A further development from my inside out series was the triune visual concept of the great “Passage” series. These were a symmetrical composition of a window or doorway, the literal passage, leading to an open bright landscape beyond. This was a strong image for me. I came to realize it was based on my many symmetrical landscape paintings of years before; a stand of trees in shadow on the left and right, with an open sunny passage in the middle leading to an inviting field or path.  I started to add a cool turquoise “river” element to these passage paintings, overlapping the strict linear elements. My visual concept became ever more abstract, using a cool horizontal on top of a vertical triune composition. This passage idea was transformational for me and led to a much more relaxed, open, completely abstract series. To me it signified a passage to future possibilities and realities; also a passage from linear rational Techne to intuitive internal creative spirituality Psyche.

The great Robert Hughes described this passage symbolically; “No painting is wholly abstract.  All art, in some way or another, is situated in the world, hoping to act as a transformer between the self and the non-self.   The great project of modernism was to propagate more ways in which this could be done.  But any view of art that insists on locating art’s meaning in its power to do what had not been done before tends to reject the benefits of the modernist spirit: it exchanges ideological cramp and historicist narrowness for the anxious and open discourse our cultural parents bequeathed us.

            The signs of that constriction are everywhere today-in the small ambitions of art, in its lack of any effort towards spirituality, in its sense of career rather than vocation, in its frequently bland occupation with semantics at the expense of the deeper passions of the creative self.   Perhaps the great energies of modernism are still latent in our culture, like Ulysses’ bow in the house of Penelope; but nobody seems able to string and draw it.  Yet the work still speaks to us, in all its voices, and will continue to do so.  Art discovers its true social use, not on the ideological plane, but by opening the passage from feeling to meaning - not for everyone, since that would be impossible, but for those who want to try.  This impulse seems to be immortal.  Certainly it has existed from the origins of human society, and despite the appalling commercialization of the art world, its flight into corporate ethics and strategies, and its gradual evacuation of spirit, it exists today.” - Robert Hughes, "The Shock of the New".

10. A Casual Biography

…drew from an early age…at 13 started playing drums influenced by Father’s incessant listening to swing & big band music and to Elvis’ appearance on the music scene …began playing in R & B, Rock & Soul bands...attended Detroit’s premier magnet Cass Technical High School as a Design & Drafting student…met future wife, Pam Yee, in high school (took 20 years to marry her)….11th grade started working in Detroit drafting community… sponsored by Chevrolet Gear & Axle in Hamtramck to General Motors Institute in Flint as a Mechanical Engineering & Management major…switched to GM Styling Staff at GM Technical Center as a styling apprentice… worked as a combination Engineering/Industrial Design student…corporate life revealed him to be “not a team player”…left GM program to attend the Art School of the Society of Arts & Crafts (later known as Center for Creative Studies) during its legendary early period, in Detroit’s Cultural Center, as an Industrial Design major…first experience of the art spirit...switched yearly to virtually every department in the college (Advertising, Illustration, Photography, Ceramics) while on US government tuition grant…exposed to a life long interest in contemporary improvisational instrumental Jazz in 1969…worked throughout as a machine tool & automation draftsman and later, designer… at 27 plunged into self-employment as an Engineering Contractor…returned to CCS in Fine Arts studies (drawing, painting, mainly figures) part-time for 15 years. [with Anthony Williams, Bill Girard, Richard Jerzy, Russ Keeter, Jay Holland, Dan Keller, realists all]…married at 35…became instant stepfather, home owner, home improvement guy…bought 2nd home in Honor (after vacationing in the general Traverse City area for 20 years)…started landscape series & showing in area venues…Pam retired from Wayne County Circuit Court…1995 we relocate to Honor………had 29 one-man exhibits and has been in 134 group shows, including many juried shows at the Traverse Area Arts Council where he won several awards… awarded an Honorable Mention in the First Northwest Michigan Regional Juried Exhibition, Viewers Choice Award in the Second Northwest Michigan Regional Juried Exhibition at the Dennos Museum Center in Traverse City, First Place in Crystal Lake Art Center Annual Juried All Media Show in Frankfort, Michigan…part of the ceiling mural restoration project at the City Opera House in Traverse City…teaches drawing and painting locally…in the collection of the Dennos Museum Center Permanent Collection, Empire National Bank, St. Joseph Hospital…

11. Art and Painting Notes

Unconcerned with the opinions of others, working deeply, for all the right reasons of meaning, beauty, and possibility, I eventually found my own imagery and passage to future possibilities.

