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The world (the multiverse, as well as the tidily habitable oikoumene) is linked together intrinsically, whether it is supported by the Divine Breath moment by moment, or is a big web of nonsensical energy, or both, the two not being mutually exclusive.
I am not so sure these blog posts are so intrinsically linked, except insofar as they mirror the life of this particular knot or eddy of the world's energy. I would like for joculum, the blog, to be sustained by a logic of inquiry that connects its numerous topics, instead of simply reflecting the considerable failings and neuroses of Jerry Cullum.
But the method inevitably derives from my own mental wiring, which has its own distinct dysfunctionalities.
That said, I am wondering if—no, realizing that—painting is another exemplar of the saying "There are as many paths as there are types and conditions of human beings." Painting, or photography, or perhaps any art you care to name that doesn't depend on physics, on there being only one way to make it hang together, and thus one set of rules.
I suppose none do so depend; if you do not intend to walk on it, you can make an intricate carpet design out of colored paper clips, just as you can make music by incorporating the random sounds in the room or make a salad that tests the limits of salad-ness by being edible but looking and smelling like nothing you would want to eat.
I bring this topic up with reference to a passage in Kate Christensen's brilliant novel The Great Man regarding Maxine's painting practice (by which I mean, as the word properly means, the way that she does stuff). Abstract painting entails one set of mental and physical practices; representational painting requires another, not unrelated set; the fictional painter Maxine, like several dear friends of mine, does both excellently.
I cannot paint representationally worth a damn. I can, however, combine contrasting marks that require muscular and mental quickness, and thus create emotionally involving abstraction. And I know (sometimes) when I have made a bad painting, as well as what frame of mind (please think about that idiom) I have to cultivate to make a painting at all.
But there are many for whom the act of painting requires no shift in mental frame at all; it's just another job, although the work they turn out often looks as nine-to-five-ish as their attitude. I consider contemporary representational painting the more encompassing mental practice because the best representation includes small passages of superb abstraction (and the least interesting representation doesn't). I say "contemporary" because there are many traditional painting practices in which rigorous rules substitute for abstraction's observational delicacy of the world's subtle patterns. Not every style of art has to incorporate every possibility.
Icons and Tibetan thangkas and nineteenth century trompe l'oeil and ever so many other types of painting have no emotionally involving passages of paint at all in them; they get their emotional impact another way, via the handling of imagery.
Contemporary photography usually succeeds by incorporating the mathematical relations of proportion, of the relationship of objects and empty spaces, of where bodies stand in space. It less often captures abstraction's complex mix of tone, spatial relation, and psychologically charged texture. What is more easily achieved in photography is harder in painting, and vice versa. Subtle effects in photography require less hand-eye coordination than in representational painting, but they are harder to see and frame interestingly in the cluttered and random outer world than in the mind's eye, even when the mind's eye is itself cluttered and random.
So there.
( * )
I am not so sure these blog posts are so intrinsically linked, except insofar as they mirror the life of this particular knot or eddy of the world's energy. I would like for joculum, the blog, to be sustained by a logic of inquiry that connects its numerous topics, instead of simply reflecting the considerable failings and neuroses of Jerry Cullum.
But the method inevitably derives from my own mental wiring, which has its own distinct dysfunctionalities.
That said, I am wondering if—no, realizing that—painting is another exemplar of the saying "There are as many paths as there are types and conditions of human beings." Painting, or photography, or perhaps any art you care to name that doesn't depend on physics, on there being only one way to make it hang together, and thus one set of rules.
I suppose none do so depend; if you do not intend to walk on it, you can make an intricate carpet design out of colored paper clips, just as you can make music by incorporating the random sounds in the room or make a salad that tests the limits of salad-ness by being edible but looking and smelling like nothing you would want to eat.
I bring this topic up with reference to a passage in Kate Christensen's brilliant novel The Great Man regarding Maxine's painting practice (by which I mean, as the word properly means, the way that she does stuff). Abstract painting entails one set of mental and physical practices; representational painting requires another, not unrelated set; the fictional painter Maxine, like several dear friends of mine, does both excellently.
I cannot paint representationally worth a damn. I can, however, combine contrasting marks that require muscular and mental quickness, and thus create emotionally involving abstraction. And I know (sometimes) when I have made a bad painting, as well as what frame of mind (please think about that idiom) I have to cultivate to make a painting at all.
But there are many for whom the act of painting requires no shift in mental frame at all; it's just another job, although the work they turn out often looks as nine-to-five-ish as their attitude. I consider contemporary representational painting the more encompassing mental practice because the best representation includes small passages of superb abstraction (and the least interesting representation doesn't). I say "contemporary" because there are many traditional painting practices in which rigorous rules substitute for abstraction's observational delicacy of the world's subtle patterns. Not every style of art has to incorporate every possibility.
Icons and Tibetan thangkas and nineteenth century trompe l'oeil and ever so many other types of painting have no emotionally involving passages of paint at all in them; they get their emotional impact another way, via the handling of imagery.
Contemporary photography usually succeeds by incorporating the mathematical relations of proportion, of the relationship of objects and empty spaces, of where bodies stand in space. It less often captures abstraction's complex mix of tone, spatial relation, and psychologically charged texture. What is more easily achieved in photography is harder in painting, and vice versa. Subtle effects in photography require less hand-eye coordination than in representational painting, but they are harder to see and frame interestingly in the cluttered and random outer world than in the mind's eye, even when the mind's eye is itself cluttered and random.
So there.
( * )
