Contemplation

First Breath, 2008, oil on canvas, 12 x 12 inches
© 2008 Diane McGregor

My work is about process, and I often find myself submerged within the painting, the paint, the brushstrokes, the moment. Starting with the grid, I slowly build up grid layers of paint, almost in a trance putting down horizontal and vertical brushstrokes. As my body of work evolves, I am finding it more satisfying to leave some of the grid intact (rather than blending the entire grid into a diaphanous structure). This is permitting me to add more textures and areas of pure color, and I'm enjoying the more dynamic interface with the act of painting and the end result. I've been thinking a lot lately about how process and contemplation are related.

I lead a contemplative life -- not full of blissful meditative moments but rather a life of hard work, struggle, and effort while maintaining awareness of the present moment. I am reading Thomas Merton's The Inner Experience, a book about the contemplative life, and he writes:

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life itself solves them for you. Usually the solution consists in a discovery that they only existed insofar as they were inseparably connected with your own illusory exterior self. The solution of most such problems comes with the dissolution of this false self.

I think process-oriented work is contemplative. Painting is all about problem solving, and process-oriented work is all about letting the problem work out its own solution. It is a challenge to allow the process to find its way through, to consciously keep out of your own way and let the paint and the process come together into a fully realized artwork. But for me, this makes the whole act of painting a spiritual practice as I learn to let go and contemplate the solutions I am given.


(The above quote is taken from The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation by Thomas Merton, page 2.)

Grace

Andrew Forge, Fall (For P.M.), 2000, oil on canvas, 44 x 36 inches

I went to New York City a few weeks ago and bought a wonderful catalogue of Andrew Forge's work at the Betty Cuningham Gallery. Forge was a painter and a well-known art critic. His paintings are composed of tiny dots of color, a repetitive technique -- a technique of gradual accumulation -- that attracts me. Although obviously influenced by pointillism, the work is non-representational and completely modern. I think his work is honest and sincere, without exposing a sense of the artist's ego. A critic once wrote that Forge's paintings "stand as poetic meditations on the process of perception."

The catalogue includes excerpts from an interview which reveal Forge to be a great thinker with a keen insight into other artists' work, among them Giacometti, Monet, and Bonnard. Regarding Monet's late work, Forge observes that Monet begins to

realize the connection between the kind of painting that he's doing and the way in which the painting absorbs the onlooker, and the ambient consequences of this, and once the idea of a series begins to fascinate him -- all this brings into his art, at the turn of the century, so much of what constitutes our consciousness, the flow of time, the feeling that it is actually our minds that are forming and re-forming the imagery that the painter is dealing with, that these images are not, so to speak, taken from the culture at large, but are actually discovered out of individual experience.

And of course that's his modernity; he realizes intuitively that the culture is no longer providing us with those great, firm icons that it had given us in the past; that somehow modern man is thrown back onto his own nervous system, his own perceptual system, his own struggle for cognition. With Monet this is acted out in the painting; it's an extraordinary life-work.

Claude Monet, The Water Lily Pond (Japanese Bridge), 1900, oil on canvas,
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

(The above quote is taken from Andrew Forge, Exhibition Catalogue 2007, Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York, NY, page 22.)

Rothko

"The progression of a painter's work, as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity: toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer." --Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1953, National Gallery of Art, Washington,

Gift of the Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc.

An abstract painting is an archive of decisions. Painting is a process of learning what to keep and what to let go of. A lot of painting happens by sitting around and looking, looking at the painting from all angles, feeling what's missing, what needs tweaking, where the color is unbalanced or too heavy. A lot of painting also happens by looking at and studying other painters' paintings.

Rothko. He seemed to instinctively know how to achieve fullness through emptiness -- his work communes with me on a level that is very close to my own visual ideals: repetition, color, luminosity, containment, infinity.

Briony Fer, in her wonderful book, The Infinite Line, observes that "there is something very distinctive and indeed extreme about Rothko's insistence that repetition should serve rather than subvert the redemptive function of the picture." She continues:

Rothko's repetition, of course, rarely gets talked about as repetition. Instead it is called his 'classic' or 'signature style'....Rothko's template of an upright rectangular canvas, with a stack of rectangular forms, endlessly differentiated, endlessly nuanced, is both stringent and flexible. It invites a subtle discernment of the differences that occur, even as it repeats. Likewise, there are colour repetitions and colour differences mobilised within the basic schema....Rothko himself once told a friend why it was worth repeating: 'If a thing is worth doing once, it is worth doing over and over again -- exploring it, probing it, demanding by this repetition that the public look at it.' There is something voracious about the demand, the demand to look, commanding attention through repetition, a concentration of mind.

There is something in my own appetite for looking, for probing, for exploring every nuance available through repetition, that resonates with Rothko's words. Rothko, unlike the minimalists, continually reworked a basic format in order to reach the transcendent potential of painting. Sublime yet intimate, his work summons a meditative or contemplative gaze while concomitantly invoking ecstasy and tragedy.

(The above quotes are taken from The Infinite Line, by Briony Fer, pages 6-8.)

Painting Truth

I found this quote by painter Philip Guston which I believe sums up the truth of painting:

In my experience a painting is not made with colours and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere, a trifle, some detail observed, wondered about and, naturally from the previous painting. The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.... There is Leonardo da Vinci's famous statement that painting is a thing of the mind. I think that's right. I think that the idea of the pleasure of the eye is not merely limited, it isn't even possible. Everything means something. Anything in life or in art, any mark you make has meaning and the only question is, 'what kind of meaning?'

-- Philip Guston, from "Philip Guston Talking" (lecture given at the University of Minnestoa, March 1978)

Guston here is talking about the idea of painting, rather than the existence of some physical materials on a canvas that make a beautiful image. That is the true nature of painting -- it is formed in the mind. The witness to beauty and the sublime connection we may feel with a certain painting is about the mind's connection to that idea -- it's not a visual connection but an emotional connection that makes a painting visually compelling. The meaning behind the painting is what makes the painting, especially when we are talking about abstract painting. A painter's philosophy made manifest is what abstract painting is all about. A painting is a living thing, it "moves in a mind."

Poetry

"The mood
Traced in shadow
An indecipherable cause."
-- Wallace Stevens, from "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"

Shadow Trace, 2008, oil on canvas, 18x18 inches
© 2008 Diane McGregor

I love poetry. Reading poetry gives me the same thrill as looking at abstract paintings -- all at once, a feeling, "an indecipherable cause," enters one's imagination and takes flight. I often use poetry to find evocative titles for my work. Since my abstractions come from within and are created slowly over time through accretion, chance, and intuition, often the right title can create a poetic interpretation of the mysterious reality of a painting. Sometimes, the titles come to me as I'm working. Other times, a word or phrase from a poem can trigger an image in my mind that then becomes a painting. Finally, as is the case here with Shadow Trace, I discover the title by looking through favorite poems. Very often, the right title transforms the painting into something profound, beyond just paint on canvas. The painting rightly assumes its place in the world, having never before existed in quite this combination of color and form, light and dark, poetry and silence. My involvement with each painting is like a birthing experience, and only I and the painting know what labor pains I have suffered in creating it. Sometimes, the title is an invitation for the viewer to witness this very private struggle and triumph.