Black Barns and Solitary Confinement

This past weekend, I luckily found and received permission to visit some barns that have been neglected for at least a generation.  One is as imposing as a beached ship, another sprawls into a large "T" shape, while a third barely stands and looks like a Franz Kline painting.  When I first arrived I disturbed some buzzards, and only later did I find their point of interest, a dead coyote.  The above is a 9x12 pastel and charcoal drawing.

Here are a few quotes from Christian Wiman who writes a lot about the relationship of experience and one's art.

"Our own experiences matter only insofar as they reveal something of experience itself.  They are often the clearest lens that we can find, but they are a lens."

"To inspire, meaning both to take in breath and to take in spirit, to be awakened by and to the creative force of one's own mind, by and to all that lies beyond."

"Most artists make art precisely because they feel some sort of absence or incoherence in their lives.  It seems not simply inevitable but necessary that the art they produce in some way seek to contain or heal whatever is missing or wounded or wrongful in them."

Wiman writes the following to demonstrate more deeply the difficulty and possibility of communicating one's yearnings through art:  "There is a passage in the writings of Simone Weil that has long been important to me.  In the passage Weil describes two prisoners who are in solitary confinement next to each other.  Between them is a stone wall.  Over a period of time--and I think we have to imagine it as a very long time--they find a way to communicate using taps and scratches.  The wall is what separates them, but it is also the only means they have of communicating.  'It is the same with us and God,' she says.  'Every separation is a link.'

... If you never quite feel at home in your life, if being conscious means primarily being conscious of your own separation from the world and divinity (and perhaps any sentient person after Modernism has to feel these things), then an idea or image that can translate that depletion into energy, those absences into presences, is going to be powerful.  And then there are those taps and scratches: what are they but language, and if language is the way we communicate with the divine, well, what kind of language is more refined and transcendent than poetry?  You could almost embrace this vision of life--if, that is, there were any actual life to embrace: Weil's image for the human condition is a person in solitary confinement.  There is real hope in the image, but still, in human terms, it is a bare and lonely hope."

Wiman focuses on poetry and language, but the same confinement metaphor applies to painting.  I tap and scratch away on paper and canvas for the same reasons he writes poetry.

Threefer

9x12 oil of Washington Avenue in Brooklyn, a 9x12 drawing of Lambertville, NJ, and an 8x10 pastel of the swamp at Field Farm.  I move quickly.

I have been re-reading the essays of Christian Wiman in Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet.  I think there are a lot of parallels between poets and painters.  He writes,  "I once heard a painter say that he wanted in his paintings a feeling for nature but without the nature.  What he meant by that, I think, was that he wanted the natural world but colored with his own consciousness, wanted his art to be at once of the world and his own mind, but not merely a mirrored image of either one.  It's the difference between illustration and the creation of original forms. between representing or refining reality and enlarging it.  It's the difference between sight and vision."

The Eternal Barn and the Ice Canal

As you can see, I did spend time doing the barn again.  It looks like a house, except it has no glass in the windows, and two broken garage doors on the hidden side.  You can see right through this barn.

Then I moved back to the frozen canal, where the sun was also shining.

I would like to return to Christian Wiman one more time.  In the last paragraph to the article I mentioned earlier he writes: "Art--including our own, perhaps, especially our own--should help us to integrate existence rather than mark it off.  We should learn to see our lives as one time rather than a series of separate times...Our most transfiguring spiritual experiences are merely the experiences we were trying to have all our lives, which is to say that we are not so much transfigured as completed."

Grapefruit, Art and Christianity

I ate this grapefruit today before painting it.  It's not the same one seen previously.  On a heavier note,  I discovered a profound writer on art and Christianity.  The poet Christian Wiman, in an essay entitled "Notes on Poetry and Religion" from Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet, says the following just in the first paragraph:

Art is like Christianity in this way: at its greatest, it can give you access to the deepest suffering you imagine--not necessarily dramatic suffering, not necessarily physical suffering, but the suffering that is in your nature, the suffering of which you must be conscious to fulfill your nature--and at the same time provide a peace that is equal to that suffering.  The peace is not in place of the sorrow; the sorrow does not go away.  But there is a moment of counterbalance between them that is both absolute tension and absolute stillness.  The tension is time.  The stillness is eternity.  With art, this peace is passing and always inadequate.  But there are times when the very splendid insufficiency of art--its "sumptuous Destitution --/ Without a Name," in Dickinson's phrase--can point a person toward the peace that passeth understanding...