“What is a painting, anyway?” I asked myself this while contemplating how to write about a year of surprises at my artist’s easel. The answer isn’t as simple or obvious as you might think. Since I began to paint many years ago, most of my images have come from inside, rather than from the world around me. (Note: my answer to the question above appears in the text box at the bottom of this article.)
Inspiration followed by execution
One painting I did earlier this year came out of a moment’s “vision,” a mental picture that spontaneously appeared as I was rising from meditation. I almost immediately recognized it as symbolic, and marvelled at the depth from which it arrived so simply.
The image was of three little girls, with each of them riding her own full-grown elephant around a circus ring, holding onto her elephant by its neck or just sitting where the head meets the neck. Riding on the back of each elephant is an elderly woman.
After contemplating the picture for a moment, I came to feel these elderly women were crones—wise women—and furthermore, that each one was the same little girl, in a much later phase of her life! I saw the circus ring as a metaphor for life itself, the journey through the world.
I set to work sketching and then beginning to paint this piece. I worked on it for the next two weeks. Slowly … very slowly … it began to take shape! I got the main forms up on the canvas and then spent most of the aforementioned period filling in the circus crowd and “tweaking” the colours and forms until they looked just right. I finally finished, framed the painting and titled it Of Girls, Crones, Elephants and Time. To me, it represents a triumph over the limitations of Time. It suggests, as Sages have long said, that there really is no Time!
A brief biographical aside
I call myself a “primitive artist.” That means self-taught. However, I have had some formal training. In my very first painting class in undergraduate school—my first attempt at Art since the seventh grade, when my teacher flunked me on a project I’d really believed in—I had no idea how to even behave in an art studio.
I watched the teacher, Mr. Foster, enter the room. He was an elderly man wearing a bow tie and corduroy sport coat. On his rounds, he came over to my easel and watched me a bit. Then he reached into my can of brushes, pulled out the biggest one, placed it in my hand, and said, “Here! Use lots of colour and have fun!”
Sometime later in the term, this trim, dapper old man came over to peruse a really wild abstract piece I was working on, for which I had pulled off a piece of leather that was loose on my trail-boot and glued it on the painting. Then, he calmly pulled out his glass eye, which I had not known he had, and briefly held it up in the painting, too!
Mr. Foster’s words are still my basic artistic credo, although “have fun” has come to mean to me, “Go deep and discover the depths of your inner being! Paint the beauty of the Universal Spirit!”
I later spent a wonderful year painting at a venerable American institution, the New York Art Students League. In the early 1990s I moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and became an artist represented by the Broadway Gallery there. Nurtured by its young owner, Nina, I sold a lot of paintings. Since then I’ve sold or given away paintings from time to time, but mostly they end up on our walls. I did have a major “gallery exhibit” in 2019, but mostly, these days, exhibit my work virtually.
Here are some recent paintings, along with the story of how each came about:
The Heaven World series
My wife of 18 years (partner of 23), Barbara, and I have been through quite a bit in terms of relationship dynamics. I actually wrote about this in a 2017 article in The Mindful Word. Since that time, things have lightened up considerably for us. “Issues” still come up, but I find myself giving deep thanks for our union more often.
It occurred to me to do a series of paintings depicting aspects of our married life as heaven on Earth. The painting below on the left was the first. We spent one weekend afternoon going back to bed to nap whenever we felt like it. I woke up from one of these self-renewal naps, looked around, and said, “Wow, this is heaven. I have to paint this!”
The painting on the right below came from a similar kind of experience of looking at our life during another of our special “rituals.” Barbara is in the kitchen creating another of the wonderful dinners she concocts for us, and I’m in the living room playing guitar, singing favourite songs of ours. Barbara sings along.
I told Barbara I’d do a third painting in the series called The Argument, just to remind us we’re still works-in-progress. I haven’t done that one yet, but still may.
Birth of the Sun
One morning recently, I witnessed what seemed like a kind of miracle of Nature! Driving back from having dropped off my weekly food delivery to a food pantry around 20 miles (or 32 kilometres) away, I was heading east on Highway 24, which for a time runs straight toward Mount Diablo, the dominant land feature in our area. Diablo rises, abruptly, nearly 4,000 feet (about 1,219 metres) from the surrounding land! It was around 6 a.m. in late summer. The sky was just beginning to lighten.
As I watched the road ahead, I suddenly saw the sun starting to peek over the mountain, just below its summit. For around the next five minutes, it’s hard to describe what I witnessed: It was not only an event in Nature; it seemed to have a symbolic, even allegorical dimension. I appeared to witness the live birth of the sun, as a living being, from the mountain! I tried without success to get a video. At home, I thought of painting the event, but felt it was beyond my capability.
However, the beauty and awesome grandeur of what I’d seen kept coming back to me, and one day, a few weeks later, I put a small canvas on my easel and decided to try. I filled in the rudimentary elements of the scene, made an initial effort to paint the dramatic event and let it go at that, recognizing that the attempt wasn’t successful.
The next day and the day after that, I returned to the canvas. I did whatever I could think of to enhance the scene, forgetting about making it conform literally to what I’d seen. I experimented boldly and wildly. Finally, to increase the drama, I made half the sky night with stars, and the other half, the reddish tones of sunrise. I tried all sorts of colours for the sun itself.
Finally, after adding a corona of bright yellow to the red, newborn Sun, I felt the painting coming alive! Finally, I stepped back and thought, “Yes. This does have the mythic quality of what I saw!”
