Stadium, 2010

Going into the 13th hour. Space heater on. DJ Shadow on Pandora. Paint flows like water. Color spreads across the room.

Thoughts on Walkabout

The above link takes you to today's Times article on recently deceased Chinese Prof Xie Zhiliu's preparatory studies and copies, which his daughter donated to the Met in 2005. Curator and Scholar Maxwell Hearn thinks the exhibition, which reveals Xie's commitment to copying Song Dynasty masters, will change Chinese scholarship, but as far as I know, copying was the mode of learning traditional techniques in China from time immemorial. Perhaps now given Westernization this does not apply, but copying was always done in Chinese tradition.

Somehow the article unlocks my preparation for the Dorsch exhibition Walkabout. I have been mulling the concept of Walkabout for some time, related to the concept of moving through a Chinese scroll as applied to my own travels, including the Fountainhead residency I am on now. Walkabout becomes a process of experiencing a new place and making work about that. The spiritual implication of movement, initiated in painting with explosive pours and subsequent travel through the (global) landscape, supplant walking the land with moving at speed from one place to another. Movement speaks to disolocation, query-leading to the loss of ego so crucial to the requisite emptiness that painting demands.

Within the permeable landscape one finds structures and places to rest--like the rock formations in Australia or the Scholars Houses in Chinese scrolls. My interest in the shape and metaphor of Parasol House, a rounded geometric structure (tower, awning, pavilion)--turned out to be the umbrella held over Buddha, which I discovered in MogaoKu (Dunhuang Caves) last year. Parasol is the ultimate provisional shelter, a halo turned flat; a hub of connection.

All I have known going into this Walkabout is that the Chinese plum blossom idiom is the visual foundation. In Miami, I have reconciled its shape with the old, gnarled seagrape trees that line Morningside Park's waterfront. Yet, I have wondered how to integrate this concept into a larger panorama, when stuck in the image-base of "tree."

Xie Zhiliu's drawings re-opened a dialogue of space that moves from depth to flatness--simultaneously page and landscape proper. Suddenly image becomes mark, unburdened from invention. I cherish Chinese mix-and-match, from clothing to calligraphy to landscape to faith. It frees me from invention to introduce gestures, colors and sketchbook images without an organizing narrative. Form is a signifier--not mine to empty--yet, without the burden of invention, it becomes spacious, inviting.

So today I foray into material, color and mark--not unlike the way I used to draw secret images inside the wallpaper of my childhood room--compressing space into layered non-narratives that are "seen at a glimpse" and made as a doodle.

Walkabout

From Wickipedia (linked above):
Walkabout refers to a rite of passage where male Australian Aborigines would undergo a journey during adolescence and live in the wilderness for a period as long as six months.[1] In this practice they would trace the paths, or "songlines", that their people's ceremonials ancestors took, and imitate, in a fashion, their heroic deeds. Merriam-Webster, however, defines the noun as a 1908 coinage that refers primarily to "a short period of wandering bush life engaged in by an Australian aborigine as an occasional interruption of regular work", with the only mention of "spiritual journey" coming in a usage example from a latter-day travel writer.[2]

Landscape

In the California Light and Space show that just closed at Zwirner, Peter Alexander's cast fiberglass wedge took me by surprise. Standing in front of it, the Pacific Ocean materialized right before my eyes: once again, I lived in LA, the light, the space of the ocean directly ahead.

The Alexander puzzles me. Its sensory capacity is overwhelming, similar to how Michael Taussig discusses anthropoligist Malinowski's perception of color in his book, Is Color Sacred? --yet, as an object, the wedge functioned similarly to a snowglobe. Once I found the illusion inside, would I be able to recover the initial moment of spontaneous perception?

As a painter in the age of sensory overload, I wonder about the emotional heat in illusion. I understand the need for distance; if imagery is proximate, readable; will it provide space for an object to be considered reflectively beyond the sensate? Even as I ask the question, I recognize its inherent Modernist foundation.

