Last semester, I either approached transcendence or engaged in criminal levels of pseudointellectual pretense…where should I begin?
…I guess history is good as anything. At my university, I have the privilege of being a part of a select group of students who — along with receiving a scholarship, of course — engage in semester-long enrichment seminars. Each of these seminars, called “faculty mentor groups,” is designed to offer an educational experience that might certainly not be found in a traditional classroom.
Whenever I’ve seen faculty mentor groups for religious topics in a given semester, I’ve jumped on the opportunity to take those classes. (The last group I had relating to a religious topic was one using Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God as a springboard for how we might achieve inter-religious harmony — I’ve written skeptically about our possibly flawed view of inter-religious harmony.)
Last semester, I picked a class called Creativity as a Transcendent Act.
To be honest, I go into these philosophically-oriented classes with some incredulity. As an agnostic atheist (or whatever), I often am a bit wary or skeptical of what we’ll discuss and what angles we’ll take. With a class mentioning transcendent acts, I was skeptical of “transcendence” from the start, but also skeptical that one semester’s time could lead one to find it even if it did exist — especially when at the onset, no one may even know for what he is looking.
I appreciated that the first thing we did in the class was develop, as a group, a working definition of transcendence. I also appreciated that in our discussion, there were others who were wary of particular aspects of a definition of transcendence. As we talked, one member of our discussion group remarked that she didn’t feel that transcendence needed to point to some higher being…that it could be something within humanity, even if it was an improved and cultivated humanity. That became the ground for a friendly tension — would our definition ultimately appeal to something intrinsically human or something intrinsically not?
One definition that we came to on the latter part of the spectrum was: transcendence is the point when artist and audience can hear and pass on the artwork’s message. In this sense, however one attributes it, artworks have the capacity to take on a life and voice of their own, and make quiet demands (a still small voice, you might say) on artist or audience. In good art (not just visual, but also aural, literary…whatever), we can recognize when a character (or scene, or action, or whatever) “feels” right. We can recognize, “That character would not have done that,” even though it would seem that if an artist were “creator” of her character, she ought be able to make the character do whatever she wants with no complaints. The character has a life beyond the artist.
I was, of course, skeptical of this definition (what makes an art work “come to life”? What speaks to artist and audience that is independent of either?)…but in a way, I was also hopeful. I was intrigued by a quotation from Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art we had discussed to prime our discussion. It asserted that creative acts — provided an artist is one of “integrity” — would allow us to “see matter rendered spiritual…even when the artist does not personally believe in God.” That principled artist would become “a genuine servant of the glory which he does not recognize.”
Our group ultimately settled on a definition on the far other side of the spectrum: transcendence is the convergence between universal language and human experience. It required no appeal to any outside force, and indeed seemed to describe something (even if I’m not sure anymore that it captures something worth of the name “transcendence.”) Instead, the idea is this: our human languages are filled with parochial and proprietary aspects. They are utterly regional. But elements of art are universal. Certain ways of arranging the elements together are universal, so we can employ this universal language to express our human experiences in a way that transcends the limitations of language[1. Oh, should I mention that two semesters ago, my faculty mentor group was about bicultural minds — the cultural impact of language and multilingualism on culture and the brain? So in a way, we discussed some of these same issues of the regional barriers of human language as opposed to music, etc.].
I liked this definition far more.
Moving from discussion into actual painting was difficult. Let me say that I find acrylic to be a…trying medium. I think our resident artist instructor, J. Vincent Scarpace (he paints fish! and sea turtles), helped me to move beyond my desire for very representational, realist works (my original art pieces were of fencing and fencers…which isn’t the best thing to do when you don’t know how to paint anatomy and you’re aware that you don’t know it.) I took a session on acrylic painting originally to try to improve my painting of fencers, but I learned some techniques with color and texture — of scraping and dragging pregnant dollops of red, blue, and yellow together by palette knife — that I liked more.
And so, I had no idea what I was doing…I just knew I wanted to explore these techniques. And it was a beautiful painting. Of primary colors…and at their marriages, their progeny of beautiful oranges and greens and violets. It was almost perfect, except for a few instances where the oranges and the greens and the violets would intersect to produce the most putrid, inbred browns.
But ultimately (albeit secretly), I wanted for something to shake my skepticism and speak to me about how the painting must be directed. How this beauty must be finished.
…To be honest, I didn’t feel much of anything until I wrote the explanatory sidebar for the painting. J. Vincent and our faculty mentor, Professor Jon Kotinek, engineered for our paintings to be shown with artists’ statements at a local gallery/cafe, the Village Downtown and Art979 so we had to write sidebars for viewers to read as companions to the art. But I didn’t quite know what I was explaining. One day, I woke up sick, and I had a thought.