Aesthetic- appreciation of beauty.  Beauty “A delightful quality associated with harmony of form or color, excellence of craftsmanship, truthfulness, originality, or another property.”

To voluntarily isolate and go deep, and report from the depths on what is found.

Get something you can’t “paint” on. ..structural qualities of oil paint…flickering oil surface.

Insights, not techniques. Technique to be in the service of vision.

The love and allure of beauty of sensual surfaces, materials, forms, colors, and proportions of art refreshes the soul.

Art is beginning before you know the end.

Discover something one could not imagine beforehand.

All subjects as a means of color and drawing as the true subject of a luscious beauty and transformative vision. …to uncover the energy and life within my subject matter rather than just taking original beauty and marring it with a technique based only on making a statement and not on revealing something worthwhile.

 Serene, tranquil, smooth, elegant, yet powerful painting ideas in the service of a refined esthetic to express mystery and essential meaning; through order, form, discipline, emotion, music, and hope through balance, composition, rhythm, and color.

Sensibility- Refined awareness & appreciation in matters of feeling.

12. Art and Painting Notes of Others

"…how the highest communion with the Divine can be found right at our fingertips in the simplest expressions of human creativity."

"…the most prayerful, most spiritually powerful act a person can undertake is to create, at his or her own level, with a consciousness of the place from which that gift arises." – Matthew Fox  “Creativity: Where the Divine and Human Meet”.

What was the artist trying to achieve? Did it succeed? Was it worth doing? Sometimes no challenge in the first place. Little reward in an easy perfection quickly reached by many. Artists who need ongoing reassurances seek out challenges offering clear goals & measurable feedback. Easier to reach an already defined goal than to discover it within you. Some problems more interesting, relevant, meaningful. Technical challenges secondary. It’s not that they’re hard, it’s that they’re easy. - David Bayles & Ted Orland “Art and Fear”

There seem to be moments of revelation, moments when we see in the transition of one part to another the unification of the whole. There is a sense of comprehension and of great happiness. We have entered into a great order and have been carried into greater knowledge by it. This sometimes in a passing face, a landscape, a growing thing. We may call it a passage into another dimension than our ordinary. If one could but record the vision of these moments by some sort of sign! It was in this hope that the arts were invented. Signposts on the way to what may be. Signposts towards greater knowledge.

“It would be easy to divide artists into two classes: those who grow so much within themselves as to master technique by the force of their need, and those who are mastered by technique and become stylists.”  - Robert Henri  “The Art Spirit”

“Divinely superfluous beauty”…“Esthetic arrest

“Inner motion of Nature and inner life of the artist parallel and serve as the subject…to awaken the emotion . . . engagement of your sense of self.”

“Essence of art to show the radiance shining through the forms of space and time. The whole as it manifests in everyday details of individual life.” - Joseph Campbell

Aesthetic beauty attributes: Integras - wholeness, consonantia - harmony, claritas - radiance- from “A Campbell Companion” from Joyce from Aquinas.

“Making a painting rather than just painting a picture of something” Rufino Tamayo

“Eugene Fromentin on Rubens: highest human values are involved in a patch of color, the bend of a line.” - Meyer Schapiro:

“The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude.” Voltaire

“…essential dimension of art as a vocation practiced for its own sake or to satisfy spiritual pretensions.. two professions… one directed toward public taste, the other toward forms of experience embodied only in art and to which creations from all times stand witness. In relating himself and his work to this extended dimension of art, the contemporary artist engages in a mythic vocation, in which, beyond current fashions and social and political problems, he seeks the approval of the masters. In the thirties, this second, “inner” profession, founded on art’s values, was centered not in the project [WPA]…but in a handful of young artists-Gorky, de Kooning, Pollack, Gottlieb, Rothko-sensitive to social demands, and confused by them, and in the school of Hans Hofmann, which propagated principles of form and feeling derived from the advanced European art movements. Once opportunities for art as employment ended, art for its own sake, and for the sake of the inner development of the artist came to the fore as a pioneering collective phenomenon. Out of a job, American art forgot its mirage of a respectable social status and dedicated itself to greatness.” “The Profession of Art: The W.P.A. Art Projects” in “Art on the Edge” Harold Rosenberg

