Paintings in Progress – Page 3 – A View from the Wheelhouse

Camillo’s Memory Theatre-an artwork in progress

Posted on December 16, 2013December 17, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

Francis Yates, in The Art of Memory, tells how Giulio Camillo reinvented memory art in accordance with the renewed interest in Neoplatonism. Camillo’s conception was also inspired by the recently rediscovered teachings of Hermetic philosophy which his friend, Marcilio Ficino had introduced into Renaissance Italy with his translation of the Corpus Hermeticism.

Ficino inspired Camillo in the use of astral talismans to draw down celestial influences into memory images and infuse them with magic power. This imaginative reinvention of memory art was meant to train the mind to receive celestial influences and unify esoteric knowledge by holding an inner image that mirrored the celestial harmony.

The Corpus Hermeticum taught the essential divinity of man and that all phenomena have their origin in the realm of ideas (archetypes.) Camillo’s theatre enabled the “viewer” to recall these first causes, and the essential relationship between man (microcosm,) and the world (macrocosm.)

The first level of manifestation was mediated by the 7 Governors. These astral beings made up the 7 measures by which the interior man descends into creation, acquires a body whose parts fall subject to the dominion of the zodiac, before he reascends through the heavenly spheres. It is through the Hermetic religious experience he regains his innate divinity. The 7 governors have associations with the known planets, 7 days of creation, angelic hierarchy and the lower sephiroth.

Yates says that the greatness of Renaissance art was largely due to perfect proportion that was in accord with celestial harmony. Seen in this light, the grace and majesty of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus is a result of her status as talisman.

Paintings in Progress, videos

A walk through the Memory Stations-an artwork in progress

Posted on December 12, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

The best way to approach an art exhibit is to work on all the pieces at once. I’m prepping 7 canvases, working on the memory stations and doing the memory practice. Here is a video to give an idea of how it works.

Paintings in Progress

Higgily-Piggily Mindscape-an artwork in progress

Posted on December 6, 2013December 7, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

Here is a small study for a larger piece. I’m wanting to keep it lean, avoid accumulation of extraneous detail and focus on atmosphere, light and a general feeling of spaciousness. This one seems to suggest loss.

Shadowy forms step forward from the mists with a single swipe of the paint rag. They appear in my dreams silhouetted against ancient fires, as if to demand I attend to their their melancholy plight wandering the in-between.

The memory practice is working. I went from recalling no dreams at all, to writing 5 pages this morning. These seem to have associations with the art project, “real” life, and offer encounters with Asiatic shamans in crazy hats who get on my case for some vague act of forgetfulness.

The intent to work with the spontaneous flow of dream imagery-the attempt to bring unconscious content into the light of day-involves a confrontation with subject/object paradox. Who is doing the observing? Who is observed? Looking inward brings up thorny issues about perception and reality that artists have been struggling with since Cezanne, and which mystics have explored for centuries.

How needing of compassion are the ignorant and the deluded, bound in this confining dungeon of egotistical attachment and the subject-object dichotomy…

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Blake saw his brethren bound in this dungeon, and sang of fallen Albion held in thrall to the satanic, scientific-materialism that set man apart from nature, charity and the Heaven within himself.

Paintings in Progress

Particulars-an artwork in progress

Posted on December 1, 2013December 1, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

William Blake stressed the “particulars,” how the details of daily life are continuous with cosmic totality. In Blake’s expansive vision the two perspectives interpenetrate and this all-inclusive vision animates and unifies his art in way that is unique in the history of art. In Jerusalem, the local village scene merges with vast space and opens on the mythic city:

Pancrass & Kentish-town repose

Among her golden pillars high,

Among her golden arches which

Shine upon the starry sky.

So my Black Friday visit to a Port Angeles fabric store acquires new significance. This particular Clallam anchorage is where the angels weave this narrative into the fabric of myth. Or maybe it was just a place where I could score a good deal on the canvas I need for my February art show.

I am imagining some large canvases painted in the muted, earthen tones of the gray, English landscape overlaid with an architecture of arches and pillars of insubstantial, golden light.

At the same time I continue the memory practice, learning Jerusalem “by heart” and using the mnemonic imagery of the memory stations as a starting point. These stations continue to evolve as I memorize the text and work the paintings. In this way I hope to in infuse the paintings with some of Blake’s generous, all-encompassing spirit.

This process may sound cumbersome, but it works well in maintaining a broad perspective and helps avoid a myopic fixation on details. This fixation is far from the non-dualistic attention to particulars Blake writes of. I hope my art may be as expansive and generous as his.

If you look closely at the background, some ethereal light forms emerge; vague figures who begin to emerge from beyond a misty veil. Or maybe the turpentine was just going to my head.

Paintings in Progress

The Memory Theatre-an artwork in progress

Posted on November 26, 2013November 27, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

sculpture stationsculpture station — Second Memory Station

A dream: I am building a stretcher (wood frame to stretch canvas over for painting) for my February art show. After I nail it together, I see that I’ve used 2×4’s which are too heavy and ungainly for the size of the painting. The center brace is too short and part of it is made of ground contact, pressure treated wood, a toxic and inappropriate material for a stretcher.

Now this is where it gets interesting. A dream about my upcoming art show. This project is continuous with the practice I undertook to memorize dreams in order to gain a broader perspective on the work. This is a view informed by the heart as well as mind. A kind of feedback loop is created: The intention to bring the dream to the waking world coincides with an awareness of waking life (art show) within the dream state. This opens a dialogue between the flow of unconscious imagery and conscious intent. It gives valuable clues on how to proceed.

