MFA THESIS: IN AN ECTOPLASMIC WAY

Like all languages, painting is spoken in the words of the dead. Motifs, concepts, iconography, and formal inventions are stolen from the decaying lips of past artists and echoed in the voices of the living. I hope that this essay will make clear throughout what my work owes to the dead.

One distinctly necrogenic element of painting is the privileging of material. Whereas most forms of contemporary popular media have a diminished material presence, even the slickest paintings may, on close inspection, reveal their terrestrial origins. For example, smartphones, made with liquid crystal displays, maintain such a high degree of abstraction relative to their source materials that one could scarcely recognize in them anything familiar from the natural world. Immateriality seems to be the point. Paintings, on the other hand, are traditionally made with pigments taken directly from the earth. Even in cases where pigments go through extensive processes of heating, purification, grinding, etc., the subsequent product feels as though it is only a stone's throw from the terrestrial, its origin and endpoint. Standing closely to an oil painting, this is rarely unclear. One may notice the weft of the canvas, the buildup of material, lipped tensions where marks collide, or even the smell of linseed oil and evaporating turpentine. When a painting does achieve a convincing façade of immateriality, the illusion is impressive precisely because of the technical mastery required to transform raw materials into something incorporeal. The emphasis remains on materiality. This materiality recalls our planet and its biomass—a biomass formed from dead stars and a receptacle for all that has lived, as well as a spawning ground for all that will live. Robert Pogue Harrison illustrates this point in The Domain of the Dead:

Through the action of fire the corpse gives itself up to air; through inhumation or simple putrefaction it returns its composite substance to the earth; through the force of gravity it sinks into the sea's underworld. Whatever biomass it receives after the extinction of life becomes part of the planet's receiving matter—matter from which life, its imponderable origins, in turn emerges. Because the earth has reabsorbed the dead into its elements for so many millions upon millions of years, who can any longer tell the difference between receptacle and contents? Take away the millennial residues that consecrate them, human or otherwise, and our waters, forests, deserts, mountains, and clouds would lose the spirit that moves in and across their visible natures.

That paint shares this reciprocity with the earth becomes increasingly clear in our photography and internet-saturated condition. In the past, much of painting's value was in its ability to create an illusion, a convincing imaginary picture, as well as sustaining that illusion past the biological life of what's depicted. Leonardo da Vinci acknowledges this aspect of painting when comparing it to music, writing:

But painting prevails over music and dominates it, because it does not die as soon as it is created, as does unfortunate music. Thus it remains in being and shows you as alive what is in fact only a surface. O marvelous science! You preserve the ephemeral beauties of mortals and give them a greater permanence than have the works of nature, which continually undergo change until they reach their expected old age.

However, at present, Leonardo's point may ring less true. MP3 files undergo far less change than oil paintings, for example, which require regular supervision from museum conservators. Post-modern paintings such as Eva Hesse's latex works, John Cage's edible drawings, or Chris Martin's bread paintings all hold a distinct, nuanced, and intentional relationship with achievability that goes beyond simple preservation. Painting has long been liberated from the job of preserving ephemeral beauties. Today, paint's materiality, its smell, touch, and/or color is no less important than whatever illusion it creates and preserves. The combination of these things simultaneously creates complex (and medium-specific) meaning. A painting's content is nearly always determined by a distinct relationship between its intellectual signals and material actuality, be it by a relationship of accord, discord, or some combination of the two. Perusing the walls of a museum one may notice the craquelure creeping across the finely crafted images, no such index of biological change would be noticeable in a museum of computer screens. A buried painting may, depending on the artist's choice of materials, return to the earth, the same cannot be said of the countless imperishable plastics haunting our landfills.

Both a reciprocal relationship to nature and perishability are determining factors in my decision to take up painting as a medium and inform my approach to the medium. For example, I use oil paint as opposed to acrylic paint, not only because acrylic is a synthetic material, but because it evokes other synthetic materials. With oil paint, I hope to emphasize a multiplicity of material associations connected to the natural environment. Paint is literally a physical/embodied material intimately related to human life and death; just the same, it may also be suggestive of the immaterial: light, space, and atmosphere.

To emphasize paint as material with a relationship to the earth, I often mull my own paints, allowing dry pigments to remain coarse and visible on the final surface. The refinement process may be evident on the final painting. I work with pigments such as graphite, iron oxides, ochres, bone, and pewter, which are more likely to suggest their literal materiality than to suggest light. I allow viscous passages of paint to drip across the surface, revealing the natural force of gravity. On the other hand, I employ layers of scumbled or transparent paint to achieve atmospheric effects like J. M. W. Turner's maelstroms, Rothko's pulsing atmospheres, or Vermeer's gleaming baubles. I often think of the paint as ectoplasmic; artist Eleanor Ray once described my paintings as "Trompe-l'œil paintings of imaginary substances."

