“Can you believe that painting…?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The one on the right, at the end. Can you believe it?”

“What about it? What do you mean?”

“I mean…why would someone do that? That’s not art.”

“It’s not art?! why do you say that?”

“Well look at it. It’s not realistic…I mean it doesn’t make sense. The title of this thing is Shotgun…and that guy doesn’t have a shotgun. That’s crazy. And besides, what’s he pointing at? It looks like he’s in some classy house or the foyer of a business or something. How realistic is that? What’s he doing there? It just doesn’t make any sense…why someone would do that and call it art.”

“I guess it bothers you, huh?”

“No, it doesn’t bother me. I came here to look at art…not that. That’s not art. I just don’t know why anyone would do that…that’s what I don’t get.”

The image is a graphite and acrylic composition by Ernie L. Fournet of Louisiana. It received a Juror’s Choice award at the 2012 National Juried Show at The Academy of Fine Arts. During the opening reception for the show, while I was looking at this painting, it wasn’t long before it  became evident to me that not many others cared for it either–if one can draw that conclusion by how swiftly they passed it by. As I admired the precision and brilliance of its execution, I overheard a couple who did stop and look for more than a few seconds. And I couldn’t help eavesdropping…. Their exchange intrigued me almost as much as the unsettling power of the image they were discussing.

Protestations not with standing, this Shotgun was loaded and, I’d say, hit its target. That’s why, in my estimation, the purloined conversation went where it did: to disqualify this painting from being legitimate art. We do this all the time…. Real or legitimate “art” is seldom what we don’t like, have you noticed? How easily we dismiss, overlook, or ignore art that we find distasteful, intrusive, morally objectionable, or disturbing. And one of the most convenient ways to deal with it is simply to pretend it isn’t really there. That is, it isn’t there in the sense that it doesn’t qualify as something we’re looking for when we we’re looking for art. Georges Braque be damned…art is not meant to disturb! –Just like our nation’s chronic addiction to war…we do it, we know it, but it’s not really there because–hey, as the addict says–it doesn’t affect us day to day, at least not enough to be disturbed by it.

With technology, mercenary armed forces, and media masking we’ve largely succeeded in isolating the real costs–the familial and personal pain, the economic and social crippling–that comes with the price of perennial warfare. Most of us resist realizing that war and war-related enterprise is America’s principal economic interest. The business of America is not business…it’s the business of war.  We’re all shareholders in the corporation, our tax dollars sustain its operation, our fears fuel its demands, but how many of us bother to read the annual report in detail? Do we really have a clue, do we really care about the costs as long as we can harbor the illusion that ‘it doesn’t really affect me’?

The title of this painting, Shotgun, in the context our current wars, is an unmistakeable throwback to the Vietnam war reminding us–if we care to remember or know–of how we were conned into that wasteful tragedy that until now was the longest, costliest, war in our  history. The “domino effect” was calibrated to excite our fears about the threat of global communism and the fallacious “Gulf of Tonkin incident” justified our military assault on southeast Asia. Now we know better. But what difference did it make? Under the cover of “9/11” we bought into a new set of lies to justify new wars of choice for the sake of an ill-conceived set of economic interests in the Middle East. And after more than a decade of war and nation-building we have trumped the tragedy of Vietnam in spades, ignored international law, and re-framed the fundamental provisions of our Constitutional democracy. Not pleasant things to look at. Not comfortable thoughts to engage. And so…not a subject for art?

Out in the provinces where the sales live and foyers have fountains, art is pleasant, pretty, and pacific. There’s not a large market with the masses for art that unsettles the stomach or disturbs the mind. And why would there be? We don’t go to church for conflict and confrontation; we go for comfort and consolation. So why would we want art to challenge, mix things up, thumb its nose at our comfortable conventions, or make us work for its meaning? Well…we don’t have to buy it. But just because you or I don’t want to work or be bothered unnecessarily with the inconvenient facts of life, does that disqualify artists from doing so? Does that mean those subjects should be off-limits for artwork because they don’t suit our tastes?

So, about this powerful piece by Ernie Fournet and that conversation I overheard…. Is it reasonable to conclude that just because this painting disturbs the peace and doesn’t make the kind of sense we want that it isn’t art? I guess if you can’t tell a U.S. Service Rifle from a “Shotgun” then maybe you should be in a gun store rather than an art gallery. It’s probably a more American thing to do.

Lawrence Bowden

Have you noticed? –when money gets tight often the first thing that budget-teers want to cut is “the arts.” Why is that?

Well, Margy Waller, Vice President of the Cincinnati Fine Arts Fund (now called “ArtsWave”) thinks she knows. What she knows is that arts funding cuts are made not because people don’t like art or “the arts;” not because people fail to value art; and not because they are unwilling to pay for art they like (if they can afford it!) Money for the arts dries up because of the way we think about the arts. And the way we think is: the arts are not my responsibility. That means that we think the arts are not a public concern in the way, say, that roads, water systems, police or fire protection are thought to be.

After more than a year’s worth of study and research, that’s the conclusion the Cincinnati folks reached. The prevailing view of most Americans is that art and the arts is a matter of individual concern, more like an entertainment than a public good. That is, they are nice but unnecessary, entertaining but inessential, provocative but impractical, valued but not vital.

WRONG….

Wrong not as a matter of opinion but as a matter of fact. That’s what the research shows. Thinking of art or the arts as only another commodity that reflects one’s taste, class, or personal disposition ignores a profoundly significant fact: the ripple effect of the arts on the community. Those ripples make waves of public good. Research shows that in communities where the arts are thriving:

• neighborhoods are transformed and revitalized, properties are restored and renovated, the streets become safer and more interesting, and people return;
• local businesses, restaurants, boutiques experience an increase in patrons and sales as the area becomes more vibrant and lively;
• communication increases as new connections are made, information gets shared from a more diverse population, and a deeper and broader understanding of the world as well as the history and richness of the immediate area is discovered and enjoyed.

