Murmurs From Deep Time

Robert Brawley
"Murmurs from Deep Time"
2004, oil on panel, 14.5" x 16"

That mirror is about the size of a silver dollar. Bob must have used a single haired brush! It's very Jan van Eyck. The Arnolfini Portrait.

In Murmurs from Deep Time, everything is lucid, like in a dream; everything is in a dreamy focus, surrounded by atmosphere of ambiguity. Bob often integrated the fantastic and symbolic with the objective and mundane, making a very integral realism, I think. This comes through beautifully here in this painting, yes? I mean, just look at how the moon, crystal ball, window, and mirror (each established esoteric symbol) are all aligned down the central axis. Six ordinary stones are arranged in the foreground, at the base, expressing both symmetry and asymmetry, diversity and homogeneity. And each stone is glowing like a magic jewel, stunning, absolutely stunning! Bob even put some fantastic Himalayan mountains into this still life. If you appreciate "disguised symbolism," or Japanese Haiku, this painting is a lot like those as well. Haiku poems (5-7-5) often include juxtaposed sizes, for example:

The distant mountains
wait outside a window-light
lined with river stones

God I love this painting. As many of you know, my meditation teacher, Khamtrul Rinpoche, used a crystal ball in his "pointing out instructions," that changed my life, so including that clear marble on the windowsill cements this into meaningfulness, for sure. Bob also studied and practiced Tibetan Buddhism, so any "buddhist" interpretation very likely could have been intended (crystal balls and circular mirrors are both used on buddhist altars.) Moreover, Brawley worked a lot with totems and totemic relationships (rooted in his own indigenous ancestry?). His wife told me that the stones might represent the earth. the elements, chaos and order; the mirror might represents the mind, reflection, perception, and the crystal ball might represnt transcendence, purity, clarity, the nature of mind. But the totem doesnt end there. What whould go above the Nature of Mind you might ask? God? Goddess? Spirit? Well, there is a window (the beyond, the light?), and then a scene of mountains and the moon in the sky. Interestingly ordinary. Profoundly ordinary. And yet, mountains are often equated with the Ground, the Vastness, the Holy, the Alaya (as in Himalaya), and in Japan they can actually be Gods--great protectors and sources of energy. Dead center above them, at the top of the totem, is the crescent moon (mystery, sacredness, feminine/masculine, luminous emptiness, nondual reality?, whatever. The cresent moon can represent open boundarylessness, as well as the union of emptiness and form. In Zen it represents the Truth, or Dharma, and the teaching is to look at the moon, not the finger pointing to it. Maybe the moon at the top is like the star at the top of a Christmas tree; it's the guiding Light, it's the guiding Love. What is so amazing is that the painting only suggests that these relationships and meanings might be experienced there. Nothing is obvious. The moon could simply represent the moon.

According to this great article, Brawley sees his still lifes as expressing “a layered metaphor of entrapment or containment in a materialistic and destructive plane of existence.”


It's often said that artists (and all people, for this matter) can choose to communicate with a certain audience--a certain type of perspective.
They choose what perspective to communicate with, and then try to use the symbols and languages inhabited by that general altitude of consciousness. They can make art for the anarchists, the spiritualists, or the traditionalists! Or all three, if they are really good. I think Brawley wanted to speak to as many kinds of people, all across the spectrum of consciousness, as he could. He wanted his work to go right into people's minds and mess things around. And it just so happens that in order to be "entrapped," some perspectives need fantasy, need dream time, and find that particular language attractive. Others need realism or technical perfection, and prefer to offer that picture their praise. This painting, like most all of Bob's later work, integrates all of these movements into one, seamless, brush stroke-less whole.

The detail, and the sfumato is breathtaking.