s church’s nave.
Regarding nature in art: Art is known; nature is not.
Spiral expand contract ascending descending twisting collapsing wig-wag.
Regarding the Guggenheim: The extraordinary argument of the spiral museum; a place to muse about gravity and the attempts by people to make a useful object—as useful as a sail or a screw—That is to create a piece of understanding, a moment of intersecting reasons for being and add an instrument for apprehending nature.
Coil upon a concentric surface
Regarding the pleasure of experiencing the day, night, clouds, foliage, fauna, stars, smells, breezes, cold, heat, etcetera from the comfort of a building: All architecture aspires to the condition of no architecture— allowing the plain experience of time and place— and to modulate light and space poetically.
Braque: You see, I have made a great discovery: I no longer believe in anything. Objects don’t exist for me except in so far as a rapport exists between them or between them and myself. When one attains this harmony one reaches a sort of intellectual nonexistence—what I can only describe as a sense of peace—which makes everything possible and right. Life then becomes a perpetual revelation. Ça, c’est de la vraie poésie!
The blue light in the studio this morning exposes the flaws in my assessments.
Ideas and Statements: The ideal illuminates the specific. Art illuminates nature.
Yeats: Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not persuade, which does not condescend, is irresistible.
10/6/97 I was looking at my arm today. It was leaning out the driver’s window, sitting in the window frame, elbow pointed away, wind blowing up the blue t-shirt sleeve, and I saw the skin, hairs, moles of my arm in the autumn sunlight. My arm, away from the shirt sleeve and my watch—my elbow and upper arm—sat there unalloyed with language. The moon was also visible, lit by the same sun. I thought of the inscrutable moon’s disc and how its appearance is instantaneously consumable when a happy face smile is sketched upon it. The difference between naked and dressed, unprocessed and processed, normally mysterious and abnormally short-circuited into comprehensibility with a circuit-closing sign like a happy face. Non-closed and unknowable is the natural state of affairs. Closed and knowable creates a temporary comfort.
At the Howard Hodgkin exhibit: Rolling amongst the Hodgkins’ bloom I’m tripped by his meaningful titles. Resuming my pleasure as my amble returns to a stroll among the unknowns; then slap—the announcement of a figure or a scene. Perhaps the pleasure of intoxication is solely the pleasure of discombobulation.
The image of classical Greece —civilization welded to the rhythms of nature— this picture portrays more our civilization’s aspirations than its actual past.
The Brahms cello/piano sonata reveals the shore. Listening to the carefully constructed, non-conclusive phrases, winding and playing in the time caged in between the beginning and the end, unpredictable except for the rules, reminds me of waves approaching the beach.
2/2/92 It pays to remember sitting, bathing in the hot spring water near the San Joaquin South Fork at Mono hot springs. Cool cold water of the river, brackish hot bath cool with sexual and cultural distractions, young mothers with children, single men and women perched for the sun, quiet campground. And overriding this small show the cool cold skin of the Sierra Nevada— ponderosa pines, rough gray granite. The ripples of monumental peaks and ridges: ripples at a distance, difficult slopes up near. All over, though, the same quiet tune of breeze/stillness/chirp or rattle or peep, I look at my own belly in the same sunlight.
1/29/93 Dragging one of these paintings up into the high country from whose contours the shape was derived, across the gravel and trail dirt, the meadow grass and river bed, the weathered talus, the slow pink granite and the sky-lit reliquaries filled with high mountain water, through the stiff cool breezes, the morning puddle ice, the muddy trail/creek intersections, the sky banners, light snow, bright blue-white sunlight, aromas of the ponderosa pines, mud of the hot springs, song and crisp dance of the ouzel, through the deer trails, up the trail switch backs that allow me with my tools—equipment, language, food, and this painting—to negotiate gravity. What is the white, the green or the blue pitcher spout like up here? Are they artifacts that make sense in this environment: beautiful in so many ways, economical in all ways? What can I shave off of the paintings to make them light enough to carry with me?
11/91 No work of art supersedes the most simple of nature’s aspects in its beauty. The clear and useful construction and useful color of any natural object radiates the beauty of economy with the economy of beauty. Still humans make arrangements unfound in nature. Although clumsy by comparison, these manifestations are singular in Creation. These arrangements of natural beauty in painting, music, sculpture, and writing allow us to better sense the existing beauty.
J. L. Borges: [an aside to using verse to tell a story] Hladik felt the verse form to be essential because it makes it impossible for the spectators to lose sight of irreality, one of art’s requisites.)
Ellsworth Kelly: I have worked to free shape and form from its ground then work the shape so that it has a definite relationship to the space around it; so that it has a clarity and a measure within itself of its parts (angles, curves edges, amount of mass); and, so that, with color and tonality, the shape finds its own space and always demands its freedom and separateness.