This is the reality. This is demonstrably what happens in cities and towns with vibrant and lively arts communities.

If this is what the arts actually do, why then do we persist in thinking of art as “nice but not necessary”? Is it not necessary for a community to revitalize neighborhoods, help its businesses to prosper, and increase its connections and communication with one another? If so then support and cultivation of the arts is a public good and not simply a matter of private taste. It is a shared responsibility and should be a function of civic pride and even moral conscience. The arts in our community, then, should not be left to passive consumers but become part of what we as active, responsible, citizens cultivate and support.

In brief, that’s the conclusion the Fine Arts Fund of Cincinnati reached when searching for an answer to the question: Why do the arts matter? Now, as an artist it’s encouraging to know that social science and communications research substantiates the social value of being an artist–especially when it is so frequently dismissed and often ridiculed by public policy makers or media mouth-offs. But frankly…that’s not why I do art. I’d like to believe–in fact I do believe–that my art has social value, even a social conscience. That’s part of the reason many artists show or perform their work. But that’s not at the heart of why art matters. I do art because it responds to one of the deepest of human needs: to make something, to be a creator rather than a creature of habit and routine all the time. It is my belief that when we have no creation in our lives, things go bad. To recognize the social and economic ripple effects of art is significant, probably essential for developing a shared sense of responsibility for the arts. But it is insufficient. If that’s all that made art matter it’d be like going to a an art museum to look at its architecture without ever going inside.

I care about ripple effects but I care more about the stone that enters the pool and lies deep within the quiet bottom of the pond. There’s an irony here. How can you say, put into words, why art matters when art exists to do what an argument, a spread sheet, or the newspaper can’t? Art is the one domain in life devoted to articulating exactly those elements of our experience that come before and lie beyond what we can say. Does that matter? Art is a different language. Asking why having that language matters is a little like asking why you need more than one string on a guitar. One string works fine; five just complicate the matter, right?

Looking at the “effects” of art on a community is not at all the same thing as looking at art, practicing or participating in it. Reframing why art matters from the personal and individual to its corporate and public effects may prove useful when arguing for a budget line, but in what direction does it advance our understanding? Is it the ART that matters or its presence in the community? The meaning and the value of art tends to be displaced from its source in inspiration and creation to the service it provides other interests. But trying to separate them is like asking what matters more–a person or their personality? One flows from the other. Both are important.

Answering the question of why art matters as though we have to choose between shared responsibility or personal self-interest is a false choice. We all live in both domains. So it’s important to remember when thinking about what matters that creativity and inspiration are not committee functions. They’re a function of the soul, or the human spirit. Art is what keeps us lively by giving us a language for what can’t be said, a look at or a vision of what can’t be seen, and a sense of presence with a great mystery that can’t be known–the mystery of Life itself. Art is a way of making that makes us matter–more like a cherry blossom than being a chairman of some board. The cherry tree with all the ephemeral beauty of its blossoms isn’t very efficient or conservative; it’s not stingy with resources or calculating about return; all those blossoms–while nice–really aren’t very efficient, but they are absolutely necessary. The cherry tree is nice not because it’s economic and efficient but because it is beautifully effective! The arts not only are nice, like blossoms, they are necessary. The effect they have makes us more human. Art stretches us with its demands and consoles us with its beauty; it exposes us to novelty, insight, and invention and contains what is precious, prescient, and sacred. It’d be hard to do without those things and stay human. That matters.

Lawrence Bowden

Because I can’t do them.

The advantage this gives as a painter is that I know I can’t do landscapes. Most landscape painters have yet to realize that they can’t do them either. Creating a resemblance on paper or canvas to the real world is insufficient. That’s what bugs me about 99% of the landscape paintings you see in art shows and galleries all over Virginia. It’s just rare, right here in the heart of landscape paradise, to find a landscape painting that rewards you more than the landscape does itself. Too often you wish that the painter had just stuck with the photograph they so obviously were laboring over. Instead the aesthetic damage to the landscape is about as subtle as a bulldozer with a blueprint! These painted equivalents of the tract home have about the same appeal as Wal-Mart does for the discriminating shopper. In scenic central Virginia, where having a landscape in your home is like shopping at Talbot’s or Chico’s, you sometimes feel like saying, “If I see one more landscape painting…..”

Aside from simply being as repetitively boring as a droning noise, why is the bulk of this stuff you see in nearly every show so utterly un-engaging? It may be technically masterful, even beautiful, but it just hangs on the wall without being there—lovely and un-engaging. Why is that?

Because it has nothing to say.

I was reminded of this recently while reading about a gaggle of new books re-assessing The Aesthetic Movement in England during the latter half of the 19^th century. One of the stars of that Movement who fell into 20^th century oblivion was Edward Burne-Jones. Well before the put downs of pastoral art by modernism and the New York School, he chose to distinguish his own work from the landscape painters of his day by saying, “I don’t want to copy objects [his emphasis], I want to tell people something.” Even though he may wrongly have thought that the emerging landscape movement of the 19^th century was merely copying the material world, his larger point resonates with us today. The problem is not that objects are mute or that the landscape of the natural world has nothing to say. The problem now is that the landscape painter generally isn’t in the conversation as, say, were the artists of the Hudson River School.

Prophetic? Martin Johnson Heade 1859

What made their landscapes so magnificent was that these artists were looking into the natural world for more than a picture of the countryside. They were fully engaged in the social, religious, and technological conversations of their day. For these artists the landscape had something to say that was not only worth expressing but was even sublime.

Today? Not so much. Today landscape painting is, commonly…well…lovely. Being commonly lovely is fine for a certain kind of consumer—one for whom paintings are like The Dude’s rug in The Big Lebowski: they’re there to tie the room together, to match the fabrics and the furniture, to look but not mean. Paintings that tie the room together know their place: to exude taste without demand, to complement the décor, and to be a restful place for the eyes without bothering your mind (much less challenging it to imagine or think). Having something to say or show that requires a little engagement…? That could disturb the peace.

