Oh yeah, I can create something

I forget sometimes. After dropping Jami off at the airport yesterday, I visited the NC museum and the Ackland. While I sat in the NC museum, looking at a Jennifer Bartlett painting, a simple series of views of a house, loosely painted, reminiscent of Monet's haystacks, using the palette of analytic cubism (grays, browns, and black, applied in short cezannesque stroke groupings that allowed the color of the underlying ground to come through), a woman and her friend came by, looked at the work for a second, and one said, "this does nothing for me," and walked on. Pity, I thought: I was getting so much from it. Where did her adamant assertion come from? I have to say that people say odd things about art; almost as many odd things as they might say about Church or scripture. Everytime I hear someone talk about the rapture or confidently about Revelation and who the beast is I'm astonished: they seem unaware of the novelty and lack of scholarly and historic basis for these interpretations in the 2000 year history of the Church (but it's probably the lack of evidence that more than suffices for proof itself). Back to the Bartlett painting, or any painting (like the Rothko I looked at at the Nasher at Duke today), I wondered what it was in paintings that I love so much.
I love looking at paintings; as I've grown older I've loved all kinds of paintings: old and new, abstract and figurative, expressionist and kitschified (although it took a long time to appreciate Jeff Koons). I get something from modern art especially. Modernism freed the artist to make mistakes, to comment, to bend the conventions, to break the conventions, to reconceive and reconfigure, allowing all things to be art or nothing to be art. It's not nihilism; it's the embrace of abundance and freedom. There are certain paintings that freed the soul. The Bartlett is like that; it speaks but you must listen. And I think that that's a big part of it - listening. Walk up to a challenging painting like a Rothko, a big expanse of two or three color planes, flat against the canvas surface, soft edged - an absence of representation, maybe a quote of landscape. Don't force a meaning on it. Don't pull it into the familiar. To look at art is to practice restraint in interpretation. Don't look away and let it speak.
Thankfully there are good museums here and good paintings. Yesterday I went to the Ackland and they had a room of drawings, all in varying degrees of abstraction or representation; all in varying degrees of development, some with color some in black and white. A wonderful Schnabel drawing called Barbados is just a mass of deep indigo with some wash. If it's negative space it's suffocating the ground of the paper; if it's positive space, it's swallowing the ground. Something so simple could be so active, so evocative.
Lately I've been trying to write an artist statement, which for me is difficult: it's like describing the inner workings of the soul laying them bare- submitted for autopsy. But I think that that's an irrational fear. What I discovered sitting in the museum the other day was that I make art for myself. It's common to hear that an artist or writer creates for an audience, but I realized that I've only occasionally done that, and that the results are mixed on that score. My best work I've made for myself, as an outworking of an inner need. And I have to say that the art I get the most from, that artist must have created for his or her self. It may be that audiences may discover some rapport with something I've done, but this was not a necessary intention on my part.

The one - two prophet

Years ago, when I lived in New Mexico, I went to a service where the hymn "sweet sweet Spirit" was sung, a hymn which contains the line "you're the one-two prophet." I've wondered since then about this prophet, his or her jab and hook: one two, one two and through and through the vorple blade went snicker snack - a line from Jabberwocky that perhaps describes something of the quixotic nature of this prophet, an Amos perhaps, who eventually was done in by his combativeness, or so we suppose from the apparent brevity of his career, a soul of wit. Sol Lewitt, the Bauhaus artist who settled in Black Mountain and taught during the war, died recently, leaving behind many intriguing ideas for conceptual drawings. He also was a one-two prophet. Any one can take his instructions for drawing and have a Lewitt on the wall. We should do that more often, making marks on the wall: what a joy it is to apply a mark directly to the wall.

