drmstream[writing]

The artist who painted this works exclu­sively in images. In her fifty-year career, rep­re­sen­ta­tive images make up a tiny por­tion of her work. She is an abstract artist.

This is one of the few works where she uses words. The oth­ers were in a series of reli­gious works that she did mainly in the 1970’s, when she was attached as an oblate and teacher to a Bene­dic­tine monastery. The most mem­o­rable was a five-foot long wood­cut meant to illus­trate a piece of scrip­ture. The let­ters were cut deep and tight, like strokes ham­mered into Roman stel­lae, but the prim­i­tive energy of her lines evoked the fer­tile mys­ter­ies of nat­ural forces more than the neutered pur­pose­ful­ness of a mod­ern church.

Words are abstract paint.

The state­ment is ambigu­ous. It can be inter­preted as a strong dec­la­ra­tion: “Words are abstract. Paint.” Or it can be inter­preted as a metaphor, con­nect­ing the idea of words to paint. Both words and paints can be used in skill­ful hands to cre­ate images that tell sto­ries, con­vey mean­ing and bestow under­stand­ing, she might be saying.

The paint­ing has spe­cial mean­ing for me. I know for cer­tainty that it is a work of Art. That cer­tainty opens a broader ques­tion, prompted by the intro­duc­tion of the painted words onto the abstract image, that plagues me.

Why do I long to make Art? Why does the long­ing linger with me even when I’ve tried to skirt it, as if I were avoid­ing the home­less woman on the cor­ner, will­ing to obscure her human­ness because of her incon­ve­nient dis­ar­ray and unpre­dictable utterances?

The essence of a work of Art is its abil­ity to sus­pend the dis­con­ti­nu­ity of being — the com­bi­na­tion of our heart, mind and soul — and to trans­port us to a moment of com­plete inte­gra­tion with expe­ri­ence. When this inte­grated state is achieved, we expe­ri­ence intensely…feelings of under­stand­ing, clear-sightedness, deep pain, eupho­ria, vision. Our being is ele­vated. We are not actu­ally in the cir­cum­stance that make this sen­sa­tion come on, but we can expe­ri­ence it wholly

The true artist sees into the warp and woof of the fab­ric of time, sus­pends the labor and shows us the mag­i­cal prod­uct of our work of liv­ing, the deep and true nature of being alive.

The irony, of course, is that the artist has to painstak­ingly apply his craft to cre­ate this sen­sa­tion. The artist has to bear the impli­ca­tions of the hard work (and it is very hard work) bit by bit to make this thing. Some­times it is not very good. Most of the time, the sen­sa­tion that the artist expe­ri­enced and seeks to share was fleet­ing, and the work to com­pose it was mun­dane, so that the essence of the sen­sa­tion was missed and the work lies flat. It does not com­pel. It does not trans­port. It is skill­ful, because the artist under­stands how to work with the paint, or the words, or the sound. But in the end, that work lacks soul.

Soul is what ele­vates the experience.

Here’s an exam­ple of what I mean.

A mile down from my house the road curves, the tree cover breaks and the ground falls sharply off to a small hol­low. A house and barn sit in the green expanse in minia­ture scale, below a ridge of pines and oaks that frame the low and wide sky.

As I took the curve this morn­ing, I glanced over the hol­low. For an instant, I expe­ri­enced the unal­loyed sense of the sky. My fac­ul­ties raced to catch up: my eyes refo­cused to the new per­spec­tive, my other senses engaged; my pulse rose; and my con­scious explored diver­gent trains of thought, look­ing for words to describe the sky, assess­ing the likely weather that day, build­ing a visual imprint so I could recall the image.

For one moment that in its instance felt time­less I expe­ri­enced the beauty of the sky, sensed a trans­for­ma­tion within my self that was dif­fer­ent than the very moment that I was in, that momen­tar­ily ordered those sen­sa­tions inside me that are in a con­stant state of dis­or­der. For a very very fleet­ing moment, I was transformed.

What did the sky look like?

The word paint­ing can be like a pho­to­graph. The low sky was cov­ered with a blan­ket of silver-gray clouds that had been sliced into tiny half moons with a scal­lop knife. The curves were sym­met­ri­cal, each deep­ened by a shadow of smokey gray that leaked out into the clouds around it. In the fore­ground, the sky was a clear blue, almost white at the edges in the early morn­ing haze. The sky seemed alive, as if it were wrap­ping the clouds back into a blue pillowcase.

The words don’t begin to cap­ture the sen­sa­tion I expe­ri­enced. They set the stage. To trans­fer that sen­sa­tion to you, or to any­one expe­ri­enc­ing the thing, I would have to add con­text, dimen­sion, cre­ate a bridge using the words of to try to present an open­ing to a moment that is evanes­cent, tran­si­tory and, to my mind, sublime.

That is what a work of art does. It takes the sen­sa­tion, it presents a con­text through the appli­ca­tion of a craft and it attempts — attempts is the key word here — to pro­vide the oppor­tu­nity for transformation.

When I try to describe this long­ing to make Art, that’s where I get inar­tic­u­late. I want to cap­ture a feel­ing and make it con­tinue, trans­fer it, open a win­dow on it. I want to be a method of trans­port, to share some­thing that I dis­cov­ered, some­thing that is almost too amaz­ing to express. It’s the moment of things, the story of things, the song of things, the pic­ture of things.

I know the times that I’ve expe­ri­enced it in another’s work. These are dis­tinc­tive moments, free of all self-consciousness and arti­fice, out­side of the sphere of analy­sis and expli­ca­tion. After the moment I’ve mar­veled at the artistry, the appli­ca­tion of craft, and tried to under­stand how the sen­sa­tion that I expe­ri­enced was achieved, but in the moment I was sep­a­rated from the tyranny of self-awareness.

These are some of the things that have given me that feeling:

• The paint­ings of Bruegel;
• The sculp­tures of Serra;
• “The Good Sol­dier” by Ford Mad­dox Ford;
• A live con­cert by The World Sax­o­phone Quar­tet and the per­cus­sion ensem­ble mBoom at the Cathe­dral of St. John the Divine;
• Joyce’s “A Por­trait of the Artist as a Young Man”;
• Tony Kush­ner’s “Angels in Amer­ica”;
• David Lean’s “Lawrence of Ara­bia”;
• A short story by Bon­nie Tyler about a mother tak­ing her retarded daugh­ter to an institution.

When I long to make Art, I’m not hop­ing to make some­thing beau­ti­ful or serene. I want to make some­thing that trans­ports me into another place, the yin and the yang of exis­tence, beauty and hor­ror spooned together front to back like long-time lovers, insep­a­ra­ble, incom­plete with­out the other.

The artist who made the paint­ing at the begin­ning of this essay is my mother. She is inde­fati­ga­ble with her work, from when I was a small child to today, when I am a man in the mid­dle of his life and she is an older woman defy­ing the obsta­cles of her age.

When I was a young man, strug­gling to get started in life and frus­trated by my writ­ing, she said to me: You aren’t an artist.

That was a sen­tenc­ing by the high­est court.

What I know now, many years later, is that whether or not I am an artist, I long to share the remark­able beauty of life, to recre­ate those moments of unre­strained trans­port. I long to make Art.