B. Newman: Communion with nature, so strongly advocated by the theorists as the touchstone of art, the primal aesthetic root, has almost always been confused with a love of nature. And the artist falling in love with the trees and the sea, the beast and the bird, has not so much been in love with them as with his own feelings about them. That is why the historic attitude of the artist toward nature has been, in non-primitive peoples, one of sensibility. The concept of communion became a reaction to rather than a participation with, so that a concern with nature, instead of doing what it was supposed to do—give man some insight into himself as an object of nature— accomplished the opposite and excluded man, setting him apart to make nature the object of romantic contemplation.
B. Newman: To my mind the basic issue of a work of art, whether it is architecture, painting, or sculpture, is first and foremost for it to create a sense of place so that the artist and the beholder will know where they are.
B. Newman: (at an aesthetics conference in Woodstock, 1954) I’d also like to bring up what I feel is the fundamental error in the reaction of aestheticians towards art, and that is the attitude that assumes that everybody agrees about the nature of reality and on that basis, that the artist is someone who interprets some aspect of it or expresses himself in reaction to it. I think that Mrs. ___ has made the false identification of reality with nature. She asks, what is art and what does the artist do. As a citizen I would like to say that what I think the artist does is create reality and that which seems to be reality is really an imitation of art, of what the artist has made. By reality I mean human reality.
Edward Abbey: (running the San Juan River, Utah) Thus we while away the time while rifting at the rate of seven or eight miles per hour toward the Raplee Anticline and the first gorge through the world of rock. Rock the color of rusted iron, rock the color of sand, rock that resembles the formal patterns of a Navajo rug. Old stuff to my unjaded eyes and always new. But in quirky ways. After thirty-five years of contemplating this bizarre landscape I can still find no human significance in it and remain emotionally unmoved—though intellectually persuaded —by geologists’ involved theories. What do I care whether these cliffs and buttes and clines, these synclines, anticlines, and monoclines have been here a billion years or only for a geological moment? Deep time is too shallow for me, about as interesting as charts in a textbook. What matters is the strange, mysterious, overwhelming truth that we are here now, in this magnificent place, and never will know why. Or why not.
Aldous Huxley: The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is a principal appetite of the soul. When, for whatever reason, men and women fail to transcend themselves by means of worship, good works and spiritual exercises, they are apt to resort to religion’s chemical surrogates.
a more accurate description = a new language
Described experience is language and by this I mean mathematical, literal, musical, and visual language. Languages are the nets in which experiences of nature, conceptions of rhythm and interval, deductions as to why things happen, and conclusions are gathered. The description of experience that describes more accurately than before is new language. To perceive and to see accurately requires existing nouns, verbs and adjectives; we use the scaffold structure of language to comprehend our situation. But the perception of the new or previously unknown occurs outside of language—just outside. The perception of the new occurs free from language because the new has not yet been quantified. The first descriptions of this small increment [of discovery] are rough and pasted together from that which seems best to describe it. Eventually the new is more clearly understood and a language counterpart is designed for it. Recognize elements—a set of circles—an array of waves—but see for the first time the whole.
As one would rub garlic on a chef to impart flavor to a meal, rub intention on the artist.
John Cage: The way to test a modern painting is this: If it is not destroyed by the action of shadows it is a genuine oil painting.
The patterns in the Navajo rug from Two Gray Hills activate differently when the piano music in the library is Schoenberg’s rather than Bach’s. Are the patterns dormant in the presence of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, or Brahms? (5/00)
A favorite aphorism of A. Albers, noted in her retrospective catalogue, comes from Lao Tzu: Grasp the simple, embrace the primitive, Diminish yourself, bridle your passions.
Invention is the sincerest form of criticism.
An aspect of nature that impresses—the Genius of the Shore [1st draft 8/00] That which is relentless and active without regard for human concerns impresses. Industrial artifacts, with impersonal and ornament-less surfaces, with machined masses and sizes determined by function and economy, manifest no regard for the human bystander. (This explains some of the power present in the work of Judd and Flavin. When Judd hand-made elements of his prints they changed to human.) The pleasure of the waves, spray, light and thunder at the ocean shore or of lying on one’s back and viewing the stars from the earth’s nighttime shore; this quality is the genius of the shore. Among human inventions, the industrially scaled machines and their products supply a little bit of oceanic majesty. Because a brick or a steel rod does not address you—they address a need—they, in a small way, resemble a natural system like a river or an ocean. They don’t transport meaning. One can look at them without being addressed. This is the genius of the shore. Some of the European artists painted out the detail so finely that the artist’s hand disappears; at best the art object seems to be an object made in nature. Leonardo’s extraordinarily vital Lady with an Ermine suggests little about the artist and his personality because the construction lines disappear. The canvas borders enclose a living system; they enclose an entity without an apparent author. The Lady with an Ermine is a free-standing fact. Now these paintings can be compared to thoughtfully arranged mill-aluminum or carefully cut rolled steel as well. Now they can be compared to certain bicycles and telescopes. They are all graceful human artifacts. They are beautiful closed systems without an outstretched welcoming hand. They attract because they are attractive not because they beckon. This is the genius of the shore.