Natural beauty is not something we’re deprived of in Virginia so it’s not hard to see why painters, as they have been for centuries, are inspired by it. What a pity the response to all this natural beauty is so seldom inspiring itself. You’d think if inspiration was at work it would call for more than copying a photograph! Reproducing soothing scenes and pastoral pictures has its place in decorative sales and manufacturing just as reassurances of one’s own righteousness and salvation do in the comfortable pew. But one would be hard pressed to find soul in either place. A lovely, peaceful landscape manufactured with technical brilliance and nothing to say is fit for the kitchen calendar and the aesthetic couch potato.

Am I being harsh? Maybe…but I think there’s no danger of either embarrassing or discouraging the cottage

a cottage industry

industry of the decorative painter. “Original,” “affordable,” and “art” have enough cache for the average patron that lovely landscapes are unlikely to disappear. What’s more likely is that I’ll be accused of sounding like an intellectual snob. But that’s just a dodge like the claim of one of our presidential wannabes that “learning is for snobs.”

Asking of a landscape painting that it have something to say, that it be something more than pleasing to the eye, is not about intellectual snobbery. It’s about learning, growth, enlarging our capacity to see. And none of that can happen unless we believe that the artist has something to show me that I can’t, or haven’t, seen for myself. It’s the desire to learn, to discover, to see new things in new ways, and be stretched enough to feel alive rather than just comfortable. The more familiar the subject matter, the greater the challenge. So with landscape painting—as ubiquitous as it is—the challenge is to make it not just interesting, but new, almost as though one was seeing it for the first time. Ironically, the presence of natural beauty places quite a demand on any painter wanting to do it justice. And that is one reason landscape paintings are so hard to do “well.” It’s probably also why so many Sunday painters settle for copying their photographs. A thoughtfully composed photo is usually lovely even if it’s not inspiring. When you don’t really know what it is you’re looking at it’s hard to know what to say—but you can always take a picture.

The good landscape painting is never a picture the camera can take. (And why would anyone want it to be?!) It may be beautiful or ugly, highly focused or expansive, representational or abstract. There is no single set of properties or approaches that properly defines a “good” landscape. There is however one thing successful paintings have that lesser efforts lack: presence. The presence I’m talking about is not the property that portrays what you can see almost without looking. It’s the capacity to show you more than your eyes can see. In other words there is a meeting of the eye/the mind, one that engages you the way another person might with a level of depth, intrigue, or dimension unfathomed in a single handshake or at first glance.

Andrew Wyeth, "Flood Plain," 1986

Presence in a landscape not only draws you in, it leads you somewhere beyond the literal rendering of a scene. Visual Bible thumping will never take you anywhere; it leaves you stranded where you are. No artist has more presence to his work than Andrew Wyeth. Look at nearly any Wyeth landscape. You are immediately there, present to and present with his rendering, captivated by such a moving stillness that it is nearly audible. What’s being said, the story being told that is alive in that place, still, the narrative in that moment so purely articulated is the play of life. Complex mysteries extend well beyond the literalness of the picture plane. And because they do you are rewarded with every effort you invest in being there, endeavoring to grasp all that painting has to say. You needn’t of course, but you could.

A landscape painting worthy of the time it takes to paint it doesn’t much care about how lovely it is or whether it will tie the room together—if it has something to say.

Lawrence Bowden

To answer my own question from the previous blog:

I don’t know…I don’t know whether what we choose to look at makes a difference or not. Do our eyes actually play a role in shaping the kind of person we are or the kind of People we become? Specifically, when we make the effort to look at something because we chose to, are we affected in ways other than those of which we’re aware? To make this question more profound than it probably is:  Is there a relation between seeing and being? I don’t know, but I think so…and I think the relation is imaginary!

Imaginary? …that needs a bit of explanation. By “imaginary” I mean: seeing is what imagination does, but not in the way the eye does. The eye responds to light; imagination responds to meaning. It responds by expressing meaning in a form that makes it accessible. (Caveat: Making meaning accessible is not the same thing as making it conceptual. Meaning is always lived and experienced before it is rendered any other way.)

The imagination constructs what we see. It actually builds the images in mind that our eyes deliver to the brain. The raw material from which it constructs those images comes from the exposure we’ve had to the visual and cultural worlds in which we live.

If we fill our head, then, with some things and not others it seems only reasonable to assume that we’re more likely to be attuned to those things, more disposed to imagine, think, and feel the presence of those things. If imagination constructs forms of meaning and value from the raw materials of experience, what we choose to look at makes a difference in the raw materials available for use. We might say that what we see sets parameters for what we can or cannot see. Why? Because our choices not only reveal our preferences, they create the visual possibilities for meaning to be there. In other words: the visual choices we make do make a difference in what we imagine!

Let’s take a concrete example of how this works. When we choose a movie, turn on the telly, attend an opening…do we think twice about where we put our eyes, or what those images we ingest do? I doubt it. Because we think there is no harm in looking and, furthermore, the last thing we want to do is censor the eye! It’s much more comfortable to believe that what we see makes no more difference than we allow it to make. Images don’t manipulate us; we manipulate them. It’s the same argument the NRA uses: guns don’t kill people, people do. The image, like the gun, is essentially a tool that can be used to either healthy or unhealthy ends. We decide, don’t we? The gun doesn’t aim itself….

So, the images we find appealing and entertaining or repulsive and disturbing only make a difference if we allow them to? When we’re over-loaded, supersaturated, with images of violence and horror, the grotesque and catastrophic…when we pay to be entertained by images of brutality, war, rape, and torture…are we simply a detached witness no more affected by those images than the projector that broadcasts them? We are patrons of our preferences looking in the mirror of self and society. And while we’re taking it all in, we’re filling the reservoir of possibilities for the imagination.