History/Probability

In a week I'm talking with the examinations committee here to join this presbytery and then I"ll meet the COM the next day. What will be the upshot? I'll be here, perhaps as a member at large. I'm a minister without portfolio. As an artist I have a portfolio, as well as a ministry. But how to pursue it?
How can I convince people to give me sums of money that will fund my project? I'm calling it "big paintings for the Church." What "big paintings for the Church" will do is provide churches with large paintings, perhaps conventional canvas paintings, but I can see a function for other genres: spray paint for instance - what if churches tagged their communities: they could drive their volvos and buicks and step out in their suits and dress clothes and plaster billboards with slogans like "rogue state" and "What the F**K would Jesus Do." My favorite "the dead in Christ shall rise - come see us this Sunday." Of course I won't tell the committee about my ties to the zombie wing of the Presbyterian Church.
Anyway, I'm thinking "big paintings for the Church" will do fine. I'll start by simply painting one painting for one church of reasonable size. However this will take support from people who share my vision for Art in the Church. Tubes of cadmium red and flake white don't grow on trees (except at this superfund site in Missouri).
I also have big concepts for the Church - concepts so big, so enormous, so vast - well I got nothing, at least right now.
I will say this: in Pierre Boulez's Repons, on a Deutsche Grammaphoe recording, on track 3, 1 minute and 43 seconds into the track, the most wonderful piano phrase occurs. I've played it again and again, driving in the rain today, where Durham is still under drought restrictions, in the rain driving down 147, where I've occasioned to repeat this phrase so much that I missed my exit and found myself at the airport. It goes: dot ta de da da da dot te dee da di di di deh di di deh. It would make a wonderful intro to a radio show, such as are heard on NPR, where I would answer people's questions about art and spirituality and cheese. People could come visit me and tell me about their experiences with painting, yoga and wenslydale.
Two days this week rain has come down in buckets here in Durham. Beautiful.

I missed carnival and went straight into lent

I was looking forward to carnival this year - after reading Rabelais and Bakhtin, I was all worked up. Then this influenza hit me. The word Influenza is a medieval diagnosis - an influence in the air, that affected a person when their humors were out of balance, brought about this condition. It's an influence just like the Moon's influence on tides or the Sun's on gold or Venus on copper. The ancients had a notion that everything exerted an influence on everything else - that the cosmos was in a quest for balance - but a balance of motion - since the only thing that doesn't move is God: everything revolved around the primium mobile, and the motion that moved the cosmos was love.
So I missed carnival and now I'm immersed in lent. I missed the imposition of ashes. I missed the deposition of sashes. I'm left without a sense of deciding to give up anything. One year I gave up despair - and that worked pretty well. With influenza has come a significant loss of appetite, so I've already given up significant consumption. In the protestant tradition, you'd think we would have reversed carnival and lent - and that now we'd be eating all kinds of cow and pig and chicken: just to stick it to the Roman church. Aside from Luther though, the reformation was begun by some real spoil sports. Calvin probably could have done with a decade of lent - all of life should be lent.
But I could be wrong. Calvin could have been for free love and feasting: probably not.
I miss being a gadfly. Back in Decatur I carried my Kierkegaard with me and settled down at various desks: the bar at Twains, the reference desk at the library - where I was welcome to put in my hours. Here in Durham, I've mostly been sick; and of a truth, a gadfly needs a certain audience and a certain ambiance of local culture, in order to perform his best.
Yesterday Jami played me a thisamericanlife podcast about puzzle solvers and listening to it I heard a clue as to why I garner certain reactions from some people. One of the puzzle contestants, a very smart guy, says that it dawned on him: he was informing people against their will. I thought, "there's my last cpe experience in a nutshell." I believe my last cpe did occur in a nutshell.
It's great to be free again.
But what does that mean for me in the future? Don't I have to sacrifice some of that freedom for stability?
I consider it only to be the freedom most people require: freedom to be and to be without being made to feel guilty about who I am; and freedom to work, to not be bothered with micro-managers, but to actually do my job without looking over my shoulder.
So I am free.
Carnival and lent have that goal as well: to free the individual. The goal of every doctrine in Christianity is to free the individual; if it is used otherwise, it becomes a cramped and jejune thing.