10-18-1987 - Kent, Washington
“I keep finding intellectual or metaphysical spaces, but this is not what I want. At one time I did. But, it is too easy and does not necessarily express the universal. There are enough monsters in me to last 500 lifetimes in the studio. My problem is not to discover the psyche, but to suppress it. My earlier self portrait series was painted this way. There I didn’t paint, I was painted. Such a method of working begs insanity”

I turned ten years old the day my father wrote that in one of his journals, he was 44 years old, the age I am today. I received a 10-speed bike that day, now rusting in some landfill.

To be painted. Insanity is necessary. But it’s not institutional insanity I’m referring to. To strip away sanity, is to strip away time in an attempt to get at the thing. Anything that runs against societal norms is usually given a derogatory name for it’s easier to label something than to be open. Art is created out of time. What I mean is this, creation exists only in the present and to hold the present requires a repudiation of linear time. The Earth view of the Hopi makes no distinction between time and space, avoiding all linear construction. Like the ancient Shan shui landscape painters who worked in a spatial temporality not a linear one. A world that sees connection to all nature in a kind of circular construct, the foundations of karma. Modern physics looks surprisingly more like this state of being than the culture from whence it was developed.

The artist’s job, in part, is expression. Art does not care about economics or grace or convention. And so the people who open that conduit are charged with insanity, for those that don’t follow are clearly insane. More labels, so let’s ignore that. There’s a contemporary idea that’s gained traction called flow state, or being in flow. It’s not a new idea, but its transcended from an alternative idea to mainstream acceptance. Anybody who has a passion and has fully given themselves up to that passion has experienced it. It’s the feeling of stopped time, that the clock has evaporated and ceases to have any meaning. Because collectively we are obsessed with following the clock and schedules and productivity that when we experience this voided time it can feel almost magical. The difference with artists; painters, photographers, dancers, actors, writers, musicians, sculptors is something is created out of this void, which is not emptiness but what Peter Matthiessen calls the “Uncreated that precedes all creation”. It’s the place where art is born, where it separates from craft.

Point of Arches, Washington State
I hold the folded tripod by a single leg. My backpack feels right. I’m walking barefoot through thick mud in a dense coastal forest at the very northwest tip of Washington State. The soft salt air and gentle roar of surf filters through the trees to my right. I’m heading to a secluded beach to photograph a garden of tall sea stacks. The thick forest canopy dances the light all around. There’s a rich hunger to make art. Later, down on the beach I’ll find my canvas and photograph it, but getting there through this forest bluff is part of the process, I must walk away and detach. Meister Eckhart, a German theological mystic from the 13th century, wrote “For the person who has learned to let go and let be, nothing can ever get in the way again.”

My father understood this. I was painted indeed.

The image in the header was photographed at Point of Arches at the end of the hike written about above. I stayed there all afternoon and into the evening and walked back in darkness. It was a good day.
Hasselblad, 50mm, Kodak T-max 100 BW film, Red 25 filter

Time