But here’s the paradox: filling the reservoir of possibilities may also drain it of options. The more explicit and intense the image the more likely it is to narcotize our imagination—filling and draining us simultaneously!  Think about it…when it comes to portrayal of the gruesome and grisly for example, increasingly little is left to the imagination. In film, it’s as if each filmmaker must out do the other with such fantastic effect that there is little need for the moviegoer to imagine anything! The hit is narcotic. The more graphic one’s exposure the more graphic the next set of images must become to evoke the same response.

With all of those possibilities spelled out, with more and more visual detail to draw from (“Now in 3-D!”), are we erasing (or trying to at least) the line between what one sees and what one imagines? And as that line thins, does the distinction between what’s imagined and what’s real become easier and easier to confuse?

Another way to think about it: is what’s going on here “visual fundamentalism”? When our images are spelled out in literalistic form with graphic detail and high definition…what’s left for us to imagine? Our eyes become wider and wider taking in all the realism we can absorb while our imagination shuts down. This is a condition Stanley Kubrick described as “eyes wide shut,” we see only what’s there but not what it means. The image has become so intense, so narcotic in its effect that it actually hides what’s going on right in front of our eyes!

(Kubrick’s movie Eyes Wide Shut is a brilliant demonstration of the point. You need only look at the critics’ bafflement about what it means. Kubrick was a genius and regarded this film as his only masterpiece. I don’t believe for a minute that he was just trying to be cryptic for the fun of it. The exploration of seeing and being pervades his work.)

The irony then is this: the more accustomed we become to having everything spelled out, displayed, and rendered with fundamentalist visual zeal, the less we actually see! The more literal an image becomes, the more it conforms to what we already know or could experience, the less imagination it demands and the closer to reality it seems. Imagination, like any other faculty, atrophies with disuse. Over exposure to the same sets of visual representation numbs imagination. The possibilities for new meaning or new experience are diminished. Growth slows and our capacity to discover meaning atrophies. Anything unfamiliar becomes not only unreal, but meaningless.

The stuff we look at over and over again, the places we visit with our eyes to entertain ourselves, acquires a normative quality. That is, it becomes so reinforced in our minds that it takes on the character of everyday life. So?

Think about how “ordinary” severed limbs, spurting blood, and people being blown away has become. When these images are so much a part of our everyday visual life, should we actually encounter them they’re not only likely to be less shocking but unlikely to register as anything other than what they are, a train wreck or a mass murder. C’est la vie. We’ll wring our hands, say prayers, hold memorials, and keep creating and absorbing all those images without ever imagining what they mean or what they say about who we are or what we have become—much less why. Blood and gore and guts are entertaining and exciting to see…they’re art, they’re sport, they’re our way of life—and the more graphic, brutal, and horrifying the better! That’s OK…we know the difference between imagination and reality don’t we?

Lawrence Bowden

Does it matter what we look at?

I mentioned to a friend the other day that I doubted I’d go see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. When asked “why?” I said that I didn’t think I could watch a violent rape as entertainment however “artfully purposed” it was. I hastened to add that my doubts were not a “statement about the movie.” Rather, they signal a feeling I can’t shake, one I’ve had for a long time: that what we choose to look at, how we feed our mind with images is not a lot different from how we feed our body. Diet impacts rather profoundly the kind of life experience we have. And just as some kinds of foods are more healthful and nutritious than others, so, I’ve felt, are some kinds of images. But are they?

Does it make a difference what we see? Or, as a painter, I wonder whether the kind of images we choose to paint or the kind of images we surround ourselves with or select for our entertainment affect us in any sustained way? Of course we all know the striking impact of being moved in a moment by an image that evokes surprise, disgust, curiosity, compassion, etc.—the marketer’s stock in trade. But is there something more than the ephemeral going on? In the main, do images we create and consume function in any way other than just being there as decoration or pastime? Or are they basically reflections, a mirror through which (like Alice) we walk into our culture or (like Narcissus) gaze into our own mind’s eye?

“Oh, yeah,” said my friend, “It’s the old art imitates life imitates art conundrum.” The aesthetic equivalent of the chicken or the egg? Sort of, maybe…. But, you’ll recall, I introduced this thought in my last blog— that the kind of images we have in our mind, the stuff we see that stays with us, does make a difference. But what difference it makes…? I don’t know. Mostly these are questions for which I have feelings but no real answers.

Does what we see make us better or more corrupt, calmer or more violent, healthier or more sick? Are the images we choose to be around and entertained by like the people we choose to hang out with—influential but not determinative? How do we know? How much do they shape our attitudes and behaviors, focus our attention, or affect how we feel? Do they influence our choices not only of what we look at (movies, shows, exhibits, performances, web sites, videos, news etc.), but what we see, virtually effecting our perception and how we think about things? It’s hard not to imagine that they do…at least to some degree. How can we deny that our friends make a difference? Or that what’s in our head, the stuff we’re constantly exposed to, has no influence in how we see or shape the world around us?

Intuitively, this makes sense. But is it true? Is it accurate to say that what we see makes a difference, makes us different? Is it accurate to suggest that the images we surround ourselves with and allow into our head actually influence how we look at other things around us, how we feel or think, and maybe even what we do?  I think so—but I don’t know that. These hunches or assumptions that seem so common sensible are perfect examples of what researchers call “the illusion of validity.” What they mean is that too often the judgments we make intuitively, judgments that just seem natural and right, more likely than not turn out to be wrong under scrutiny. Money Ball, the story about how manager Billy Beane turned the Oakland A’s baseball team into winners in 2002, is instructive. It offers an entertainingly powerful portrayal of what happens when years of conventional, intuitively sound, wisdom gets turned on its head. When the best ole skippers in baseball ply years of seasoned decision making against a new counterintuitive approach using statistics and probabilities, what happens? What happens is that over a season, the intuitive wisdom doesn’t hold up, the numbers do.

