The Alive Phenomenon

Dead Bird No. 3, 14” X 17 1/2”, oil on jute on panel, 2022, Sandra Meigs

I attribute agency to paintings, that is, the idea that a painting is capable of expression. A painting is more than an inanimate object. It can be alive, an ontological being. This idea could be dismissed as a metaphor, a model for a back and forth relationship between the work of art and its spectator. But I sometimes get so into it while painting that the life inside the painting becomes very real.

One could simply attribute this to child’s play, a simple engagement with the imagination, an imaginary friend. But does imaginative play account for the constant going back and forth in a communication with the painting. I contend that in the process of making the painting, there is a back and forth exchange, a give and take, not about just form and content, but about expression between two subjects: the painting and its spectator.

Think of the very basic idea of active expressive perception in everyday life. Think about the act of perception and the relationship between one’s inner emotive state and the outer world. Either the scene one beholds can influence emotion, or, the emotion one feels can influence the perception of the scene.

Does one’s feeling of grief influence how one sees, or, does seeing a mournful scene bring forth the feeling? For example, if you are embroiled in your own feelings of grief, you might project that grief onto the landscape and therefore experience grief all the more intensely. Or, if you are feeling buoyant then suddenly observe a tree branch tapping on the window in a dark wind, it might cause you to suddenly project loneliness into your soul.

In a critically aware scenario, it is possible to behold a sunset and bask in wonderment at its beauty, all the while thinking about the dust, smoke, pollutants and carbon gases which contribute to the glorious glow of the intense red sky.

Near my home in Hamilton, Ontario there is a bridge, the Skyway, which connects Hamilton to Burlington. From the bridge there is a grand view of the many functioning steel mills along the shores of Lake Ontario. I mention this here because of the intense emotion I feel every time I cross the bridge and behold the fire breathing beasts. It is like a scene from a Bosch painting. The medieval industries of rusting towers, steam rising above carried by the wind, flames shooting upward, railroad tracks and heavy 24 wheeled vehicles towing huge rolls of steel across the beaten roads of Dofasco, all leave me with an impression of awesomeness that I can only describe as perversely beautiful. The scene hits me with humanity every time, as, in my mind, I go back to the origins of civilization when iron was first pounded over a fire.

I have thought about making a painting of this scene and projecting all of my critical capacities as a painter into it, the beauty, the awesomeness, the heavy heavy carbon footprint of the landscape. (In winter the houses around the mills get dumped with brown snow.) I fear that I could never do the scene’s immensity justice, but it is always on my mind. Perhaps I feel I would need a canvas of great scale to accomplish my goal. But, then, I think of Albert Pinkham Ryder, who painted small canvases poignantly capturing moments of expressive feeling. If he could do it, perhaps so could I.

I first read about Albert Pinkham Ryder in the 1990’s when I was becoming a more adept painter. I was particularly fascinated by the fact that museum conservators stored his paintings flat. Because he worked and reworked the paintings over many years with many layers of paint, the paint is still active after over a century. The painter was known for his unorthodox use of layers of glazes, oils, and other mediums, reworked, sometimes over the course of a decade. Perhaps this confirms the theory that paintings are truly beings unto themselves, complete with paint particles that run in the night.

I finally got to see three of the paintings in person at the Detroit Institute of Arts. These little works were powerful in the way that they seemed to both receive and emit emotion. The liveliness of the paint, its cracked surface, its thick oil, though over a century old, seemed so fresh. I think the aliveness I felt residing in the oil paint compelled me to project my emotional states of melancholia, grief, and apocalyptic panic, onto these works, feelings our time in climate catastrophe, not the artist’s…. Such is the power of art.

My own painting, pictured above, is adapted from the Albert Pinkham Ryder painting, Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens, 1888, which is in the collection of The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. According to his own accounts, after seeing the Wagner opera Götterdämmerung, Ryder was so moved that he rushed back to his studio to begin this painting. The particular scene that Ryder painted depicts three river spirits, the maidens, bathing in the moonlit river as a horseman, the hero of the opera, rides toward them on a dark forest trail, with trees swaying in the wind. There are many twists and turns in the opera, but suffice it to say that it was received by the American public at The Met with religious fervor. Such intense emotion was poured into Ryder’s painting, through which one can feel rapture, erotic joy and menacing doom.

Ryder’s Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens is both my foil and my mate. I chose to paint it on a rough jute surface to give the paint a struggle…a struggle to express, a struggle to survive, a struggle to represent. In my version of the painting, the human figures are absent and in their place a bird is fallen and dead and occupying the foreground of the scene. The romantic ecstasy contained in the landscape is thwarted by painting’s rough surface which lends the act of depiction incomprehension, blurriness, and clumsiness. While the dear sweet bird, large within the tiny scale of the landscape, presents mournful loss in what, in today’s world, could yield an impending catastrophe, for all bird species, within the night scene.

I close with an image of Ryder’s painting, Dead Bird, 1890. It is impossible for me to see this work today without feeling the flow of mournful loss. With impending climate catastrophe there is more loss than can be fathomed, here, projected onto a little bird.

Dead Bird, Albert Pinkham Ryder, 1890’2, 4 3/8” X 10,” oil on wood panel. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

Posted October 17, 2022

Notes:

For a discussion on Expressive Perception, see Painting as an Art, by Richard Wollheim, 1987, Princeton University Press. Chapter II, What the spectator sees, draws out Wollheim’s idea of Expressive Perception.