James Jamerson: If you don’t feel it, don’t play it.
The circle-like view through a telescope suggests the extraterrestrial by its shape alone and it is not extraterrestrial, it is just not a post and lintel window.
F. L. Wright: Isn’t a picture (like sculpture and like a building) a circumstance in nature; sharing light and dark — warm and cold — changing with every subtle change: seen now in one light; now in another?
Leonardo: The divinity which is the science of painting transmutes the painter’s mind into a resemblance of the divine mind.
Donald Judd: There’s no way that you can really understand the art that was done in the past. It’s too different. You can’t even understand another person’s work in a way whereby you could do it and add to it—living at the present. It’s a total illusion that you could understand anything about the art of the past and make something that looks like it in the present and have it be good art, because the gap in information and way of living and everything is too great. I think this gap is so profound; evidently, other people don’t think so, but—
Nataliie Wolchover Though galaxies look larger than atoms and elephants appear to outweigh ants, some physicists have begun to suspect that size differences are illusory. Perhaps the fundamental description of the universe does not include the concepts of “mass” and “length,” implying that at its core, nature lacks a sense of scale. This little-explored idea, known as scale symmetry, constitutes a radical departure from long-standing assumptions about how elementary particles acquire their properties. But it has recently emerged as a common theme of numerous talks and papers by respected particle physicists. With their field stuck at a nasty impasse, the researchers have returned to the master equations that describe the known particles and their interactions, and are asking: What happens when you erase the terms in the equations having to do with mass and length?” Nature, at the deepest level, may not differentiate between scales. With scale symmetry, physicist start with a basic equation that sets forth a massless collection of particles, each a unique confluence of characteristics such as whether it is matter or antimatter and has positive or negative electric charge. As these particles attract and repel one another and the effects of their interactions cascade like dominoes through the calculations, scale symmetry “breaks,” and masses and lengths spontaneously arise. Similar dynamical effects generate 99 percent of the mass in the visible universe. Protons and neutrons are amalgams—each one a trio of lightweight elementary particles called quarks. The energy used to hold these quarks together gives them a combined mass that is around 100 times more than the sum of the parts
R. L. Stevenson: The rain is raining all around, It falls on field and tree, It rains on the umbrellas here, And on the ships at sea.
Samuel Johnson: Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye; and while we glide along the stream of time, whatever we leave behind us is always lessening, and that which we approach in increasing magnitude. Do not suffuse life to stagnate; it will grow muddy for want of motion.
Wallace Stevens: Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit If there must be a god in the house, must be, Saying things in the rooms and on the stair, Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor, Or Moonlight, silently, as Plato’s ghost Or Aristotle’s skeleton. Let him hang out His Stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly. He must be incapable of speaking, closed, As those are: as light, for all its motion, is; As color, even the closest to us, is; As shapes, though they portend us, are. It is the human that is the alien, The human that has no cousin in the moon. It is the human that demands his speech From beasts or from the uncommunicable mass. If there must be a god in the house, let him be one That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness, A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass Of which we are too distantly a part.
Matisse: There are painters who spend their whole life looking and not finding: that is because they have more intelligence than sensitivity.
The standard for beauty, attractiveness, interest, mystery, paradox, pleasure,--all that which is pursued by one’s attention and heart—is that which already exists. The world so to speak.
There are the features of an artwork that remain in the room: color, shape, rhythm of composition. There are the features of an artwork that correspond to experience outside the room. No hope of re-presenting something; some hope of recalling a correspondence.
The most important quality resides in the thing itself—not what it indicates or describes—the language itself is the content—the measure.
There is an unintended tyranny in configuring this or that on the flat of paper— everything in creation unfolds in three/four dimensions.
Georges Clemenceau: Augustus needed the approach of death to learn that “the comedy” was over. Monet, without comedy, always doubtful of himself (which is the privilege of maturity) could see the complete success of his drama, though refusing to give his Water Lilies to the public before his death—the last gesture of a likable self-distrust which in its noble frankness rounds out the magnificence of disinterested energy.
8/16 The first effect of a fine artwork is to underline boldly the present—the vibration of now. Even historical paintings by Poussin or portraits by Leonardo -- their first power is to call out now.
Harmony parallel to nature—
The simple divisions of thought implicit in Latin and early languages—room to imagine—the simple arrangement of image on cave wall in Herzog’s film. All of the beautiful rectangles of M. Hafif arrayed in the Swiss Kunsthalle—and A. Martin’s paintings ally with the orthogonal language of our architecture—which isolates the artwork in an architectural connection. Used to be a knock on ceramics that it was tied to function — that is nothing like being chained to a wall.
Remember opening the bathroom window letting in the warmth and the bird calls.
Creation rhymes—hence the correctness of a waterbody’s surface.
Monet: Only paint what you see, paint to not see.