Does this mean that intuitive judgments are always wrong or without value? Of course not. But we need to recognize that their power is not in their accuracy, it is in the speed with which they’re made. In a life-threatening situation, e.g., there’s hardly time for statistical research! But to supplant accuracy with speed, or reality with illusion, when the situation does not demand it is naïve. So…wondering whether the images we create or the images we ingest and give a home to in our head, actually makes a difference in our experience of the world or somehow affects the kind of culture we create and inhabit…well…these would not seem to be questions well-suited to intuitive judgments. But consider this: images invade us at the speed of light. They come at us a lot faster than a wild animal in the woods! It may be that we have to decide intuitively while someone’s doing the chi square stuff!

Images are a function of the eye/the mind. The mind is an eye is the mind. The line between percept and concept, between the information our eyes convey and the image the mind registers, is so thin that it is practically indistinguishable. So what we see is actually a construction, a cooperative project between the eye (all the stuff it picks up and delivers as sense perception) and the mind (that assembles all that information, coordinates it with our prior experience, and makes something we recognize—an image.) It doesn’t seem unreasonable, then, to assume that what we see, comes from all of that stuff we hold in our mind’s eye, the raw materials from which we imagine—for better and worse—how things are, or, what they might be. It would seem, wouldn’t it, that the kind of raw materials we use, the information we fill up with, is going to affect the outcome of our imagination?

Isn’t it a matter of fact that we must first imagine something before it becomes real? For example, the atom bomb. Wasn’t it imagined before it vaporized human beings? “The communicator” on Star Trek…wasn’t it imagined before the cell phone had a ring tone? Do these images and ideas just arrive from nowhere? I don’t think so. I think they are constructed. I think that our imagination assembles them from the reservoir of images absorbed by the eye/the mind. If that’s the case, don’t artists have a hand in this? Don’t they produce or manipulate a lot of what goes into the reservoir? Conversely, as an audience, don’t we have some control over what we absorb and hold in our mind’s eye? Don’t we choose in good measure how to fill the reservoir from which we interpret our experience and build the world in which we live? Could the old cliché, “what you see is what you get,” be more than descriptive?! Might it also be determinative?

Doesn’t it make a difference, then, the kind of images we create, the kind of images we consume, promote, codify, and protect? Doesn’t it make a difference not only in the kind of culture we construct, but in the kind of people we become? Maybe what we choose to look at makes a difference not only in what we see but in what we can or cannot see.

That’s next time….

Lawrence Bowden

I recently joined a newly initiated discussion group called “Art Is My Thing.” A former student of mine, now quite an established California painter, was looking for a place to discuss the ideas, techniques, and approaches fellow artists discover to enlarge and enhance their work. Since most existing art discussion groups tend toward marketing, sales, or self-promotion, he decided to create an alternative that made art work itself the focus. One of the first topics to come up was “sourcing”…where do you get your ideas? Where do the images come from? What inspires a painting or triggers the urge to make a photograph? Talking about this—even with other artists—is a challenge! Probably because making the art doesn’t live in the same place as the thoughts or feelings that require it.

The old saws about making something beautiful or provoking the viewer to think or see in new ways or giving expression to one’s thoughts or feelings or framing a moment of time or place with meaning or question…all of these hovered about our conversation. But none of them quite reach into the source of why we do what we do, why do we choose or struggle to create the particular images we do? If we think of our work as an expressive language, a way to communicate or share something that can be offered in no other way, the question of where the images come from is a little like asking someone about the vocabulary they use. Where do your words come from? Why do you use the words you use? It’s not ordinarily something we think much about. But when we do we realize how powerful words can be, how particular words can shape our own perception as well as the way others see, see us, or think about what’s said. It’s not hard to get confused or be confusing in the process! Artists know this well.

It’s a bit embarrassing to confess, but there’s probably no one any more mystified about their work, about why they paint what they paint or where the images they paint come from than me. I’d really like to know! I think of myself as an intuitive painter, but not in the stylistic or technical sense of the word. When the eminent psychologist Carl Jung used the term, he understood intuition as a kind of insight or knowledge that arrives by way of the unconscious. (This was just a clever theoretical way of saying he didn’t know where it came from. The unconscious is, by definition, what we’re unaware of!) So when I think of what I paint or why I paint what I do, I have to admit that what shows up on canvas is triggered as much by what I’m unaware of as what I am. That’s how I think about being an intuitive painter. My images arrive to challenge me to understand them. And just as in ordinary conversation, what others have to say about what they see is often as revealing as anything I think. Painting helps me to know about deep rhythms and values asking for attention.

Opticon One

The current series of paintings I’m working on I’ve called “Yesterday’s Tomorrow.” I’ve borrowed that title from a traveling exhibition assembled by the Smithsonian back in the early 1980’s. The subtitle of that exhibition was “Past Visions of the American Future.” Beginning in the late 19th century up through the late 1960s it catalogued a sampling of the ways images and visions of the future played out in a variety of arenas from transportation to community planning and architecture to communication media to industrial design to warfare. It was an amazing celebration of the future as an idea and an act of the imagination. The images, many outrageous or silly by today’s standards, were nonetheless overwhelmingly optimistic and almost utopian in their vision of the human potential and the possibilities for a more humane way of life. Even war was reframed in ways that would make warfare obsolete.

Where this paleo-future grabbed me as a kid were the images I absorbed first from Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. Then, when television came into our house, from shows like Captain Video, Captain Midnight, Space Patrol, and Tom Corbett Space Cadet. These images were captivating not just because they portrayed what Gene Roddenberry described critically as “cowboys and Indians in space,” but because, more importantly, they imagined a future I wanted to inhabit, one rich with adventure, one fantastic and fabulous—and fun! These images seemed ubiquitous—broadcasting an amazing future so loudly that they muffled the noise of annihilation coming from real world fears.

Gone.

