Expectational Hazard

Negative Space

Though this has been posted previously it reminded me of the current House of Representatives.

Expansion

Narrowing is happening everywhere. Disciplines of study look at smaller and smaller areas. Specialties in every field create distance from the big picture by the specific detail they study. People are often narrowing their personal group and guiding ideas. This is possibly a response to fear. Even when we know the news story in all its details, wars, shootings, disease, with every dramatic horror, the media swamps every outlet with endless discussion that generates more fear. We may know the primary characters in the drama, but never who is making money off it other than the media and the arms industry. The way it fits into a larger picture and how a broader understanding might lead to better solutions does not feed the machine, so we are trapped in our chairs, hidden from exposure lest we are somehow fingered as the enemy. The destruction industry is very powerful and is now turning attention to important government structures that though far from perfect have given us a framework to work with competing viewpoints. Facts are at war with alternative facts, our sophisticated brains drowning in simplifying contradictory symbols. Yet creating is still happening. Artists all over the world bring insight and the emotional significance of events. Gaining perspective is a task for images. Antagonisms are built from limiting the evidence, avoiding whatever shows how a different group sees things. We need to see more of how things are interconnected. I recently heard someone on the radio say that banning books was an effort to decrease empathy. Stories create context, allows others into the circumstances behind events. Stories about people different from the familiar group help us understand them better, sympathize with a specific situation and recognize an individual as another human being. Art creates a bridge to the minds of others. Expressed with feeling, the feeling connects people even when the content is unfamiliar. This strengthens the ability to see what matters instead of surface triggers aimed at manipulation. Anyone can train their visual, intuitive intelligence by looking at art. With so much now available on the internet, it couldn’t be easier and more urgent. John Dewey once wrote that propaganda was designed to close minds whereas education was designed to open them. Looking at a bigger picture opens the mind to wider possibilities, opening up solutions that bring together instead of tear apart.

Invitation

Notes on upcoming show

Over forty works covering two floors of the Gallery at Manor Mill, the show “Phases of Mind”, represents two ways I explore feelings I’m trying to understand reflecting diverse mental states. The pastel drawings on the second floor investigate idea-based moods often triggered by my reading in science and philosophy. I think of these drawings as visual philosophy, an image that shows a set of relationships that can prompt ideas in the viewer. One purpose is to break down fixation on separate objects and shift attention to processes of change and interpenetration, drawing attention to impermanence. The graphite-based drawings on the third floor focus on weight, how it affects attention and conveys seriousness. These are darker moods as the metaphor of heaviness implies. Many of them are also motivated by the desire to have the image push out at the viewer rather than the traditional sense of the picture falling back from a window. The seven drawings in the “Rational Limits” series, six of which were shown at the BMA are a bridge to the socio-political work that formed the rest of that show. They consider the mindsets that detach people from their feelings enough to create division and anxiety in the world. In all off these works, the viewer can go in many directions of their own. I’ve sought an essence that gives form that can prompt a viewers’ thought.

Enactment

Noticing

In a time when the attention of so many is sucked into one small physical location, 21st century research is reminding us of the importance of the rest of our environment to day-to-day well-being. Nature and water have the most restorative qualities. The integration of elements in the natural world includes us when we’re walking through it. In Japan they recommend the benefits of forest bathing, a simple walk in the woods. Noticing what’s out there stimulates the senses and can stir curiosity because nature keeps changing. The clouds are different, the fox or deer or rabbit that runs through a yard is never the same, the edges of the creek vary as does the clarity and depth of the water. A regular suburban neighborhood is an endless stream of information, that when noticed, strengthens our ability to notice more. Any continued involvement in something brings expertise which enables us to see in more detail. Whether it’s studying the needs of the plants in your garden or learning more about the people around you, accumulated observation builds knowledge. Spinoza wrote “The more the mind knows, the better it understands.” Any one area of knowledge improves our base for reasoning about other things, with a range of characteristics, functions and interactions that can be compared to new perceptions, making distinctions where different and correlations where the same. Personal verbal language is enriched with new description and metaphor. This is not quantifiable knowledge. Observed knowledge broadens our base of perception. Everything we learn with our eyes fine tunes our ability to see. Every time I walk with my friend Jordan Tierney, I learn something from her intense ecological awareness of the natural world. I notice more. I contrast this with the memory of a teenager I saw walking in the surf at the beach, his eyes never leaving the screen in his hand which is attached by wires to his ears as well. Our curiosity has been co-opted by our phones, reduced to the choices on the screen- has someone responded to our post or text, do we have voice mail, what is the weather in the next 15 minutes, what’s the trending video. As algorithms and demagogues know, emotion gets attention but never has us question why a feeling attracts us. Art shows what words can’t say, bringing the feeling we couldn’t articulate back to us with real depth. Art can show feelings too subtle and deep for words. When Jordan and I were leaving the reservoir area we saw two buzzards pecking at something dead on the ground. When we were close enough see it was a fawn, horror and sadness were the only words. They couldn’t come close to describing the thickness in my chest. Later she sent me this page in her journal so beautifully exemplifying art’s power to say it for me.