The painted structures manifest the shape of the valley/array of mountains by reducing form to a sequence or arrangement of lines -- lines and shapes derived from measurement. The ridges, edges, pockets, etc. that the lines indicate are as much the voice of the painted structure as is the overall shape, the integrity of the surface, the color, and the color’s application. Similarly important is the beautiful edge—the element that arises from the sectioning of the flowing earth’s surface—of lesser importance is the armature that conducts the new form to a simple and logical relationship with the wall.
Pattern and its relationship to intention—the matrix within which resides a story or an account or a portrait or a lesson—the pattern, the presence of a lively field, a sensible rhythm—a pattern that allies with the vigorous and not so vigorous structuring of the world—the patterned organization of living organisms and the slower patterning of what seems lifeless—rocks, clouds, rain, streams, and the ocean surface—the beguiling surface where two systems touch but don’t mix (when in repose) air and water air and earth water and earth.
Activate an empty room. De-activate a crowded room.
William Butler Yeats: Lapis Lazuli (for Harry Clifton) I have heard that hysterical women say They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, Of poets that are always gay, For everybody knows or else should know That if nothing drastic is done Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out, Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in Until the town lie beaten flat. All perform their tragic play, There struts Hamlet, there is Lear, That's Ophelia, that Cordelia; Yet they, should the last scene be there, The great stage curtain about to drop, If worthy their prominent part in the play, Do not break up their lines to weep. They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay; Gaiety transfiguring all that dread. All men have aimed at, found and lost; Black out; Heaven blazing into the head: Tragedy wrought to its uttermost. Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages, And all the drop scenes drop at once Upon a hundred thousand stages, It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce. On their own feet they came, or on shipboard, Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back, Old civilisations put to the sword. Then they and their wisdom went to rack: No handiwork of Callimachus Who handled marble as if it were bronze, Made draperies that seemed to rise When sea-wind swept the corner, stands; His long lamp chimney shaped like the stem Of a slender palm, stood but a day; All things fall and are built again And those that build them again are gay. Two Chinamen, behind them a third, Are carved in Lapis Lazuli, Over them flies a long-legged bird A symbol of longevity; The third, doubtless a serving-man, Carries a musical instrument. Every discolouration of the stone, Every accidental crack or dent Seems a water-course or an avalanche, Or lofty slope where it still snows Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch Sweetens the little half-way house Those Chinamen climb towards, and I Delight to imagine them seated there; There, on the mountain and the sky, On all the tragic scene they stare. One asks for mournful melodies; Accomplished fingers begin to play. Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
A thought—as a sequence—lays out itself in time whereas a feeling is now an artwork always harbors a conceit: nail on the wall, canvas, back side— The beauty of an autogenous object—a tool—derives from its completeness as a thing—it isn’t about anything—just is and yet nothing comes from nothing -- intention addressing phenomena.
Walking through the Seurat drawings at MoMA the rhythm of tones used to evoke the drawings’ subject—constant soft dark and light—whether a sail, his mom, a dress, a beachgoer—the artist’s modesty is present—is radiant. Seurat evokes his motif with reverence—saying little about himself except exuding his affection for this or that in light. The measure with which Seurat measures—a bit like a mantra—a sound the effect of which is known.
Elegance wants to be the footprint of intention. Let intention leave, if any trace, an elegant footprint.
Light, surface, shadow, darkness. Darkness light surface shadow. Shadow as a value—shadow = not lit. Darkness defined by the absence of light. Dark as active, light as passive. Define light as the absence of darkness. Light as active, dark as passive.
Nature blooms towards an ideal—the living. The lucky man is usually the man who knows how much to leave to chance. Matisse was naturally inclined to see and observe everything as a miracle.
The clarity of a crisp horizon. The precise precision of a windswept morning horizon. The curve and the circle of vision crisply intersect. The variation in density of water allows the sea to separate from the sky. The varieties of blue—fractions of darkness, fractions of the whole, some percentage of an absolute. --a glass, a boat, a horizon— As the waterline on a boat is always in the same place -- perpendicular to gravity’s persistent draw, so it is with wine in a glass -- either at the lips or at rest on a table. The plane of liquid is always tangent/parallel to the earth’s surface – perpendicular to the draw of gravity.
W. H. Auden (a fortunate misprint) The ocean has names for rivers and bays.
Seurat: Art begins when artificial lights come on. That’s the perception of a great painter. Whistler is right.
The least efficient use of the past is to compare existing work to what is proposed. Better to study existing work in relation to nature and social circumstance—see how it works. To find the existing corollary to new or proposed work fly it against nature only. Thinking of the yet-to-be born in relation to existing work is to diminish its potential— its possibilities. Better to fly it in the sky and see if it stays up.
A shape—the effect of which is known. A word as a mantra -- the effect of which is known.
Delacroix: That fleeting moment of gaiety that runs through the whole of nature. The new leaves and the lilac, and the sun made young again. During these brief moments melancholy is put to flight. If the sky becomes cloudy and overcast, it is like the delicious pouting of one’s sweetheart; one knows it will not last.
Delacroix Exact imitation is always colder than the original. This is what I meant when I said a short while ago, that although the use of a model can add something striking to a picture, it can only happen with extremely intelligent artists; in other words the only painters who really benefit by consulting a model are those who can produce their effect without one.