Opticon Two

What happened? Did I grow up? When did we decide the future was not something to dream about but a nightmare to be avoided? The world clearly was no safer then than now…. Something life sustaining is absent when the images we imagine entertain our fears, when our hopes are to avoid catastrophe rather than to aspire for tomorrow. What’s missing is not a childish naivete that smothers the facts with fantasy or draws a smiley face on evil. What’s missing is that imaginative spirit that launched Buck Rogers in the midst of the Great Depression or built a World’s Fair in 1939—on the brink of global war—on the theme: The World of Tomorrow.

So…in the series I’m calling “Yesterday’s Tomorrow” I’m playing with what I imagine as iconic and fantastic images molded from an era when our fears were held in check by the fabulous rather than cultivated by dystopian disillusionment. There is a place for dystopia just as there are reasons to fear. But if the only future we can imagine is degraded by fear, yesterday’s tomorrow is, quite literally, only today. There is no future, just what happens next. By contrast, today is the place to imagine things differently. The future now is in the difference we make today. And the difference we can make depends on the images we entertain, on what we choose to see…and Imagine!

[If you’d like to learn more about the ways the future has been imagined, check out this blog from The Smithsonian: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/paleofuture/]

Lawrence Bowden

I’m dreaming of winning the raffle prize to Paris (though as an employee, I can’t buy a ticket…) But there are some similarities between the art scene of Montmartre in the 20s and Riverviews…. not least of which an appearance by Larry Bowden at 1:15. –Mary Ann

One thing about small-town America: it teaches you to know your place.

I’m from one of those: a small, mid-western, farm town…big enough that you didn’t actually know everyone, but small enough to feel like they knew you. You knew in what part of town which people lived, who belonged to the country club and who did not, and where and how far you could ride your bike and still feel at home. Our town had a modestly sized liberal arts college, half a dozen churches, a grain elevator, and the red granite courthouse with its imposing clock tower anchoring the northwest corner of the town square. There were banks on each of the other three corners. The monumental, turn of the century courthouse housed the county jail and signaled our claim to fame, being the County Seat. No museums, galleries, or concert hall. Our Town was not cosmopolitan but neither (thanks to the college I suppose), was it particularly parochial.

As a child, the semi-circular sanctuary of our little Baptist church seemed vast. The pulpit was front and center. It surveyed a congregation that fanned out from its place on an elevated, carpeted platform above and behind the altar. Sloping toward it like spokes on a wheel were two wide aisles with pews between them and on either side. These were the runways! Starting from the elevated rear of the sanctuary, you could build enough speed racing down the aisle on one side to jump onto the pulpit platform, launch off the other side and tear heart-pounding up the opposite aisle. Then you’d roar around the rear of the sanctuary and back down the runway to plop, an exhausted human offering, onto the platform. Great sport! The slope of those wide aisles just invited take off and landing…as long as you didn’t get caught!

Mom was very clear the moment she first witnessed one of my take offs and landings. Gently but firmly she instructed: The sanctuary is not the place to run, yell, jump, or play. But why, I wanted to know? It’s not appropriate behavior. Huh? What does that mean? It means that you’re not being respectful. But…there’s no one there but us kids? Who are we not being respectful to? God wants us to be happy at His House, isn’t that what you’ve always said? And this is fun, Mom! Yes…but here we need to respect what this place is for and we do that by behaving properly whether anyone is watching or not.

I didn’t get it. But whatever it was she meant had evidently an adult consensus. They all seemed to gang up on this kind of behavior disapprovingly. There weren’t exactly “rules” that, ignored, deserved punishment. It was more implicit—like an “understanding” or convention that, by observing it or not, said something about you. Appropriate behavior signaled that you knew where you were and understood the demands of the space. In other words, your behavior mirrored your sense of place thereby respecting the presence of others sharing it with you—whether they were there or not. Behavior that belonged or behavior that was out of place showed what kind of person you were.

Knowing your place is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it can be a euphemism for oppression; on the other it conveys a deeply profound and necessary sense of recognition and belonging. Knowing where you are means not only being oriented in space and time, but recognizing the connections you have both with the place and with others who belong there too. Those connections of recognition and belonging not only determine who you are, but also imply the behavior appropriate to where you are. Absent that awareness of what’s appropriate, you are out of place…literally, a displaced person. Being in the vicinity of an event is not the same thing as the experience of belonging there. Objectively, being someplace without recognizing or picking up on what’s appropriate is like having someone try to reach you when your cell phone is off. You’re oblivious to the signals.

Last week a painting crashed to the floor in the Craddock-Terry Gallery shattering the glass and springing the frame from true. A visitor leaning onto a gallery wall had evidently caught the frame with his clothing and pulled the painting from its mooring. The noise awakened a somnambulant apology but little else from the offender who, of course, had no idea that sharing the gallery wall with the art was inappropriate.

Homage to Duchamp?

The Curator of the Gallery reports that cleaning up following a recent Opening she retrieved a partially filled plastic cup of punch from its perch atop the frame of one of the works in the show. The frame, evidently, was at just the right height to hold the visitor’s drink while his hands had other things to do than mind a drink.

At yet another Opening, a large and tactile work filling much of the wall proved irresistible to a mid-life blossom from the new age. So she moved, literally, atop the painting and began to cop a feel, pawing its surface with both hands as though, in another age, she’d been cleaning wallpaper.

It's the wine

And then there was the too-well lubricated wannabe—Artist? Critic? Sophisticate?—whose pronouncements were about as insightfully appealing as the volume at which he pronounced them. Reception wine needs to be more discriminating about the tongues it loosens. Maybe the wine should be sold with a reminder that patrons are not purchasing a license to annoy?

Stuff like this makes you wonder. Pecca Fortier!?

Where are these kid’s parents? OK, then, where are the adults? I used to think that “being an adult” meant you knew how to behave appropriately. I used to imagine that an adult would assume some social responsibility, a role that asked for more than just personal accountability. I used to believe that if you were sophisticated enough to want to go to art galleries and museums you’d know that they were not the same as the high school gym.

