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(”Snow-Painting” by Patrick Yurick, Febraury 2008)

I wrote in the margin of the book “No-More Secondhand Art” by Peter London this morning before I started my homework.

“In the pursuit of artistic abstraction we inevitably draw from the “truth” of life in order to create a representation of it; finding immediately that all we have ever perceived as the “truth” has merely been abstraction.” (Mister Y, Mar. 16, 08)

It was a thought I had wished I had communicated from the beginning in my abstraction unit with my Art II class, but I wouldn’t have been searching for it if I hadn’t been teaching it for the last month or so. London was talking about the purpose of art and specifically the quest for beauty vs. the quest for art.

If I lose you , be sure to skip to the last two paragraphs.

“Art has traditionally had another function besides the pursuit of beauty, one that is less costly; equally legitimate, ancient in origin, and universal in usage; and perhaps even more profound. I mean the pursuit of meaning. By shifting our concerns from trying to make the beautiful thing to seeking the honest and the meaningful thing, two critical objectives may be accomplished. First the paralyzing self-consciousness that invariably accompanies the search for beauty is diminished. When we give up concern for making something beautiful we also drop any comparison of our work with external standards of excellence, and drop the feelings of ineptitude that inevitably result from such comparison. The pursuit of the merely decorative edge of beauty is thereby put into its natural place: nice if its there, but structurally unessential.” (“No More Secondhand Art” By Peter London, 1989, p. 20)

That wasn’t what I wrote in the margin. But it was what connected a thought I was having last night together. As I was driving to go work out at the gym I listened to Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose” he was not talking about the production of art like London was but he was talking about how the things we perceive as solid forms are merely abstract. He talked about how recently it was discovered that what we perceive as solid, such as out bodies, is 99.9% formless. What that means is that when you take away all of the space that is between atoms and then between molecules all that would be left would be a 0.1% of what we see. And even the solid matter that we would like to believe is solid is unstable and constantly moving. HE described it in comparison to our bodies being a scaled down version of space and the cosmos. All of the space in between planets is equivalent, though scaled down, to the space between solids within our own bodies.

He then talked about how our perception interacted with this reality. He talked about how we abstract our reality. Everything we perceive as solid and full of form is merely how our minds interact with translating reality into the understandable. I thought about this as I walked up the stairs to my destination, the gym, and I realized that this perceived as solid thing I was walking on was merely a choice I was making in order to believe in something. I then thought about how stairs could be a metaphor, then I realized that it was more than a “could be” scenario – the stairs were a metaphor. A metaphor for getting to a goal, and how I walked illustrated how I did not want to work out – because I was taking my time. I was physically walking on a metaphor. In that moment I realized that the abstraction the students have been doing in class is completely real, as real as walking up the stairs.

We continuously live within an abstract painting, Or, rather, we continually live within an abstraction. The painting as an exercise is a perfect way of reminding ourselves that whenever we engage with life we are abstracting because we are perceiving life as solid, a fundamental error and a fundamental necessity. We have to see form in order to live within the confines of a formed world, yet the only way to find meaning within the formed world is the realization that it is truly formless.

Ok so basically, to sum up my thoughts:

Abstract painting helps us realize that the truth of reality is entirely as true as an abstract painting. When we draw a man on the stairs taking his time to walk up it, we are drawing ourselves. The next time you walk up stairs you may even remember that you are that man that you are painting. And when, especially in abstraction, we pay closer attention to colors and shapes and lines of the painting – drawing away from emphasis on eye-sight realism we may remember this while we walk up the stairs and these shapes and colors and lines that we traditionally gloss over may now be hard to miss.

All we can do when we start to see reality for it’s vibrant shapes, colors, and lines is smile and realize we have been goofing up. We actually believed that there was only one way to see the world and that either we had found it or we were missing out. (If you take either stance – you and anyone who believes this is making a fundamental error in perception and unfortunately is missing out on the living abstract painting.)

Until next class ☺ ~Mr. Y