If it were the case that the space where this exhibition hangs, were given over to the Kerns and the Merceds—the relationship to the trees and clouds seen out the windows would be stronger with the works than to the actual gallery space. These hulls would seek to be amongst that which flows. And no human endeavor can last long in that world. Yet for a moment: correspondence! After a few minutes of sitting quietly—with the company of a sound the effects of which are known—thoughts that paddle towards an answer give way to awareness without purpose The paddling of reason gives way to the wave ride of awareness unencumbered with purpose.
Matisse: I know that Seurat is completely the opposite of a romantic, which I am; but with a good portion of the scientific, of the rationalist, which creates the struggle from which I sometimes emerge the victor, but exhausted. Delacroix’s composition is more entirely created, while that of Seurat employs matter organized scientifically, reproducing, presenting to our eyes objects constructed by scientific means rather than by signs coming from feeling. As a result there is in his works a positivism, a slightly inert stability coming from his composition which is not the result of a creation of the mind but of a juxtaposition of objects. It is necessary to cross this barrier to re-feel light, coloured and soft, and pure, the noblest pleasure. Delacroix’s imagination, brought to bear on a subject, remains anecdotal, which is a shame; this relates to the quality of his mind, for Rembrandt in the same conditions is noble. A word that I never can say in front of a picture by Delacroix…I am happy with my picture that returns me to the middle of all these movements of my mind.
Meaning—perhaps the least important feature of creation.
Everything in a state of becoming the measure of a bird song. How does the new shape measure or sit alongside this ancient song? What is it in an artwork that we seek that is not already here?
The familiar light and shade of a river’s path.
A circle is a natural unit of seeing -- the first unit of seeing. Like any lens, the eye gathers light and dark within its broad circles. From these circular fields, the mind begins to discriminate; the mind calculates position, motion, and distance. Horizon, height, and width are realized and the mind construes a scene -- the elements fall into a relationship with the horizon. Even though the horizon itself is an elliptical curve – so faintly curved -- it is effectively a straight line. Hence the convenience of depicting a scene with a horizon as well as that which in it that stands—horizontal and vertical.
Yun Hyong-keun: Since everything on earth ultimately returns to earth, everything is just a matter of time. When I remember that this also applies to me and my paintings, it all seems so trifling.
Richard Feynman: It's only through refined measurement and careful experimentation that we can get a wider vision. And then we see unexpected things. We see things that are far from what we would guess and imagine. So our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not as in fiction, to imagine things which aren't really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.
Bertrand Russell A watercourse which at most times is dry gradually wears a channel down a gully at the times when it flows, and subsequent rains follow the course which is reminiscent of earlier torrents. You may say, if you like, that the river-bed “remembers” previous occasions when it experienced cooling streams. This would be considered a flight of fancy. You would say it was a flight of fancy because you are of the opinion that rivers and river-beds do not “think.” But if thinking consists of certain modifications of behavior owing to former occurrences, then we shall have to say that the river-bed thinks, though its thinking is somewhat rudimentary. You cannot teach it the multiplication table, however wet the climate may be.
Precise as a pond.
The order of urban life – is the order with which we come to stand – that is the language with which we describe the world to ourselves. Our sense of here and there come from the language we use to describe ourselves and our understanding of this and that. So – considering that that which strikes our imagination as a signal to pay attention – the takeaway from Duchamp are his standard stoppages. He formalized a meter’s length when its length – a dropped meter-long string -- was allowed to set itself. This was an essay on the relative value of order and standards. Its real value is its elegant capturing of an event.
Certainly, as spacecraft Endeavor set down in the Gulf of Mexico, the beauty of all the elements in the scene – so much care and love – and simplicity & thoughtfulness – clear headed beauty. Look for alliance with that portion of manifest creation.
A. Albers: The objects of nature are what we consider to be reality. Art objects are objects of both reality and vision. The reality of nature will appear to us as never ending, for we know nature only as part of nature. As we examine it, it is endless. It obeys laws never totally lucid to our understanding. The reality of art is included in itself. It sets up its own laws as completion of vision. Art is constant and complete.
Now is where everything is.
When does matter -- at what scale -- at what scale does matter become competitive? With living things -- at the scale of known life -- so-called survival comes into play. Trees -- a community of trees and the way that they might interact. What sort of souvenirs or distractions would a grove prefer?
The flow of attention -- if one's attention is the real product of awareness, then to follow one's attention might provide evidence of a structure, or a way of seeing things somewhat different than what might seem obvious at first.
Hokusai: All I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three I learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence when I am eighty, I shall have made still more progress. At ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at a hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvelous stage; and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive. I beg those who live as long as I to see if I do not keep my word. Written at the age of seventy by me, once Hokusai, today Gwakio Rojin, the old man mad about drawing.
