loveMELT newsletter #008: Simultaneous Creation | Destruction + Distance | Closeness
Dear Beautiful,
Last Sunday, I went to Jamaica.
I took the Long Island Railroad to get there. I went to Jamaica, New York to visit Peter Bonner in his studio. I’d previously only interacted with Peter digitally with a computer. On Zoom. I, fortunately, enrolled in his Abstract Painting class at the Art Students League for several months during this pandemic.
Getting the chance to visit someone, in person, surrounded by the medium of their evolving exploration and expression is an experience somewhat overwhelming to process in real-time and difficult to articulate post-time. There are not the right words...but it infuses some awe back into questioning what it is to be human...what it is to be Alive.
Your being is spurred.
Peter is a person who has the ability to show others how to see. He’s shown me new ways of seeing time and time again in the brief time I’ve known him, usually offhandedly. Being around people like this, people who are present, people who observe and respond honestly, reminds me of a book I read some time ago titled How to See. And the book reminds me of the people continuously showing me how to see. The people and the book give each other meaning. A dialogue between the two is created.
Peter is from Australia. And while he’s studied various philosophies of painting in many places, Indigenous Australian art has a powerful enmeshing in his approach to making, specifically the art made by Indigenous women of Australia (their approach to painting is most likely different than what springs to your mind as ‘painting a canvas’). Hearing him say this multiple months ago during a class deeply resonated with me. I don’t yet have a long history in visual art learning and making. My learning and practice have ebbed and flowed as an adult. But I do remember taking myself to see the Ancestral Modern Exhibition at the Frist Museum showing Indigenous Australian Art in 2017. It was the first time seeing art in person that I felt I “got”. It spoke to me and had this incredible, moving (in the action sense) presence.
Feeling that I grasped what was being shown to me is seemingly ironic since this art is full of symbolic narrative...narrative of life and land so wildly different from the one I routinely experience. However, even without knowing each symbol’s meaning, there was much to absorb in every painting’s manifestation of marks.
Being enveloped in Indigenous Australian art is intuitively fertile. You can sense it all around you, you feel it all over you, it’s imprinted on the insides of your eyelids when your eyes close, it goes inside you, plants itself, expands and flows.
Absorbance between you and it is equally fluid.
Peter’s work brought back that flowing feeling. I was in a world. A world candidly presenting itself to me and asking me to be honestly present with it. As my being became more comfortable in its environment, it’s not surprising that Peter and my spoken conversation quickly followed suit in openness and I began to see his work, even if just for flashes at a time. Hopefully, with more time spent with the artwork, my consciousness will continue opening up to it to explore and feel its dynamic, dimensional dialogue.
What’s also interesting about being immersed in someone else’s created world is that it can provide glimpses of clarity into yourself and/or into your own created world. It’s like when traveling to a foreign country and all of the sudden decisions needing to be made become so much easier to make, you’re able to finally put your finger on what’s been bothering you at home, and you’re able to ask yourself questions you’ve been avoiding.
Your brain isn’t cluttered with yourself, your world.
Seeing Peter’s artwork while discussing artmaking with him brought to my attention the juxtaposition currently taking place in my own artmaking process. Part of me wants to purely express feelings of life, emotively, kinetically connecting the feelings being experienced in the moment through mark-making and fabric shaping. The other part is highly conceptual and tries to more specifically declare thoughts and ask questions of myself and the viewer to give the art and myself purpose for creation.
While working on a more emotive, in the moment, painting, the more conceptual paintings off to the side look like something and seem more “right” or justified than whatever the hell the blob of shit painting is right in front of me. And when I work on a conceptual piece, the abstract art in my periphery seems to more defiantly enrapture me in its presence. My mind is fighting with and contradicting itself...per usual.
After discussing art-making processes with Peter, I’m now considering that maybe the works cannot exist without the other. Whether they all become artworks I sell needs to not matter, but they just need to be. Maybe the works provide meaning to each other and give rise to a meaning to me or in me or something of that nature?
“Mindfulness as Intellect, meet Mindfulness as Presence”
(Let’s see what MI’s and MP’s dialogue is)
Coming to this observation also reminds me that the more I read and explore various philosophies, approaches to living, and how the world is functioning, the more I discover unity in truths continuously emerging to humans observing and responding to their surroundings. For example, begin to consider Emily Kame Kngwarray’s painting, Wild Yam Dreaming, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s, ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ series, A Thousand Plateaus, the study of ,Relational Sociology, the ,emergence of digital social networks, and the development of Algorithms for Reliable Navigation and Wayfinding. Merge in Indigenous Australian mythology, The Dreaming and Post-Modernist theories of always-already and deconstruction.
These happenings and philosophies are truthblips, showing their interconnectivity, activities of growth, their multiplicities while expansively evolving to and away from us to emerge ‘new’ blips elsewhere. And this maybe has to do with why we humans are ever-searching...because although the blips already have been, presently are, and always will be interconnected and ever-flowing, each ‘new’ observation a human makes exemplifies a truthblip exuding itself and providing a grasping and a feeling wholly unfelt by our being before. The 'new' observation or truthblip simultaneously deconstructs and rebirths our consciousness, spurring our being forward while maintaining its flow and interconnectivity.
A Side Note:
While I was visiting Peter, one of our discussions brought up a former professor of mine, Beata Kania. Beata is the first person who taught me how to see. When I told Peter this, he asked me how. My immediate response was, “I don’t know”. And that’s probably the most accurate answer. However, my mind trying to provide an answer for myself and to Peter, led me to say that she showed me how to play, how to be present with material (fabric at the time), how to explore and experiment, how to observe and have a dialogue with my surroundings. Simultaneously she indirectly showed me another way to live. A life full of creativity, full of joy, full of gratitude, full of presence, full of curiosity and empty of standardized-American success. Beata showed me Alive.
May we continue learning how to see, exploring how to be.
Sadie