I hope that by using paint in a way responsive to its necrogenic origins, I can insist on our continuing connection to nature, despite the encroachment of a disposable material culture and digital circus. We maintain a degree of symbiosis with the material world. One may argue death is a natural rite, perhaps the last one that cannot be stolen from us—that we cannot steal from ourselves. While we understand the biological processes inherent in death, the metaphysical question of what's beyond is less knowable. In our Google world, illuminated with blinding data and information, all human experience appears less mysterious, more definable, predictable, and under our control. Increasingly, the universe becomes human-centered, and, yet, paradoxically, more impersonal. As science brings more and more clarity to our understanding of the world and consumer and technological culture erodes our sleep, death remains beyond knowledge, understanding, or control, but serves as a final sleep, a universal reminder of ineffability. It is through the contemplation of death I have found, in our contemporary world, a vessel for enchantment, the spiritual, and the natural. John Keats touches on similar ideas in his poem, On Death:

I.
Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream,
And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?
The transient pleasures as a vision seem,
And yet we think the greatest pain's to die.

II.
How strange it is that man on earth should roam,
And lead a life of woe, but not forsake
His rugged path; nor dare he view alone
His future doom which is but to awake.

These ideas, connecting beauty in death and nature, are not new; they may be as old as death and beauty respectively. However, they make their clearest appearance in a long tradition of thinkers originating in Romanticism, such as Keats.

In my opening remarks, I put forth that my work was indebted to the dead. I've outlined how I approach paint as it relates to the biological process of death as a material continuum, now I'd like to turn to those deceased voices of former artists that I hope to channel. Building upon the Romantic tradition, much of my work begins with the aesthetic categories of the sublime and the beauty of nature. I see myself connected to an American strain of this Romantic lineage, wherein the American landscape serves as a replacement for religious institutions. I see my work operating in a long tradition of artists, writers, and thinkers who locate the sacred and the sublime in the American landscape—from the Transcendentalists to the Beat Generation, artists and writers as varied as Arthur Dove, Barnet Newman, Gary Snyder, and Henry David Thoreau.

While we may no longer maintain the same sense of discovery and wonder relative to nature that these earlier Americans felt, we occupy a unique position in relation to the landscape as witnesses to climate change and environmental crisis. Indeed, our relationship to the landscape now is often set to lamentation or, worse, apathy. The Romantic aversion to rationality and technology that precedes and characterizes many of these thinkers is more relevant now than ever. My paintings propose a relationship with nature that encapsulates death, renewal, and the ineffable. However, unlike the European Romantics and their great American followers, it is difficult for me to believe in a heroic vision of nature. My paintings are quiet and modest in scale, unlike the enormous paintings of artists like Frederic Edwin Church or Barnett Newman.

By adopting this modest scale, I disclaim the heroic ambition that underlies much American painting, as well as the pervasive desire for expansion within western capitalist culture, a value that results in the exploitation of the natural world and ties our experience of the American landscape to the history of genocide. To manifest a mountain, I do not feel the need to make an impressive, mountainous painting. The spirit of the mountain resounds through the mountain's smallest speck of dirt. In many ways, I view my work as the residue of the American sublime, the sticky spirit left over after the excess is burned away. I try to express what is lost as well as what is immutable.

Not only is my work diminutive in scale, but it also employs pared-down compositions which often focus on a central void, emphasizing absence. I make no effort to hide fastenings, such as nails, staples, or tape, demonstrating the provisional means in which things are held together but could fall apart. When not employing oil on panel, I scavenge for materials such as found objects and tattered paper.

My work and its relationship to the landscape is also dissimilar to earlier American Romantics in that my vision is undoubtedly tinted by the internet. Online, images of the landscape are reduced to the size of a monitor, distorted, repeated ad infinitum, and organized in geometric grids. While I believe what I am trying to achieve in my work is at odds with the digital experience, the relationship is inevitably more complex than that. The internet has shaped the way I see the world, and its histories. Like much of the painting of our era, my work adopts a complex heritage, often sourced online. I trace my inspiration anarchically from the internet, gathering images with an eye toward felt or poetic unity as opposed to conceptual, stylistic, geographical, or historical logic.

I make no attempt to be contemporary or, for that matter, a-contemporary. I am looking for images that resonate with my personal feelings or memories. My disparate source material is synthesized in the paintings in a way that diminishes its disparity. In fact, the work may well oppose its e-origins. My work tends to reduce the number of pronounced hierarchies to a small range and may similarly reduce its value range into something that is subtle or murky, qualities that don't translate well to the online experience.