To the extent that any artwork is a sign, then it is in the family of writing -- that is -- an indication of something observed, seeking to capture something of something else's nature. Because everything else simply is. Under the broad umbrella of language then are artworks. And any language seeks the energy of the observed. Hence, well-observed and re-configured, an artwork lives along side that which it describes. Essential here is a language nearly as modest as nature's invention -- that is no sign of authorship. Perhaps the most modest of inventions are not artworks but tools. However tools often lack the extra dimension of pure love -- the pure love that gives rise to the artwork's attempt to describe or capture -- say -- those wavelets on the shore today.
The question often is where to stand regarding this or that contention or point of argument. Perhaps point is the best metaphor -- as the confusion about having a point of view arises along side understanding the larger nature of change. A point will have its own reasons for being attractive, say: environmental prescriptions, social change, political adventures. However, once any of these arenas of concern is reduced to a point or a position, one quickly loses sight of the larger shape -- a shape so large that contradictions and paradoxes are part of its build. The larger shape more resembles the shape of change.
June 16 On the slope we called Surprise -- the steep wave of a hill just west of the June Mountain lodge, Martha and I were gathering discarded or lost this and that: old match covers, crumpled papers, a variety of forlorn and misplaced miscellany. And we were putting all of this stuff in bags so that the hill would be clear of trash. Once done, the ground we were on softened -- became a little sponge-like. We walked a few steps towards the lodge and somehow I better understood that the earth -- spherical spinning -- was quite alive and maybe I could say aware of itself. All of everything earthbound -- was it. So to not comprehend that it was a friendly generous being was being a bit oblivious to what was now obvious.
B. Newman: Don't tell me who my father is. My father is not Cézanne. Paul Cézanne is not the father of all modern art. I'm not a bastard. I know who my father is. My father is the late Monet and you don't have one in the Museum of Modern Art collection.
Look for evidence of both energy paths. Look for the dragon at every site.
The feminine shape of the valley -- the female spirit never dies. We call it the mysrterious female. Subtle yet everlasting! Seems to exist. In being used, it is not exhausted.
Err on the side of carefree.
The last thing I seek to do now is show a place as a place. That which is attractive attracts not because of what it is, but because of what it looks like before you know what it is.
Johns The processes involved in painting are of greater certainty and of, I believe, greater meaning than the referential aspects of the painting. I think the processes involved in the painting in themselves mean as much or more than any reference value the painting has.
Einstein Now Michele Besso has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Cezanne It took me forty years to find out that painting is not sculpture.
It is not to draw what you see, it is to draw that which catches your eyes' attention.
Matisse One of the most striking things in America is the Barnes collection, which is exhibited in a spirit very beneficial for the formation of American artists. . . . This collection presents the paintings in complete frankness, which is not frequent in America. The Barnes Foundation will doubtless manage to destroy the artificial and disreputable presentation of the other collections, where the pictures are hard to see—displayed hypocritically in the mysterious light of a temple or cathedral. According to the current American aesthetic, this presentation seeks to introduce a certain supposedly favorable mystery between the spectator and the work, but it is in the end only a great misunderstanding.
Carl Andre My idea of a piece of sculpture is a road, That is, a road doesn’t reveal itself at any particular point or from any particular point. Roads appear and disappear. We either have to travel on them or beside them. But we don’t have a single point of view for a road at all, except a moving one, moving along it.
So beautiful the lapping water at the shore's edge at Orchard Beach yesterday morning --- like a second hand giving the news of passing time. Unlike the slower pace of the shore itself, or for that matter, the islands.
Soetsu Yanagi Washi is a very simple material, yet the longer I look at it, the more enthralled I become. Handmade washi is replete with appeal. Looking at it, touching it, fills me with an incredible sense of satisfaction. The more beautiful it is, however, the more difficult it is to put to use. Only a master of calligraphy could possible add to its beauty; it is exquisite just as it is. This is wonderfully strange, for it is merely a simple material. Yet plain and undecorated as it is, it is alive with nuanced beauty.
as inanimate as a breeze.
The drawing wants to be cool even though drawn from the active scene. The field of view provides rhythms, intervals, dynamic patterns -- apparently all on a plane -- for consideration. Any scene can be re-graded into a plane -- hence the vitality in Seurat.
Louis Kahn I had this thought that a memorial should be a room and a garden. That's all I had. Why did I want a room and a garden? I just chose it to be the point of departure. The garden is somehow a personal nature, a personal kind of control of nature. And the room was the beginning of architecture. I had this sense, you see, and the room wasn't just architecture, but was an extension of self.
unencumbered by sobriety
John Muir Were the flights of all the ouzels in the Sierra traced on a chart, they would indicate the direction of the flow of the entire system of ancient glaciers, from about the period of the breaking up of the ice-sheet until near the close of the glacial winter; because the streams which the ouzels so rigedly follow are, with the unimportant exceptions of a few side tributaries, all flowing in channels eroded for them out of the solid flank of the range by the vanished glaciers, -- the streams tracing the ancient glaciers, the ouzels tracing the streams.