Return to mandalas
No “vision” came to me for the next painting, after the Mount Diablo one was finished. I waited, and went about other kinds of work, but still, nothing emerged in my mind’s eye.
I began feeling “barren.” There are times that our creative fields need to lie fallow, but in this case, I felt very restless. It didn’t, somehow, seem time for that.
I decided to go back to basics. In Art, one of the ways I do that from time to time is to return to the mandala form. I’ve been painting them ever since an independent study project in college with a psychology mentor, using the wonderful book Mandala by Jose and Miriam Arguelles as a guide.
That same professor had, the year before, written me a note in his beautiful calligraphy, telling me where to find Dr. Carl Jung’s writings on mandalas in his Collected Works. That material guided me, too. To this day, I return frequently to Jung’s words on this profound topic.
Here are a couple of quotes on the subject from the visionary psychologist (Jung himself painted a mandala every day, during a certain period of his life. Many are shown in his Red Book, which was published in 2009.):
“My mandalas were cryptograms concerning the state of the self which was presented to me anew each day … I guarded them like precious pearls …. It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the centre. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the centre, to individuation.” – Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Gustav Jung
“The mandala is an archetypal image whose occurrence is attested throughout the ages. It signifies the wholeness of the Self. This circular image represents the wholeness of the psychic ground or, to put it in mythic terms, the divinity incarnate in man.” – Memories, Dreams, Reflections
I decided I’d paint a mandala, and use the colours of the developing piece to “talk” to me and tell me what to do next. Here are two developing stages of the first painting I did using that scheme. As the complexity of the piece increased, I used not only colour, but also other design elements that came to mind intuitively.
Here is the finished painting as it appears, framed, on our wall:
I used the same technique on the next painting. It, too, went through quite a few stages. I thought it was finished at one point, but brought it back to the easel again. This is what the finished painting does look like:
Single-circle mandala paintings
I continued to use the basic mandala form for the two most recent paintings I finished, but in a different way. The one just below is titled “God’s Womb.” I was listening to a YouTube talk about rebirth symbolism, when this image came to mind of a person, looking more like a grown-up, really, than an infant, in the “womb of God” awaiting a spiritual rebirth.
One friend saw it as waiting for reincarnation. I felt it expressed the sense of being “on the verge of a new life” that hasn’t completely emerged yet.
(Again, I used Meher Baba’s picture. This is my personal image of my Higher Power. I wrote the story of how this relationship came about in The Mindful Word a few years ago. Someone else might use a different central person or symbol.)
All Pervading
The most recent piece I completed, before a case of bronchitis and a number of time-consuming obligations temporarily interrupted my painting, is a portrait of Meher Baba as a young man, inside a Mandala circle, which (in Dr. Jung’s words, quoted above) represents Wholeness.
I’d been listening to a lecture on Jung’s concept of the archetypal Self, which is almost the same as God, and a name for God from an ancient Persian prayer called the 101 Names of God came to my mind: “ALL PERVADING.” That is the title of this painting.
Final thoughts, for now
These have been some of my recent adventures in painting. The answer to my initial question, “What is painting?” remains something of a mystery to me. Most of these pieces stem from some deep imaginative source. Without saying I’ve been completely transformed, I can say that painting feels transformative to me, and it most definitely helps me to feel alive and to give me a sense of what Krishnamurti once called “freedom from the known.”
My next envisioned piece arises from my ongoing quest to make conscious my anima, as Jung calls a male’s inner feminine; and from something once said to me by a friend who had spent a year in a matrilineal village in Guatemala: “I never saw a single sharp corner anywhere!”
The picture is a continuum: from an abstract figure on the left made of triangles and other pointy shapes, over to his complement, a “female” abstract figure who is literally all curves. The landscapes change on each side, as well, and there is a continuum of “little kid abstract shapes” that gradually morph in kind across the picture, from left to right, in front of the main figures.
The journey goes on.
To view more paintings by the author, visit his personal site»
A little history
Most of the paintings I do belong to the tradition of modern art, which, starting in the 19th century, broke with long-established traditions and ended up allowing an artist freedom to do whatever he or she is inspired to do. More specifically, my personal practice of deriving paintings from internal images is called, or at least allied with, visionary art.
Art which has been largely self-taught, as I mostly am, is known (and most impressively practiced by the 19th-century French painter, Henri Rousseau) as “primitive art.” Visionary art always implies the question, “What is Imagination?” The answer to that question leads into extremely profound realms. Sages say it is “Anything but Reality,” and that includes the physical world, or at least one’s limited way of seeing it.
However, there is a mystical tradition of painting from the cave-dwellers down through medieval Christian art and the work of 19th-century English mystic William Blake, that allies these inwardly derived images with, you could say, “white magic,” or the power to render the Good, including spiritual truth and beauty, on Earth.
A truly original painting, remember, is, like any work of Art, something new, something that has never been seen before, and adds to the world’s treasury of positive images and forces.
Many artists do “photorealistic” landscapes or portraits or “still life” pictures, which can be incredible in their likeness to what is actually seen in the world around us. Often based on the system of linear perspective, which was invented in the 15th century and widely adapted during the Renaissance, these paintings can thrill people with their “illusionism” or likeness to an actual person, place or thing.
While a photorealistic picture can awe an audience, especially if it “brings to life” a great and timeless spiritual figure, the internal derivation of paintings is a direct expression of a spiritual truth or vision, if practiced seriously and meditatively.
«RELATED READ» PLUNGING BACK INTO ART: Reflections on Jung and the creative process in 5 new works»
image 3 (Phil Foster): UC Magazine, University of Cincinnati; all other images: Max Reif