Disrespect is no less disrespectful for being naïve, unintentional, or ill informed. In fact, unintentional disrespect is even more alienating because the conduct is largely unconscious. Unconscious behavior is the hallmark of doing what comes naturally! It’s action unaffected by our higher faculties. People this unaware of their behavior, were you to call it to their attention, would either be offended or assume that you are the one who doesn’t get it.

“A GPS can direct you to a destination, but it can’t tell you where you are.”  A gallery that is open to the public is, well, “public.” Anyone can enter. But being in a gallery is not the same thing as belonging there. Belonging is not about “membership” nor is it necessarily about elitism. It’s simply the observation that not all who enter know where they are! Protocol oblivion is a pretty reasonable indicator that someone—in spite of what got them there—has lost their place. Running your hands over the surface of an artwork (unless instructed by the artist to do so) is simply out of place; leaving your refuse in a gallery, much less on an artwork, is out of place; frustrating with gauche behavior the corporate solitary engagement of the art by others is out of place, etc.

These and numerous other examples of dysfunctional, inappropriate, behavior are only partly a matter of “just not knowing any better,” of somehow missing the chapter on propriety and social convention. It’s also about perception. Were it only “knowing better,” signs and information would fix the problem. But you can’t have a sign that anticipates every inappropriate act. The problem is perceptual, one of recognition, of seeing where you are, who’s there with you, and responding appropriately. We can’t assume any longer that the behaviors appropriate to a place—be it a gallery or the landscape itself—are acquired implicitly. The capacity to recognize where we are—not just our physical location—or to know who we are and how we are to act seems to have all but disappeared. To experience the deep sense of belonging that elicits appropriate behavior has been eclipsed by an aggressive self-absorption that makes of even our social networks an extended projection of our own needs. You have to care about others—even when no one’s watching—to do what’s right. Maybe that’s just a small town notion?

Lawrence Bowden

A thing of beauty is a joy forever,

said John Keats. Really?!  Forever…really? Or did he really mean, “only as long as it lasts?” If not…if Keats is right…does that mean that once you’ve had the experience of beauty the joy can never be destroyed?

So…let’s see if I get this:  If we can believe Keats, the thing may fade or disappear altogether, but what it’s beauty evokes or creates is there even in the absence of the thing that gave us the experience…right? There’s something comforting in that…hopeful…. It may even be transformative to know that however ephemeral our life, however harshly time may treat things, what is created in beauty is neither ephemeral nor merely temporal but true and worthy of practice.

The Whirling Logs, Navajo sand painting image by Frank Martin

In the Nightway ceremony of the Dineh (Navajo), there is a refrain in one of the songs that says:

With beauty before me, I walk

With beauty behind me I walk

With beauty below me I walk

With beauty above me I walk

With beauty all around me I walk.

In beauty I walk.

What is immediately evident in this refrain is where the prayer locates the singer: at the center of the beauty through which s/he moves on a daily basis—the sacred universe defined by the four directions, nadir and zenith. In other words, by becoming conscious of the beauty in which one is found, the experience one has of the world gets centered, balanced, made whole. One’s being is literally restored to balance and health by participating (a participation made conscious by the Nightway chant) in the beauty, order, and harmony of our true nature and the true nature of creation.

The Monks of Tashi Kyil

Last week a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks from Tashi Kyil Monastery in Clement Town, India, presented many in Lynchburg with the opportunity to see (if not experience) how this works. Over a period of four and a half days working eight hours a day with colored sands, the monks—sometimes as many as five working at once—created a painting (a square within a circle within a square) ofapproximately 25 square feet. The sand was meticulously and painstakingly dribbled a few grains at a time to create an elaborate, esoteric, design rich with symbolic and contemplative meaning. The concentration and focus required for this kind of painting was a moving meditation, one whose outcome took the form of a mandala, literally, “a sacred circle.” One can think of a mandala as a spiritual blueprint, a visual tool from which the sacred order, harmony, balance, and health of our true dwelling can be constructed in mind.

Loose sand trickled into a beautiful, brilliantly colored design free of any bonding agent, is by its nature vulnerable and impermanent, like life itself. And precisely because it is ephemeral, the painting, i.e. the act of making, is more significant than the sand. In creating this mandala the monks give spiritual matter form to be sure…but just as important, they are bringing the living Buddha of healing and compassion to our community. These sand paintings are never private acts for personal gain. Even if we fail to comprehend the ritual context or the language of the chants surrounding the event, we participate with our presence as an essential ingredient. The value of presence as participation is easily overlooked (and easily abused—but that’s another blog!). Making the painting recognizes how deeply inter-dependent we are and how universal is the need for healing and compassion of one for another.

As laboriously and mindfully as it was created, even so swiftly is it swept away once the painting is done. After days of watching the monks devote love and care to their work, the relative abruptness with which it turns to dust is poignant. Sweeping the sand away is not a rocker’s act of nihilism. Rather it serves to emphasize how inter-connected we are when we pay attention, sometimes by just showing up, to watch by being present…a presence honored by participating in the process of disillusion. [When practicable, the audience actually does the sweeping.] Seeing and feeling the image dissolve before our eyes also illustrates our vain desire to cling to things that by nature change. And (perhaps somewhat paradoxically) as the mandala disappears we awaken to the awareness of just how deeply we mind, pay attention to, what’s there before it’s gone.

The sand is brushed into a pile, it’s myriad colors like the painting itself not lost but now invisible to all but mind. Then small portions of the sands are distributed to those present who wish to have a material reminder of the event. The remainder of the sands were then poured into the moving waters of the James River, returning all things to their source, carrying the image of healing and compassion as far as the waters will.