Seek to not alter the scale of the room nor diminish the pleasure of light in the room.
Sorolla Claude Monet once said that painting in general did not have enough light in it.
Scheldahl In truth, Matisse did both at once, integrating painting’s two primordial functions — illustration and decoration.
John Playfair Every river appears to consist of a main trunk, fed from a variety of branches, each running in a valley proportional to its size, and all of them together forming a system of valleys, communicating with one another, and having such a nice adjustment of their declivities that none of them join the principal valley either on too high or too low a level; acircumstance which would be infinitely improbable if each of the valleys were not the work of the stream which flows in it.
Tu Fu (DH) Gazing at the Sacred Peak For all this, what is the mountain god like? an unending green of lands north and south: from ethereal beauty Creation distills there yin and yang split dusk and dawn. Swelling clouds sweep by. Returning birds ruin my eyes vanishing. One day soon, at the summit, the other moutains will be small enough to hold, all in a single glance.
Things that are growing don't ask questions.
Good works were and are foremost -- specific objects. That they suggest narrative or meaning is an attribute of a larger successfulness. Their beauty emanates from some sort of elegant completeness.
Shih - Tao The perfected man must be universal and enlightened: being universal he responds to change; being enlightened he undergoes transformation. He perceives things beyond their material forms, and when composing these forms, he reveals no trace of his efforts. Ink seems applied as if the painting were already created; brush movements appear to result from spontaneous activity.
Rilke Without looking at a particular one, standing between the two rooms, one feels their presence coalesce into a single reality. As if these colors were able to eliminate one's indecision for all time. The good conscience of these reds, these blues, their simple veracity nurtures one; and if one places oneself as well-prepared as possible among them, it is as if they were doing something for you. One also notices, and better each time, how necessary it was to transcend love; it is natural, of course, to love each of these things while rendering it, if one shows it, one renders it less well; one judges it instead of saying it.
Bacon The uses of light are infinite in enabling us to walk, to ply our arts, to read, to recognize one another—and nevertheless the very beholding of the light is itself a more excellent and a fairer thing than all the uses of it.
Wright An excessive love of detail has ruined more fine things from the standpoint of fine art or fine living than any one human shortcoming; it is hopelessly vulgar.
Don't resist the beauty of the sketch.
Wright [Hiroshige] here you get a sense of tremendous limitless space. Instead of something confined within a picture. On what is your attention focused? Nothing.
Wen Cheng-Ming My heart is undisturbed by the carts and horses of the workaday world.
Wang An-shih (DH) Dawn lights up the room. I close my book and sleep, dreaming of Bell Mountain and full of tenderness. How do you grow old living with failure and disgrace? Stay close to the cascading creek: cold, shimmering.
Start off slow -- then ease up.
Looking through the 2022 box of watercolors and ink paintngs with Allison, Hart, and Martha last night -- such straightfoward discussions of the attributes of each painting. Especially interesting to test the paintings in different light levels. To be noted -- the easy dissassociation from depiction. All three of them did not hesitate to drift away from the pleasures of depiction if the emergence of pattern, rhythm, tone, color, or some lovely element in the field of vision had been acccurately noted in paint or ink. Perhaps more accurately -- some of these note-like paintings, made with proper ink on well-made paper, confer what is noticed with a spot or stroke on the paper -- letting the correspondence occur.
There is some relationship of rhythm and form scaling up and down the Sierra; small elements resemble in shape larger elements. A boulder's face might have swellings and indents that resemble the much larger forms of valleys and mountains. The similarity of these forms at different scales, if not just amazing, is certainly charming. The earth is inherently attractive.
Nice to see the patterns once more on that North Wall. Takes a moment to see it as a field and less an object or array of objects. The patterns, the result of such a variety of forces and circumstances -- recognizing sets -- some vertical, some diagonal, some parallel to the horizon -- all splendidly orchestrating what you see and feel gazing at the wall -- the look changes like a clock face. Actually, -- more accurately -- a moving clock face, resembles anything one attends to in daylight. And the colors seek to remind me of some chromal / tonal relationships in the scene. Not to record accurately the color -- instead lay in color to stand in for -- like a word stands in for a thing. The color on the paper must elide with the experience in the field. For the most part that happened. Although the paper made a difference, not just the paper's color but the nature of its sizing.