The common cold is misery.
If I prefer any form of art, it is definitely writing. Maybe I’m not any better at it than I am at painting, but I feel better at it.
So, I wrote about the common cold.
When suffering, you may have wished to have rather caught death. But you knew the irrationality therein, because you knew that things had been better before…that this too shall pass. But memories do not persist. Recent misery redefines recollected memory[2. This reminds me of a blog post by John Gustav-Wrathall that ultimately reminded me to get to writing this post in the first place. In his post Grace, he tells with a great analogy of how overwhelming and ubiquitous certain miserable states can be.]. (Be glad that wellness does too — even now, your recollection of miserable illness is mentally inchoate.[3. This reminds me of a person’s FASCINATING recollection of his accident-induced extreme cognitive impairment. Think Flowers for Algernon, but in reverse. He can recall certain details of the the retardation, but now his recollection is colored with analyses that were impossible at the time.])
What of color — just one element we have dared declare universal? Would you notice if one day, what you call red became what you call green? Could you distinguish between mischievous neurosurgery that tampered with your optic nerve (inverting future perception) as opposed to your memories (inverting your past perception)?
I had read a lot about qualia and the subjectivity of color. Of Daniel Dennett’s criticisms of qualia. It all was coming together. Why talk about universal elements of art (like color) when color is inherently subjective[3. Another aside: as a group we had one to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and I had seen Carlos Cruz-Diez‘s “Color in Time and Space” exhibit on manipulating color perception through physical space {“physichromie“} in the same vein. See this interview also: “Color in its essence is ambiguous and unstable. It is created in the moment. Color has no pastor future. Color exists by itself; it doesn’t need form. It happens in space. Our culture doesn’t teach us to read the space, only the form. That’s why I experimented with backgrounds that would give me that notion of the instability of color.”].
I recalled the browns that marred my painting, and continued writing.
Maybe, we should accept that colors, their layers and mixtures, are (like memories and emotions) effervescing events, not stark statues…So why do I feel that this brown bleakness will never bloom into brilliance?
And as soon as I wrote “brown bleakness,” I knew how the painting had to be completed.
…That although this painting was once well, perhaps it ought to die?
I cried. I started screaming. There was no one in the room, but I started screaming, “No!” over and over again. I knew that the only way for the work to be completed…for it to tell a truth about the human experience…would be if I painted brown bleakness over my beautiful, brilliant colors. The art had its own destiny, and to be authentic, I could only be “a servant of the glory which I did not recognize.”
…Maybe, one day I’ll become well enough to see–
—
I’m not sure what you want to talk about but here’s some food for thought. If you want to artistically visually communicate somewhat universally, humankind since the beginning of time sees and accepts landscapes as “normal” and will generally relate to landscape colors organized with dark colors at the bottom black (shadows) brown (dirt) dark green to light green in the middle medium blue to light blue and white on top. The sun provides two lights a main light and reflected light highlights and shadows should reflect this look. Perspective is achieved using two vanishing points on the horizon. More solid colors produce a cartoon look, variation in color with appropriate lighting highlights begin to paint a picture. This can be applied from impressionism to realism or used to help ground abstract art. Reds, yellows and oranges are experienced as primitive colors and are used in limited amounts for accent only in more enlightened work purples blues and white are more enlightened colors and can used freely. A sunny day produces a high dynamic range from dark black shadows to white white snow and everything in between an overcast day compresses this scene into a much lower dynamic range of varying grays without black or white this technique can be used to communicate mood. High contrast is primitive low contrast especially coupled with a high dynamic range is more enlightened compare professional film photography to a snap shot to see what I mean. These are some of the visual clues that speak universally to people and help to communicate the content and emotion of a piece. Take your audience into consideration primitive people respond better to primitive techniques and enlightened to enlightened etc. So yes I think transcendence does take place through art, is it a spirit to spirit connection maybe not but by stimulating common experience an artist can tailor their work to invite a predictable response and use it to convey content and emotion.
I love this post. Art truly does transcend humanity. And I also appreciate the difficulty you have in putting in words what you “feel”.
I have had times where a single note in a guitar solo has brought tears to my eyes. I have had times when a painting has touched my soul and tied me to humanity. I have read books that had reached into my subconscious and changed my view of the world.
I can’t describe these things, but they are profound. They are also some of the more “pure” moments in life when everything else melts away and you feel more connected to everything.
Thank you for the post.
Also, it’s not the point of the post, but I rather enjoyed The Evolution of God. It caused me to think a bit about things.