For a discussion on Phenomenology and Art see the essay Eye and Mind, by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, English translation 1964, in The Primacy of Perception edited by James M. Edie, Northwestern University Press.

Making Art During Meltdown

I can’t stop thinking about the following two paragraphs in Daniel Sherrell’s book, Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World, in which he describes a scene in Larsen Von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011). In case you don’t know the film, it is the apocalyptic story in which a mysterious planet crashes into Earth, before which a family had gathered and is awaiting Earth’s destruction together one evening.

Sherrell writes:

 “At the beginning of Melancholia there’s a ten minute overture sequence set to an opera by Wagner. Von Trier strings together a series of static shots filmed in slow motion, the figures barely moving. On rewatching the film, I’ve come to notice something I hadn’t seen the first time: amid this opening montage there is a lengthy shot of that same Bruegel painting, which I’ve since learned is called Hunters in the Snow. The frame is full of it: the icy hill and its copse of birch, the dogs and men poised on top, draw your gaze along with theirs toward a tiny bustle of the town and mountains beyond it. For several seconds nothing happens. You watch the painting. Then shards of black begin to fall, obscuring parts of the image, and you realize that the painting is burning, bits of ash flaking off from the top.

The thing about watching a painting burn is that it elicits no reaction from within the painting itself. This shouldn’t be surprising but is, somehow. You half expect its figures to revolt against their demise: for the birch trees to bend, the dogs to howl, the hunters to flee or beg. But everyone and everything holds its pose, even as fire peels back the margins.”                                                 

Quote from Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. Published by Penguin, 2021. By Daniel Sherrell.

Two things come to mind. One, what is an artist to do awaiting Earth’s meltdown and can artworks be present to this unspeakable horror? And two, Art always makes me think of objects in an ontological sense. Sherrell also discusses objects near the end of his book, that is the inescapable fact that objects will fill the planet and have a kind of life. What is a great heap of abandoned art without people to contemplate it? Objects may replace humanity when all of us are gone. And how does one think about objects in that existential light?

I can’t begin to fathom an artwork so profound that it would slow climate change. Some artworks do raise awareness and draw attention to the awesome destruction begot by us. Edward Burtynsky’s stunning photographic imagery of the devastation that human industry has wrought hits hard. His work certainly promotes climate awareness. Awareness is the beginning of active calls for change.

The anthropologist Michael Taussig, in his book, Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown (2020), introduced me to the idea of a Bataille-like campaign to attack the cultural creation of sublime beauty, as western civilization depicts in painting for example, and instead, to express all feelings, forms, and expressions by way of using slime, goo, and other abhorrent aesthetic matter. Georges Bataille’s rants against industry, war, and high art, featured photography, drawing and written pieces by he and other artists in the journal Documents, published in Paris in 1929-30. Bataille’s work influenced many artists in the early twentieth century and is still relevant today.

Why make more art, just more stuff in the world full of too much stuff? Objects of art will continue to be housed and conserved in the world’s museums until civilization’s demise. How are we to think of Museums in these times? Every day more precious, every day a trip to a museum to cherish art? Art can make life worth living, as solace, reflection, dialogue. If humankind is no longer, will the art take over expressing for us, as Sherrell half expects….the Bruegel painting’s figures to revolt against their demise, as they burn. An absurd thought but vivid nonetheless. The burning painting is also a metaphor for our failure to take action. As the planet burns we are frozen like tiny figures in a painting and do nothing.

My therapist tells me that there is a new field developing called Climate Trauma Psychology, researching how to help people deal with their mourning for lost species, fears of disaster, and utter uncertainty of a future. This emotional trauma is very present. For some, depression is never far off. Can Art, a grand form of expression and connection with the world offer some a possible place for both sorrow and joy in connection with others?

At another point in the book Warmth, Sherrell projects Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow into 2021 and imagines the forest of the hunters retreating northward, as forests are doing now. The little snowshoe hare are dying because as their white world of snow melts into muck, the hare succumb to predators.

Sherrell discusses other works of art too. There are many literary references which include Melville’s Moby Dick, Proust’s Swann’s Way, and Gerald Murnane’s novel The Plains (a writer I had been unfamiliar with).

In Part One there is a vivid behind the scenes description of the NY Renews coalition, an activist group Sherrell has worked with. This is intense because there is a a complex web of failures and successes in their campaign to get the the NY Governor’s office to pass legislation to end carbonization. Street demonstrations, sit-ins, email campaigns, and protests, are described, as well as the political swindling and plotting both against and in favour of the Bill by the political parties in power. Finally, at then end of Part One, there is success, albeit a much watered down version of the Bill as it was originally proposed by the group. Then Trump was elected. Throughout all of Part One, Sherrell’s inner turmoil with The Problem is always close at hand.

I continue to ponder this book. The book covers Sherrell’s development as a climate activist and examples of specific climate regulations that the activists he works with have succeeded in instituting. The book is also about how to deal with the Meltdown on a personal level. Framing the book as a letter to his possible future child is a way to write reflectively about the future of the planet, but it is also a truly felt dilemma.

This book has been very meaningful to me. One of those books that hits the heart and the mind where hitting is needed.

Posted: September 19, 2022

Book: Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World by Daniel Sherrell. Published by Penguin, 2021.