 

“No painting is wholly abstract.  All art, in some way or another, is situated in the world, hoping to act as a transformer between the self and the non-self.   The great project of modernism was to propagate more ways in which this could be done.  But any view of art that insists on locating art’s meaning in its power to do what had not been done before tends to reject the benefits of the modernist spirit: it exchanges ideological cramp and historicist narrowness for the anxious and open discourse our cultural parents bequeathed us.

The signs of that constriction are everywhere today-in the small ambitions of art, in its lack of any effort towards spirituality, in its sense of career rather than vocation, in its frequently bland occupation with semantics at the expense of the deeper passions of the creative self.   Perhaps the great energies of modernism are still latent in our culture, like Ulysses’ bow in the house of Penelope; but nobody seems able to string and draw it.  Yet the work still speaks to us, in all its voices, and will continue to do so.  Art discovers its true social use, not on the ideological plane, but by opening the passage from feeling to meaning - not for everyone, since that would be impossible, but for those who want to try.  This impulse seems to be immortal.  Certainly it has existed from the origins of human society, and despite the appalling commercialization of the art world, its flight into corporate ethics and strategies, and its gradual evacuation of spirit, it exists today.” “sensuous communion with worldly delights” “great inherited themes of Romanticism”- Robert Hughes “The Shock of the New” 1980

“Passion overConvenience” - Gil Evans

“Art is not truth but the illusion of truth. Great paintings are not photographs but doorways into another world. If the painting has too little content, or none at all, only the eye will be pleased. Nor will the mind and the imagination be engaged in it if the content is too literal…, stating everything but implying nothing.” Timothy Foote - Time Life: The Life of Brueghel.

“Art generated by spiritual forces, art history properly understood is a ‘history of the human psyche and it’s forms of expression’ - Wilhelm Worringer” Jose Arguelles in “The Transformative Vision”

Aesthetics is not an academic subject, and beauty is not decoration.

…aesthetic, Beauty, art, [Aphrodite, Venus, Psyche], is sensory, survival of the soul, to refresh the soul, lure us back, sensual seduction. Tactile quality, sensuality of materials, surfaces, forms, proportions, but not in and of themselves. Allure, charming, attractive. Awaken the senses. Give in to what already is, imagining, enchantment, re-enchantment, en souling, re animate.

“ daimon, counselor, guardian angel, guide, genius, character, image, fate, soul, destiny, psyche. Socrates followed inner daimon.  “Tendance of the soul” - from James Hillman

"Entertainment gives you a predictable pleasure. Art leads to transformation. It awakens you, rather than just satisfying a craving." Makoto Fujimura

“The mechanic arts are those which we have occasion for in a young country as yet simple and not far advanced in luxury. I must study politics and war so that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their sons the right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” John Adams 1776 from a CCS catalog

“George Inness was largely self-taught and had little patience for the detail and labor of drawing and engraving. He loved, instead, the richness of paint and color, which he called the soul of painting, and believed that one painted, ‘not to imitate a fixed material condition, but to represent a living motion.’ Alluding to subjects, avoiding mimetic representation . . . detail did not gain me meaning . . .

. . . structure his landscapes around geometric forms, a development that may have reflected the Swedenborgian idea that the natural world corresponds to the spiritual world and that geometric forms possess spiritual identities. Through these and other compositional devices, Inness created paintings to inspire an almost "religious experience" in his viewers. - Adrienne Baxter Bell ”George Inness and the Visionary Landscape”

“. . . a perfect description for Inness' transcendent landscapes--gorgeous and radiant scenes that embody life's interconnectivity, mystery, timeless beauty, and untarnished hope.” Donna Seamen from Booklist

“...For the most part, we are losing authentic art in the marketplace, although not in the privacy of many studios around the world.” Roger Lipsey “An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth-century Art”