Wayfarer

"Wayfarer"
Robert Brawley,
2003, oil on panel, 9" x 24"

This short talk today has three main objectives: one, to ennoble and provide an interesting interpretation of the great masterpiece paintings by Robert Brawley; two, to bring into fruition my own experiences with art and art-making; and three, to benefit the reader. Please read on.

The Featured Profile
Robert Brawley, “Bob”, was my professor and adviser at the University of Kansas. His lectures were integral sermons that swept over major fields of knowledge, from psychology to string theory, art history to sexuality, spirituality to postmodern philosophy; he talked about it all and integrated it all into an art lesson. I felt my time with him was, in every sense, “integrally informed”, and I felt overjoyed to have finally found a teacher so clearly operating from an “Integral Consciousness.” His artwork was mostly realistic still-lifes and landscapes, painted with a hauntingly high degree of skill.

He told me once, “The way up is back down! The entire thing is a spiral, remember?”

And so, because Bob was flying at an integral, vanguard altitude of consciousness, and painted in a style of realism, I think we should use his work to examine what the New Realism, or “Integral Realism,” looks like in painting.

Every era has its avant garde (and its avant garde chasers), and later we will explore what our own current, kickin avant garde is (and why it is "Integral"). But first I’d like to make one thing very clear.

Interpreting Languages
Like all interpretation, art interpretation is a dicey affair, leading to what some might call a killing. John Dean says it best: “An answer is always a form of death” and this is very true in regards to explaining art. To “explain” literally means to make flat, or lay out on a plain (from ex+ planus- level, flat.) It's the difficult task of trying to make a multidimensional "holon" one dimensional, which deletes a large, beautiful component of the artifact (and therefore, of the mind interpreting it).


"Wayfarer"
Hieronymus Bosch, 1500-1502.

So my spirit of interpretation will be to explore Bob’s paintings in a way that will not delete depth, and will not close doors. The very nature of art is to begin a conversation, not end one in an answer, and therefore, I pray that the nature of this talk will be that of many doors opening to many new ideas and avenues inspired by the work. May it increase the included perspectives, forcing the the mind to grow.

Personally
Personally, Bob’s little round painting “Persephone” pictured above, has been a portal in my living room, a tiny mirror reflecting a vast sky and mountain range of ideas within me and my world. I’ll share with you this portal, and its effect on my own perspective, and I hope everyone keeps using art as a vehicle to the still depths in the center of reality.

Cave Paintings and Early Goddesses
And so we begin our discussion of this painting by looking to the past. All modern artifacts have embedded within their creation all that came before. They enfold their own history, an art history reaching back to the cave paintings and the early sculptures of the goddess. This artifact is no exception, and calling it “Persephone” helps nudge us even more towards a review or a “re-call” of those early myths (and with your permission, we will do that later on).

However, when you read about my take on art history, please keep in mind that I am a painter, and an artist’s take on art history is very different from the art historian’s. Bob was very cynical of art historians’ theories, reminding us continually that Art History is a story that changes every 15 years or so, and that "asking an art historian about art is like asking a virgin about sex." Understanding this is important because the success of our interpretation of Bob’s work depends on how well we can piece together his worldview.


Lineage
Artists have a personal and even emotional connection to their “lineage,” and you can sense it if you talk to one about art history. Alex Grey’s “The Mission of Art," or Philip Rubinov-Jacobson’s “Drinking Lightning” are perfect examples. Or here, listen to the great M.C. Escher speak about the cave paintings at Lascoux:

“You get such a strange feeling when you try to imagine what is meant by “70,000 years ago." You try to imagine it, but can’t. How short is a historical period of 5,000 years, from the oldest Egyptian pyramids until today, compared with that time span! A dark night lasting perhaps 20 times longer than that entire historical period separates us from the human spirit whose mirror image we observe on the walls of this cave. It is an image that is alert, lively, and that speaks to us immediately, as if it had been painted yesterday. It touches you deeply, not so much at the moment you are observing it (I didn’t see anyone in our group bursting to tears), but later on, now, that is, while I am sitting here on the grass. Yes, it is a strange phenomenon that human spirit, that unextinguished spark, that seed that remained alive, that thread we hold in our hands that connects us, across the soundless and pitch-black night, with this member of our species there in the cave of Lascoux, dimly illuminated by a small wick dipped in animal grease and set in a hollow stone. Do you see him sitting there, our brother? What does he look like? What kind of sounds come out of his mouth? Does he stammer a language? We don't know. But we do know, we do see something else. A brush or a tuft of animal hair or of plant fibers in his hand, and with it he brushes over the rough surface of the stone. Look! The heard of a bull appears on the rock wall, an image so alive that it looks as if it moves. It looks as if the damp nostrils tremble. Our brother depicts the bull with such intense emotion that the distance of 700 or 1000 centuries that separates us from him shrinks to nothing. What do we care how he looks; isn’t he our very own brother? What does it mean when we call him “primitive”? Is he really inferior to us? Can we do things “better” that he? Does it clearly appear that we are “farther along” than he was? Have the Great Ones whom we honor, the mighty sculptors from any of the historical periods, depicted life more sharply, with more intensity that he has?