Crassly accounted, we witnessed beauty created for the purpose of dissolution. But that’s not exactly right. The religions of Asia, indeed traditional oriental art forms, differ from our dominant Western approach in at least one essential aspect. That is in the emphasis placed on practice over belief. What we witnessed was not a means to an end but a way of being in the world. When the emphasis is on practice, the practice is a way of living that shapes not only your character but also how you see and experience the world. The manner in which you create and conduct your daily affairs is of far greater substance than what you say you think or believe. In fact, the way you live your life reveals what most truly is in your mind and heart. It matters very little for us to love beauty and create ugliness with every step! It matters very little for us to love peace and be angry at the world! The Buddha smiles.

So, the beauty we see in the work of these Tibetan monks, the healing and compassionate Buddha in the sand painting, the beauty that is a joy forever, is not a thing swept away. It is a way of being devoted to walking every step of every day with the awareness that the beauty we see is equal to the beauty we make. Without uttering a word the art of these simple monks help me to realize: We need to change our mind about things.

Lawrence Bowden

Dylan is at it again. Not another album…but another controversy. This time it’s not about plagiarizing in his music, not about selling out to Victoria’s Secret, Cadillac, or Pepsi, and not about on whatever cultural edge he’s skating to keep forever young. It’s about his art, i.e. his painting—specifically, the work presented as “The Asia Series” by the prestigious Gagosian Gallery in New York.

Dylan knows what he’s doing. Painting is not something he’s come to in the autumn of his life. He’s studied painting and has been painting almost as long as he’s been singing. Of his paintings at Gagosian he says with typical Dylan ambiguity, “they are from real life,” work that the gallery announcement promotes as “a visual journal” of Dylan’s travels in Asia. However much “real life” is portrayed in these paintings, much of it appears to have been copied (without attribution) from other artists’ work.

The Monk (Dylan 2009 from an 1880s photograph)

He’s obviously copied someone else’s photographs. So? Does the copying diminish the painting? Or is it the work of his hand for better or worse? Regardless of how you feel about appropriation art or re-purposing, regardless which of the judicial arguments about plagiarism and fair use you side with…after the questions about money and integrity and social cachet drop away, there is the image. The image and the artfulness of its presence or lack thereof remain. Is it not the image and the magic of the artist’s craft that presents it what makes art art? Isn’t it the image we most care about? …seeing what’s there? Should not the image rather than who owns it or who did it or how it was done determine its value? Too often it does not.

Take a look at this image:

As found at a yard sale in Virginia, 2009

How would you value it? What would you be willing to pay for it? Here’s the story about this still life image: As you notice, it has several puncture wounds and two serious tears along the top and bottom just above the stretcher bars. AND, it’s filthy. Any brilliance it may once have had is long submerged beneath the film of age and carelessness. There’s no signature evident. It’s not a pretty picture.

This painting was found at a yard/estate sale in Rockbridge County (VA) in 2009 and purchased for $3.00. The antique hunter who bought it was delighted when he could sell it for $35.00 to a friend who handles estate auctions and liquidation. He realized more than ten times what he paid for it and was delighted!

Then the friend who runs a Virginia auction house had it cleaned and decided to list the painting in one of his online auctions. He identified it as a “Virginia Folk Art Still Life from the second half of the 19^th century” in “as found condition.” The estimated bid price, now cleaned but un-repaired, was $400 – $600. The hammer price realized? A stunning $18,400! For a $3.00 yard sale damaged canvas?! Go figure….

Well…suppose as a bidder on this piece you happened to be aware of images like these:

Raphael Peale, 1822

Sarah Peale, 1825

These are just two from a plethora of watermelon still life paintings by various members of the Peale family. Now, if you saw this three-dollar painting in an online auction and knew something about the First Family of American art, would you make the leap that this might possibly be an early, undiscovered, work?

The last we heard about the find from Rockbridge County was that the painting had been restored and sold at auction in New York for $38,000. Meanwhile, the still life itself, other than for repairs, didn’t change. The image at $3.00 and the image at $38,000 are identical.

Or, how about this:

Rembrandt Laughing, 1628

For more than 100 years this painting of Rembrandt Laughing was assumed to have been the work of a Rembrandt imitator or, possibly, one of Rembrandt’s students. When it came to auction in 2008 the auction house listed it as a 17^th century knock-off valued at $3,100. But not everyone was so sure…. When the hammer came down a British collector paid $4.5 million for the imposter. He must have been looking at something the auction house wasn’t.

Turns out, the poseur in this painting is not an imposter at all. After scrupulous examination by the Rembrandt Research Project, the image is not only of Rembrandt, but by Rembrandt himself. Utterly unique. “It has an incredible presence,” said Ernst van de Wetering, head of the Project. Suddenly the appraised value for the 9.5 x 6.5 inch painting jumped to nearly $40 million. The presence has always been there, even at $3,100. Nothing of the image has changed since 1628 when it was made.

Stories like these frame the substantial mystery of art, the eye/the mind. How easily we recall artists like Mondrian or van Gogh or, for that matter, our own Willie Shouse who could barely interest anyone in their work while they were alive. Or conversely, look at

from photo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1948

someone like Bob Dylan, a Kennedy Center Honoree, an unquestionably prodigious musical talent and cultural prophet who likes to paint pictures. When Dylan plies his pleasure to copying a photograph, is it the painting that matters or his copying? Or is it the fact that it’s “a Dylan”? What about the image itself?

However ideally we might like to distinguish the image itself from all that surrounds it, in the so-called real world it’s nearly impossible to do so. Provenance, personality, and politic get fused to a work of art to such a degree that we ordinary people hardly know anymore what it is we value or why. The way we engage an image is always determined by more than meets the eye. But here’s the thing: What meets us there, image to eye, says as much about who we are as it does about what’s there.

If we’re more concerned about it being unoriginal, being a copy of someone else’s work, than we are about the presence an image conveys (or fails to convey) …what does that say? If we’re more concerned about what a painting might be worth, what price it might bring, than we are for the real value the image holds…what does that say? If we’re more concerned about who painted it than what is…what does that say?

What after all are we looking for?

Lawrence Bowden