I’m not sure what the symbols of treated 2×4’s and toxic ground contact, pressure treated wood tells me. But I have an intuition that it relates to right proportion, appropriate measure-ways and means.

I’ve long intuited that lucid dreaming abides by the golden mean proportion. It is not just control of dreams, but a way to avoid getting lost in allurements, terrors and distractions; mesmerized by the phantasms that present themselves as real. It depends on the right proportion between waking and dream. These contraries are held in a dynamic tension and generate a third element-a state which transcends contradiction. The point of all this is to gain clear awareness of profound emptiness. This is the truth of the most fundamental Buddhist koan:

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. – Heart Sutra

I began sculpting memory stations with plaster to use as a basis for drawings- studies for a series of large paintings.

This one has taken a vaguely angelic form.

The challenge is to paint these ethereal beings without sappy cliché.

Without contraries there is no Progression. -William Blake

Paintings in Progress

The Memory Theatre-a Reprieve

Posted on November 23, 2013November 24, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

DSC02850memory stations 10 tree — First memory station

In his wonderful book, Little Book of Dreams, Robert Bosnak says that the best way to enhance dream recollection is the classic memory practice. This is important for many reasons. Here’s one:

In a dream I was given a slip of paper on which was written the word HEARTNET. The image was very clear and when I told Lily of the dream the next day, she suggested I google it. It turned out to be a heart health website.

Taking this as a sign, I had a checkup and found my cholesterol levels dangerously high. I became resolved to clean up my act and extend my life. It gave me a reprieve.

Tibetan Buddhist teachers say that the ability to consciously enter the dream state-lucid dreaming-is a good way to prepare for the bardo after death.

As I am not ready to face the bardo’s dangerous pathways, attending to the dream message allowed me more time to cultivate the qualities of compassion and wisdom that help to ease the transition. This, it is said, increases the possibility of a favorable rebirth.

DSC01792blakes painting teacher — Blake’s painting teacher, from his visionary heads series

I was thinking of Blake’s vision of Jerusalem as a Golden city of peace, love and harmony that, at some timeless time, was “on England’s pleasant pastures seen.” Did such a city exist in prehistory?

Then I read this in Eva Wong’s commentary in the Hui-Ming Ching (Cultivating the Energy of life:)

When we are in our mother’s womb, we were filled with the primordial energy of the Tao. In the natal state, original nature and the energy of life are united.

At birth we come into contact with the world. When air is inhaled through the nostrils, the primordial breath is contaminated and the connection with the Tao is broken. Original nature and life energy separate, the former moving to the heart and the latter moving to the kidneys.

Paintings in Progress

The Memory Theatre-an artwork in process

Posted on November 20, 2013November 20, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

I’ve made some memory stations and begun the memory practice. Maybe I’ll try to memorize Jerusalem (at least parts of it) by William Blake. The organization of the space and creating the stations is not separate from the work of sketching out the composition on the canvases. The placement and spacing are important.

I imagine the paintings might take the form of a still life that opens onto a vast landscape. Blake had a vision that beheld the universe in a grain of sand, infinity in an hour and the celestial city built on the rolling green English countryside. I want my art to share some of this all-encompassing perspective.

The fields from Islington to Marybone,

To Primrose Hill and Saint John’s Wood,

Were builded over with pillars of gold,

And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.

I’ve found that memory practice leads to amazing experiences. It is a way to attune to subtle influences and bring to conscious awareness the too-often suppressed messages from the unconscious. In her brilliant book, the Art of Memory, Frances Yates quotes Cicero’s recollection of the poet Simonides, who was said to be inventor of the memory art:

…persons desiring to train this faculty (of memory) must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written on it.

Paintings in Progress

The Memory Theatre-Idea for my Febuary art exhibition

Posted on November 19, 2013November 19, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

My next art show is coming up soon. My idea is inspired by the Memory Theatre. This is an ancient mnemonic device used by actors and rhetoricians to commit long speeches to memory. The memory places are niches, or altars that contain imagery (the more outlandish the better) that facilitate recollection of the text. In ancient times, these features were incorporated into the design of theatres.

My idea is to make this part of the process of creating the work for my show. I’ll start with the basics: clean up my studio and create a series of 10 altars which I will decorate with whatever imagery will facilitate recollection of a long poem. At the same time I’ll prepare 10 canvases which will correspond with each of the memory stations. These paintings will comprise the exhibit.

I haven’t decided on a poem yet but maybe one of William Blake’s medium-length works will serve. This memory process will be concurrent with the creation of 10 paintings inspired by each of the memory stations. The art show’s theme will be continuous with the theme of the poem.

The whole process from straightening out the studio to “completion” of the paintings will be documented in this blog with photos, text, video and recordings. Stay tuned.

Paintings in Progress

The Saga of Eagle Harbor

Posted on November 4, 2013November 4, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

Here is a picture of me painting on the old houseboat, Wicca, in Eagle Harbor. Most of the liveaboards have been evicted since then. Here is a fine article about the destruction of this once vital community from the online sailing magazine, Three Sheets NW.

Paintings in Progress

Studio Update 2

Posted on October 27, 2013October 28, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

Here are a couple of paintings I’ve been working on for my November exhibit. The top one is my first version of the Vicker’s memorial in Kane cemetary.

One of the most difficult things in painting is knowing when to stop, and maybe that time passed long ago. But I have another version which I began when I’d given this one up for lost.

The second one I just began. The colors outside the studio window are more vibrant than I could ever hope to capture in paint. It’s still a work in progress, though the show goes up in 3 days.