Gober's Charles Burchfield catalogue and the ancient Chinese painters' integration of spiritual, emotional and perceptual navigate the slippery terrain of temperature. As I write, waiting for pours of paint to dry on the first few panels of an epic landscape, my mind turns to my current location, Miami, and ways to express its impact in paint.

I begin to see my heritage as an American landscape painter, visionary division. Visionary sidesteps the binaries and gets to the core of immediacy.

Morningside Park, Miami, Friday morning

Nocturne

Painting

Paint is embodied. That is part of its importance.

Xio Yau and Wei Baogong

Wei took the picture of Xiao and I in the post below this. Xiao's son, whom I got to know well, is called "humanity" in Chinese. I could not understand the word, sadly...and so called him wo de xiao peigno (pidgin is off)-- my little friend.

They live in the village next to mine in Songzhuang, as they have for 9 years. Wei paints, Xiao is a mastermind organizer and coordinator. Formerly a soldier in the army, she met Wei and now lives the art life--facilitating, translating, planning, orchestrating.

We met in 2005 at Red Gate. Xiao arranged for Wei and a friend to take me to the Great Wall on a freezing December day. They picked me up early; we ate dried grape fruit on the way. Delicious. The three guys wore green Mao coats with fur lining that were very warm. Once we reached our destination, about two hours north of Beijing, we crossed a footbridge and paid a few yuan to a local family before heading to an old, crumbling part of the wall. We were the only ones on it that day. Mountains rose and fell around us; shadows moved across them as the sun shifted over the sky. After several hours of hiking, we returned to the family's home, where they made us a warm meal. A photograph of Mao was on the table.

Afterward Wei, his friend and Xiao drove me to a Buddhist temple, with expansive grounds. They told me to go in alone. I entered a passage lined with bamboo. Moving over the grounds, I saw enormous Buddhas, an 8,000 year old tree spread over a lattice and another extremely high mountain with a criss-crossing path. I sighed. How could I not climb it, though my feet were frozen solid and my legs sore from the Wall? And as I climbed, and climbed, I reached the top, where Beijing spread out before me, a flat field illuminated by a gold sun in the distance. As I descended the second major climb that day, I heard bamboo soughing in the wind. The van with Xiao, Wei and their friend idled in the parking lot outside.

I was transformed. I had seen scrolls from my own perspective, the journey they represent over a duration of time and moving through a place.

Wei loves Yuan Dynasty painters and has a copy of Huang Gongwang's landscape book. He is a classic Buddhist Chinese scholar, adept at painting, calligraphy and also serving tea. Four years later after the Great Wall, when the picture below was taken, he was sharing his books on the great Chinese painters. Later, we shared philosophers--he did not know Francois Chen, but told me about Red Pine and others working in the United States. I continue to learn a lot from Wei Baogong and Xiao Yau.

My friends

Albany Museum of Art

Brooklyn, Brooklyn

Missing it keenly -- the warm kitchen -- clementines -- the night cold.

Solo Museum Exhibition

Thursday, November 12th, 2009 is the opening of my solo exhibition
A World of Splats, Gestures and Images
at the Albany Museum in Albany, GA.

A catalogue is available with an interview by Tyler Emerson-Dorsch.

I am extremely excited!

New Collages

Carl Plansky, Rest in Peace

In many ways, he epitomized New York.

Beijing Views: Summer Palace, Forbidden City, Trucks...

New American Paintings

Edition No. 82, curated by Ron Platt of the Alabama Museum of Art...I'm in it!

The Camera Lies Fallow

Wanting to write more--take less pictures--collages in the studio abound, ready for the next step.
Thinking with my eyes, how travel makes its way felt into a painting through the process of making.

The Daily Rumi: August 8, 2009

You that come to birth and bring the mysteries,
your voice-thunder makes us very happy.

Roar, lion of the heart,
and tear me open.

-Coleman Barks, trans.

Beijing Studio June 2009