I made one painting in my life that was SO much better than anything I did before or since (a very low bar, to be sure) that it actually changed the way I saw the real world during the months I worked on it. I was actually perceiving things as flat pixels instead of depths. So I see art can be transcendent in the sense of letting us internalize a portion or view of reality we otherwise have no access to.
I’ve had the same experience when the significance of a mathematical or physics equation “clicks” and I see the universe differently. Perhaps I need to look more at the interface of art and religion instead of just the interface of science and religion.
I’m an audiophile and agree with Mike S. that certain notes or passages can be emotional this study showed “…tears were most reliablN evoked by passages containing sequences and appogiaturas, while shivers were most reliably evoked by passages containing new or unexpected harmonies.” http://pom.sagepub.com/content/19/2/110.short?rss=1&ssource=mfc So the composer can use these tricks to play the audience and of course musical scoring has long been considered an important part of motion pictures for these and other reasons.
I don’t have a facility for or much patience with jargon or verbiage in delivering the message of a painting. If it transcends the abyss between artist and viewer, it does so completely without verbal explanation, except perhaps the title. I looked at the painting before reading the post, and my cursor brought up the title. I understood the meaning of the muddy field and the little bits of the pure hues, or rather I assigned my meanings to them, almost instantly. It works. You succeeded.
I tried to read through the text you posted, and I did okay through the narrative part where you tell the story of how the painting came to be, but you lost me in the analysis part. I never can get that intellectual stuff that people say about art without a ton of brainsweat, and sometimes not even then. The visual is its own language, different from verbal language. If it works in visual terms, all verbal explanation is, at best, superfluous. But some folks seem to find it most useful.
This painting didn’t bring tears to my eyes (the way Mahler did recently), but it made me think of something meaningful to me about misery, and also feel the truth of it.
Just thought I’d let you know.
Andrew S. just for kicks rotate your painting 90 degrees counter clock wise and let me know if it takes on new meaning for you.
Thanks for the link. I really like the painting, and can definitely see the association. In fact, I thought the same thing as Howard — counter-clockwise works, clockwise doesn’t.
Personally, I like it the way it is. We’re in a left-to-right culture, so LTR indicates progress discretized in the form of words.
Since I am on my phone only right now, I can’t respond to all the comments (all…few…of you), but I will address a few:
Mommie Dearest,
yeah, in some aspects I really dislike writing posts this long. And actually, I was trying to avoid revealing the name of the piece in this article (mostly to push my companion article which is a trackback to this article) to get people visceral reactions to the painting without people having information at first. (I think it’s difficult to tell here, but in other places, people have been unkind enough in a way that makes me feel I’ve succeeded…they say this painting literally looks like sh**. And that’s the point. There are some points in your life when near the totality of it feels like sh**.
But in a way, you really got the point of all the analytical stuff even without it. It’s exactly the case that the visual creates its own language that the verbal can’t live up to…verbal language always is limiting, regional, alienating. But visual language, if we understand it, is easy to understand.
(still on my phone so please bear with me)
re: Howard and JS Allen and 90 degree counterclockwise turn,
That’s something quite interesting that I hadn’t considered. (In fact, I had often thought about the painting in a landscape form like this or a portrait form 90 degrees clockwise, but not 90 degree counter clockwise.)
I think I can see how it might take on new meaning for others (or maybe not? I’m still not sure what people think when they see it), but for me, the most pervasive meaning of the piece lies in its *layers*. They aren’t totally apparent to outsiders (which is quite on purpose), but the overriding meaning of the painting to me is that I had a beautiful (in an aesthetically pleasing sense), vibrant painting, but 95% of that is now completely obscured by diseased colors. The other 5% that pokes out feels less real or unreal…
90 ccw grounds the piece as I mentioned in 2, it currently has tension leading to the question “What is it?” 90 cw creates significant conflict.
Your painting succeeded with me. Halfway through this post, I stopped reading to just experience the painting as I would at a museum. Honestly, I didn’t especially like it at first, which is NOT to say I thought it was bad. Then the bold lines cutting through the muck caught hold of me, and the painting started to be something engrossing. I decided that, for me, it showed the aftermath of some conflict. And having arrived at that place of realization, I was glad I had experienced the painting. Then I read the rest of your blog post and said, “Wow. That’s kind of similar to my experience as the viewer. Cool!” Nice job, Andrew. And thank you for sharing the painting with us!
OK, I’m back from my trip!
I wanted to respond to some of the comments.
re 2:
Howard,
If I was looking for any response, I guess it was for the kind of visceral reaction of what people thought the painting was and meant. For example, did they think it was ugly? Did they think it was a waste of time? That “any child could have done this”? That it didn’t deserve the amount of explanation it got? That there was nothing special about it? That it looked like a literal piece of human excrement? Things like that.