“He did not have paper and pencil for sketching, no modern well-lighted drawing table on which to make preliminary sketches. It must have been tiring to bend over his work while painting an animal five meters long clear across the vault of his cave. While painting such an animal under the poor lighting conditions at this disposal, he perhaps could not see the head as he was working on the hindquarters. But his will and his capacity to produce pictorial images were at the least just as strong as ours. Perhaps even stronger because he was in direct contact with nature, which we usually approach by way of a cultural and educational system that, if not barring the way, certainly obstructs it for us.


“The plastic arts have not experienced an evolution. In everything else that man makes and in much of what he thinks, he adds his contribution to what he has been done by previous generations. In everything he strives toward perfection. The development of his spirit and his increasing mental grasp are staggering in all aspects—except in the plastic arts. It seems to me that here each individual has to start from scratch each time, without ever taking anything of really primary importance from a predecessor.”

I think the reason why “the distance of 700 or 1000 centuries that separates us from him shrinks to nothing” is because when artwork enters us there is a transmission of the artist’s state of consciousness. Somehow the artist’s state of mind is imprinted in the artifact, and travels into our perspective along some sort of medium, and our minds resonate and empathize with the mind that made that mark. In a way, we become the artist for a moment when we follow his brush along its path of creation.

Escher also points to one of the reasons these cave paintings destroyed our idea about the evolution of art. We thought that art evolved like everything else: starting extremely simple and developing with time. But these “first” drawings were far more developed than they should have been when we look at where the people were socially and technologically. Art seems to have appeared already fully formed.


Escher’s account of the cave paintings might sound different from a historians because without having the experience of pulling forms from surfaces, as well as being pushed by a creative impulse hauntingly blissful and mysterious, it’s hard to…appreciate the actual depth of artists’ productions, and understand mystical and transformative intentions…

Art history might tell the story of a developing/evolving form of language. But Escher, and other artists, find that idea to be, well, just a story. The actual history of art occurs every time we pick up a pencil or an instrument, hit a drum, or release our muscles in a gesture or dance. True, our skill in depicting “realistically” an object does evolve, as well as our perspective and understanding about what is “real.” But the impulse, and the passion, and the ability to express that emotional experience…that appears to have been fully developed in its awesome completion from the beginning. Children today can express themselves artistically just as well as an adult can (if not better!).



I do believe that children don't have as much to express as adults. Emotions evolve. They get more and more complicated with age, and correlatively the arts also get more and more complex and enigmatic, but that's another story we can save for later.

Whenever we feel moved to communicate, or feel pushed and pulled by a creative impulse, we are possessed by a fully formed, liberated spirit, the same one that moved the hands and eyes of the artists 70,000 years ago. And it was that spirit which Escher connected with that day at the caves. He discovered that no time or space separates us from that spirit, no matter what the art historians say. It was there then, and the same impulse is in us now.

I will end today's talk with another impressive statement by Michael Garfield.

"A moment of speculation, rooted in a study of universal trends: Human history can be defined as development along any of numerous axes, but my preferred story-for-our-species is of an advance in mind control technologies. For good and ill, the development of our consciousness flies tandem with our expanding capacity to access and explore various states of mind at will. Our command of navigating mind with sensory and electrochemical stimulation has matured to include everything from early entheogenic experiments with drumming and chanting, to contemporary techniques of magnetic temporal lobe stimulation and virtual reality immersion…and with the impending advent of biotech and nanotech that will profoundly deepen the intimacy between brain and machine (and erase such primitive distinctions), we can be sure that mind control is one of the best markers we have for measuring our humanity (and our trans-humanity).

"With this in mind, I spend much of my time looking at contemporary art and music as touchstones, clues to our place as a self-transcending species in the cosmos. Every time I see intention meet technology in a deliberate manipulation of mindstates, I rejoice that we are on the right track."