Also, unlike the online experience, I hope that my paintings promote slow contemplation. I see my practice in a tradition of artists such as Agnes Martin, Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, or Hindu Tantric painting—all work that, while varying in degrees of expressiveness and aesthetic intent, promotes an essential idea of the spiritual that manifests itself in reductive geometric abstraction. The particular variety of abstraction offered by these artists/traditions encourages me to slow down my mind and reflect. Similarly, I think of each of my paintings as a prayer or meditation. Words like devotion or compassion circulate my mental space while painting.

Agnes Martin's work is of particular importance to me. The simplicity of her paintings feels boundlessly generous, as though the work offers a simple answer to the complex question of what it means to exist at all, or otherwise reveals that the question was never complex. Her painting Wheat can evoke, as the title suggests, a field of wheat, or abstract qualities like innocence, nostalgia, grace, or beauty, or all these concepts simultaneously. The paintings occupy a liminal space that teeters so close to disembodiment, yet they gush with breath and vitality. The gentle color, monochrome at times, often blue and cool, conjure in me a kind of longing, as though they represent distant vistas, grayed by atmosphere, or memories dusted in time.

However, perhaps ironically, investing so much in Martin's painting can make their austerity feel oppressive, especially when I'm trying to find my own voice through that lineage.

Like Martin, or the before mentioned Mark Rothko, Piet Mondrian, and Tantric paintings, I often employ symmetry and a limited palette in my work. But where I see my work departing from their example is my refusal to impose an absolute condition. My work is not as ideal and crosses geometric certainties with painterly incidents, landing somewhere between cosmic diagrams and nosebleeds. Painted in layers of accumulated color, attenuated to various degrees of opacity, and wiped or smeared into the preceding layers, the color in my paintings coagulate into passages of negation, atmosphere, or mud with moments of more saturated or defined colors pulling themselves forward.

Many of the paintings are made with natural forces in mind, as though wind may course through the substrate or fire burns beneath a film of paint. Within a small scale, and provisional materials, I would like to make light swirl and heave. In this way, I hope to honor the revelatory feelings I've experienced in the American landscape.

I see the creative act as spiritual, and my painting practice as a spiritual practice. I do not think the spiritual is above life but interwoven with it. To further illustrate what I mean, I admire Rothko's desire to show his work in a chapel as opposed to a commercial space such as he decided to do in 1958 when he refused to display his paintings in the Four Seasons, despite the hefty bounty of the commission. I want my work to occupy a space similar to a chapel, not because I believe my work should be revered, but because the space promotes meditative and transcendent feelings.

Better yet, I look towards Canadian artist Tim Whiten and his installations of earthen mounds. The Whiten installation, which places art objects in a hollow mound of earth, is like the Rothko chapel in that it refuses conventional means of art display in favor of something that acknowledges the art viewing process as deeply linked with the human spirit. However, in Whiten's case, there is an acknowledgment of the role of both the earth and the body in the spiritual.

These dichotomies of the spiritual and the bodily, as well as the intellectual and poetic are at play in my work. At times I employ color spectrums in my paintings, speaking to natural optical phenomena such as rainbows, auroral light, or halos (like those formed around the sun or moon). These spectra may also reference color-chart diagrams, such as those in color-theory documents, or the test sheets photographers use to calibrate hue—with the implication in my paintings that the bands are somehow used to calibrate the color of the painting.

In this way, there is a play between the objective and subjective. Where the spectrum bands suggest objective means of contemplating color as diagram or index, the more intuitive color fields invoke a particular mood and a sense of interiority. Bringing into focus the visual spectrum of light, by contrast, allows the viewer to see that which exceeds it, inviting the viewer to contemplate the metaphysical or that which is outside the empirical.

I feel a similar connection with images of metaphysical charts, be it the paintings of Alfred Jensen, Jain drawing, alchemical diagrams, or theosophical illustrations, each of which have a latent and indescribable poetic presence that emerges from their intellectual impetus to evoke spiritual truths as objective knowledge.

Lastly, I am indebted to the history of visionary artists, those who, as Rashaan Roland Kirk puts it "talk with spirits," or acknowledge, in Sun Ra's words, "There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of)." I do not consider my work to be visionary in and of itself, in that I am not working from visions of other worlds or pulling upon mystic experiences, but I am deeply interested in artists that do. I study the work of artists like Forrest Bess, William Blake, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Morris Graves, and many others to make things that honestly express the feeling of the otherworldly, invisible, or prophetic. To partake in the history of painting is to engage with a vast weave of intuitive knowledge that is exclusive to the realm of visual culture, perhaps even exclusive to painting. I don't intend to make good, bad, important, or expensive works of art, rather, I am here, trying to tap into those quiet currents latent within the world. At best I can use my work to dip my feet into those waters and share what I've found.