You Are What You See

I am still kicking around a continuation or a companion piece to a painting I did for my sister a few years back and things took a different tack. In the course of reading some Daoist alchemy texts and essaying my first stab at Chinese translation, I found a sudden visual inspiration/corollary to the work.

I’ve also been teaching taijiquan and qigong to seniors – until the first week in March, to be sure – and I think the additional load of those practices may have opened up additional gates for this. In any case, there’s a fair bit of work coming out of me again. Some of it okay, some of it wretched, and some of it, I actually like.

What I’ve been mulling over today is the digestion of specific visual/aesthetic events and their metamorphoses into something else. “After Ellsworth”, the work in progress under consideration here, is a case in point.

Ellsworth Kelly - Houston Triptych, 1986
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 

In 1986, a sculpture by Ellsworth Kelly was installed in the Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Since I had left Houston around that time, I wasn’t aware of it until I returned some years later.

The work itself is simple; three figures mounted on a blank wall, floating in air, as it were. I liked it, in the way that one likes Calder’s works. It’s not the most challenging piece – or didn’t seem to be at the time, anyway. More recently, when I returned to Houston a couple of years ago, I had a different experience.

The Cullen Sculpture Garden has been substantially reconfigured since 1991 or so and the sculptures are given a bit more space to work in. The Kelly is one such and it struck me as a more powerful work owing to this, so much so, that I took the liberty of drawing it:

I filed it away and moved on with other things.

More recently, though, I was going over notebooks and journals and came across the drawing and realized my dialogue with the sculpture wasn’t over. In fact, it started to egg me on.

Now, let me also mention that an old teenage idol of mine was Wassily Kandinsky. I couldn’t explain why, but I really found his work a good entrée to everyone non-figurative. Of course, I read his “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” and that only furthered cemented in my mind that he was onto something. However, I never wanted to paint like Kandinsky.

As much as I responded to his works and his theories, I really was drawn more to others like Ernst, Masson, Matta, and Lam, if we’re talking about his contemporaries and the generation that came after him. Still, I was often struck by how full of life his work was when I saw it up close. In any case, I rather filed Wassily away, as well as Ellsworth’s sculpture.

Back to this week, mulling over the drawing, and after completing another layered work, I decided to use Kelly’s forms as point of departure and see what happens and it dawned on me that I had a little Kandinsky coming out.

All of this is to say that none of this is conscious, thought-out, or pre-meditated. It’s more about how an experience or a set of aesthetic encounters are consumed, digested, and returned to the world (you didn’t think I was going to say “excreted”, did you?)

This is just one example. I would argue that it holds good for all human endeavors. At some point, you see/read/hear/experience something that might just happen at the right time such that the impact it makes on you doesn’t seem terribly impressive, but it’s there. Down the line, it expresses itself in another way, perhaps not necessarily in an overt manner, but you recognize the influence, you know the origin of your inspiration in that moment.

None of this is linear, either. It seems so, after the fact. But I didn’t set out to incorporate Ellsworth Kelly when I laid down the blue ground. I didn’t have Kandinsky in mind but once this got to a certain point, it strikes me that there is a resonance.

I’ll be moving onto the next thing and then the thing after that, as you do. Perhaps I’ll be surprised by the muse, yet again, as she plants another image, idea, scent, or sound in mind, in heart.