And would the colors in the corner, or underneath the lines have led one to suspect anything else. I have had others say, “The corner looks nice…why couldn’t it be more of the painting.” Etc., Or, “Why couldn’t you have taken photos of the painting before you put the top layer over the layer of green/brown/muck?” etc.,
I like what you had to say though, however. One thing I would say…if we are speaking of “universality,” then why still would we “drill down” to differentiate “primitive” from “enlightened”? Is there something objectively different from these groups that makes artistic elements different for them?
re 3-4:
Mike,
It’s another story, but I have also had some incredible experiences with music. Of course, I guess this is really a trope of a lot of skeptics/disbelievers/whatever, but the response to the music made me think, “So, is the spirit something like this? If so, how can we talk about the spirit in religious terms when it can come from something so mundane?”
Also, for the most part, I liked the Evolution of God. I just think that Wright has something of an agenda and I didn’t like that. (The way he interviews people on his bloggingheads.tv really exemplifies this — he’s trying to lead people to answer questions his way.)
re 5:
FireTag,
Such an interfacing shouldn’t be difficult, considering you could start by looking at the interface of art and science/math too. I mean, I am utterly not a mathematician or scientific type of person, but I keep hearing/reading/seeing about the mathematical properties of certain aesthetically pleasing patterns…and also of the aesthetic qualities of certain mathematical formulae.
re 6:
Howard,
And the skeptic in me would point out that much religious music uses these things in kinda the same way to elicit specific emotional responses.
re 14:
ChildeJake,
Thanks for the comment about your experience. (although far more people have said they thought it was bad. hehe, I guess there are just more polite people at W&T.)
Andrew, the universality of it is the basic landscape colors and their layout, it appeals to most people. The drill down naturally follows with what is left. My interest is photography so I’ll use that as an example. Consumer films and digital cameras are high contrast resulting in bright colors. Professional photographers use films and digital cameras that are lower contrast coupled with high dynamic range resulting in smoother subtler color and more detail to suit the taste of their paying customer who wants something more elegant than a snap shot. If you organize colors with red, yellow and orange below the basic landscape colors and above that purples at the top then look around, you will generally find a third world preference for the bottom half of this color spectrum and excluding an occasional flashy red or yellow Ferrari etc. of the nouveau riche a preference for the upper half of this color spectrum plus some earth tones in lower contrast sometimes referred to as understated elegance.
More thoughts I had while reading your feedback:
Everybody’s visceral reaction is going to be something personal to them, and there may not (probably won’t) be something universal that applies to everyone.
In the discussions about turning the painting to a portrait orientation, I would see some significant things differently. What I saw in the first moments of viewing the piece evoked in me a memory of water flowing over the bottom of a mossy, muddy ditch which had long grass-like plants growing in it. I saw movement from right to left, and I saw water. Or rather I saw through water. The lines gave me a visceral feeling that I can’t put words to, except to say they display the movement. If you turn the painting on it’s side, the water is no longer there, but it’s all about air and movement, and perhaps defying gravity or weightlessness. It depends which side you assign to be the bottom or the top. Words really do fall short here. The small areas with the pure red, blue and the tiniest bit of yellow, and the white evoke ideas that can’t be described verbally, except to say that they sort of represent the opposite of misery. The reaction to these pure-hue elements might be the closest thing to universal that you get, and it doesn’t change much for me whatever is the orientation of the painting.
The color of the brown field, at least on my monitor, appears to be sienna with a strong greenish gold overcast. It actually is quite beautiful, and rather sophisticated from a color mixing point of view. And I like that it works (again, for me) from a moss/decay/entropy point of view. I know how to mix some truly ugly browns and greens, and this one is better than those would be. I don’t find it wanting. The small bits of pure hue are of great importance, and they actually follow a rule of design, that the more muted (less pure)hues can occupy a larger area comfortably, and purer hues do their task best occupying smaller areas.
There. You got three sturdy paragraphs out of me. Good job. It took me about 10 times longer to write this than it did to think it.
I hope you and your readers don’t find this to be drivel.
For what it is worth, extreme grief creates a cognitive deficit, which can disrupt thinking modes.
re 17,
Mommie Dearest, lovin it!
Sorry Andrew S, late to the game. I LOVED the post! Well done. Your writing speaks to me more than the artwork, and I appreciate your sincerity. Nevertheless, your piece definitely captures the spirit being manifested.
Well done!
Thanks jmb!
re 18,
Stephen,
I’m curious as to your comment. I mean, I get the idea that grief can cause a change in cognitive activities, but what exactly does cognitive *deficit* or a *disruption* to thinking modes entail?
Perfect. I totally get what you mean as a writer and an actress. Great post. Keep writing and painting and thanks for the ping back.