Anything can become a sign for something else. And any thing, taken aside and examined, immediately becomes relative to something else: bigger than, similar to, different from, etc.. Association immediately occurs. This phenomenon acknowledged, the artwork is best that orchestrates the array of associations it generates; a wonderful artwork manages its associations wonderfully. Barnett Newman was stunned when his simple Onement seemed to sit there and not generate associations. Oddly Newmann felt that the precedent for his invention was the late work of Claude Monet -- all drawn from the scene of his engineered pond at Giverny, with its surface of reflections and flowers and its pale of trees. The format is part of the work. Cezanne's brushstrokes align with what is seen -- the motif and with the vertical and horizontal nature of his paper or canvas. Monet not so much -- until the very last works where his array of notes on color, tone, form, pattern, and rhythm on enormous canvases are mounted in elliptical rooms of his own design
Dan Flavin I believe that art is shedding its vaulted mystery for a common sense of keenly realized decoration. Symbolizing is dwindling—becoming slight. We are pressing downward toward no art—a mutual sense of psychologically indifferent decoration—a neutral pleasure of seeing known to everyone. For many years, well from about 1960, I drew along various shorelines in fairly fair weather. I thought it important to sketch, however freely, from direct observation. In 1985, I decided to start to draw in season and out, which meant that I would synthesize "sails" over water (never incorporating ship hulls, however) whenever I wanted. Pencil was abandoned almost all together, in 1986, to vine and compressed charcoal sticks, I added blue conte crayons. I renewed regular use of bright white double-ply Bristol Board stopped in the mid 1960-s. Triangularly shaping paper -- according it a sail-like form -- became possible...By the way, I sense "sails, sole, "sails" out and off in the breadth of waves, as emblematic of a terrifically self-satisfying assertion of human independence under them. A serious sailor has told me that my drawings reveal a strong sense of the romance of sailing. Yes, I imagine so.
Before settlers arrived in the Central Valley in the 1800s, Tulare Lake was the center of life for the Native Yokut people who lived by its shores and along the rivers. Then farmers began diverting water and claiming land in the lake bottom. More than a century later, members of the Santa Rosa Rancheria of the Tachi Yokut Tribe live near what was once the lake’s north shore. The tribe’s leaders have agreed to diversions that will channel some of the floodwaters onto their lands, easing pressure on the system while also helping to recharge groundwater. The lake’s rise is “just a very small reminder of what was once here,” said Leo Sisco, the tribe’s chairman. The phantom lake, which the tribe calls Pa’ashi, remains central to their spiritual beliefs. Their traditional songs include passages that say when the water rises, “that’s the lake telling us, ‘OK, it’s time for you guys to get out of here now,’ ” said Robert Jeff, the tribe’s vice chairman.“So that’s when our people would pack up,and we’d head to the mountains, to our other villages, until the water receded -- it was time to move to higher ground.
A. Martin People think that painting is about color. It's mostly composition. It's composition -- that's the whole thing. The classic image -- two late Tang dishes, one with a flower image -- one empty. The empty form goes all the way to heaven.
Shih-tao There were no painting methods in remote antiquity, for the Uncarved Block had not yet disintegrated. When it did, methods were established. But what is the basis of any method? They are all based on the Holistic Bushstroke. The Holistic Brushstroke is fundamental to depicting everything in existence and is the root of all images.
R M Rilke But the watercolors, which gave rise to all this, are quite beautiful. Just as self-assured as the paintings and as light as the others are massive. landscapes, delicately pencilled contours, upon which here and there, as emphasis, a fortuity of color falls, a series of spots wonderfully arranged and of a sure stroke: as if a melody were being echoed --
Wang An-Shih (DH) River When a spirit-spring broke open, it began swelling and coiling on ahead and through mountains crowded up, blocking the way. It keeps on flowing right on time to the sea, harboring bright pearls in mud and sand, frolicking dragons in cloud-in rain dark. Why ask where all the depths come from? River gods see no further than themselves.
S. Johnson The great end of prudence is to give chearfulness to those hours, which splendor cannot gild, and acclamation cannot exhilarate; those soft intervals of unbended amusement, in which a man shrinks to his natural dimensions, and throws aside the ornaments or disguises, which he feels in privacy to be useless incumbrances, and to lose all effect when they become familiar. To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.
make work that allies with, and does not conflict with, the flowers.
R.S. Deese The dream I’d had the night before: I was at the Cory house waiting for Nick, at his current age, to show up, and I was standing in that outside space between the washing machine and the carport (was there a lemon tree there?). Mom, about as young as she was when I was Nick’s age, walked by in a hurry as if she was headed for some work to do, like grading papers, inside. I said, “Have you seen Nick yet?” and she kept walking. I woke up with a sense of everything being simultaneous, and that it made perfect sense to have a dream with current Nick and younger Helen in it, both as matter of fact characters.
H. Melville In summer, too, Canute-like, sitting here, one is often reminded of the sea. For not only do long ground-swells roll the slanting grain, and little wavelets of the grass ripple over upon the low piazza, as their beach, and the blown down of dandelions is wafted like the spray, and the purple of the mountains is just the purple of the billows, and a still August noon broods upon the deep meadows, as a calm upon the Line; but the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic, and the silence and the sameness, too, that the first peep of a strange house, rising beyond the trees, is for all the world like spying, on the Barbary coast, an unknown sail.
True but not illusory, as clear-headed and taut as the stars aligned that configure a constellation. Instruments for enjoying the presence and passage of time, depicting and not contradicting, catching what goes by so fast.
the shape of things is not the shape of things at rest —the shape of things is the shape of things in motion.
Matisse Cutting directly into color reminds me of a sculptor's cutting into stone.