lines

My art making practice is ecotonal. Ecotones are areas of transition between different adjacent ecological communities. If we consider mediums to function as ecological communities then the matrix functions as the terrain (and the artist is the ecotone). This is our definition of a world. According to Wikipedia: "Ecotones are particularly significant for mobile animals, as they can exploit more than one set of habitats within a short distance. This can produce an edge effect along the boundary line, with the area displaying a greater than usual diversity of species." Diverse species are dissimilar organisms. If we look at objects from a Hylozoic point of view they are organisms. The concept of objectification may be moot. I like the analogy of the mobile animal in reference to the artist. The mobility may be more mental than say a Geselle or journeyman but no less active.
I use the moniker woodcliffe. It's a bardic name. Woodcliffe is the name of the street that I grew up on in Lancaster, Ohio. It was an appropriate title. Behind our house was a large stretch of woods and in front was the street that led right into the center of town. In her book Color: A Natural History of the Palette Victoria Finlay tells us about traveling Glaziers. When a new cathedral was in the finishing stages Glaziers would arrive to create the stained glass windows. Townspeople, often suspicious of strangers, were particularly wary of these traveling artisans because they would camp out by or in the forests or woods near the town. They did this in order to be close to the fuel supply for the furnaces they would build to heat and make the glass. The edge of the woods is an ecotone between the wild and civilization. These artists lived on that edge, the cliff of the woods.
I feel as though I exist there too.



yet to be titled 2007, Marys 2006, yet to be titled 2006 © R. Sullivan

windows through the soul

Paul Klee's work has been said to have created, through its pictographic forms, a mythology outside and beyond any one, or particular culture. His forms are variable, archetypal, and have multiple meanings. The simplicity of Klee's forms allows for a complex ambiguity. Simplifying forms like the human figure or structures into basic signifiers provides freedom and openess. When there is abstraction there is more possibility or potential for viewer participation; because the work isn't based within a context of illusion but representation. Simplified or symbolic forms have traditionally been referred to as "primitive". I was taught in school that Medieval art looked the way it did(flat and disproportionate) because it was made in the "dark ages"; people were uneducated barbarians who weren't sophisticated enough to deal with perspective. This is lazy thinking. The middle ages were a time of "reformation". The church was avidly trying to convert pagan peoples. Force isn't the most effective or Christian way of doing this(although obviously not always the way chosen) so what's left is the appropriation of key events, dates, styles, etc. Most people know that this is why in Catholicism Christmas is around the winter solstice. Light festivals in nature religions during the darkest time of year conveniently fit into the Christian idea of Jesus as the light of the world. Nature religions are just what they sound like, about nature, they are a Cthonian focus on the cycles observed around us and how humans fit into that cycle. Rather than an Appolonian Christian idea that nature is lower than the spirit and inherently inferior because it "dies" and the spirit is "eternal". Simplification of the world around you into symbols provides a language that is easily reproduced, understood, and projected. Doesn't it make more sense that this is where this style of religious iconography may stem from? What we are talking about here are priorities, not knowledge. Folk art is more in line with practicalities and typically seen as a lesser form than that of academic or fine art. Art that I find interesting is idiosyncratic. And if you consider Folk art any art that comes from a non-academic context, then a lot of folk art comes from a very deep, personal, and idiosyncratic place. That, combined with an artists intuitive sense of beauty, is more interesting than a masterwork from the Renaissance that, beautiful and illusory as it may be, seduces us in a way that is still sensual; one's body still gets involved in a very Cthonian way. We want to touch it, gaze at it in admiration and declare how majestic it is.

After reading Shrines, Curiosities, and the Rhetoric of Display by Stephen Bann I was thinking about medieval triptychs and the Renaissance practice of the cabinet of curiosities in relation to a piece I did recently. The paintings I've been doing are very simple. They remind me of Paul Klee. I put a few of them along with Xerox photos I've taken in a wall mounted poster display unit like that you would find at a head shop or department store. What I find similar in medieval triptychs is that the wings are often hinged and double sided; they are meant to be opened and closed like a cabinet. Also, they almost always depict religious scenes from the bible, typically the crucifixion, which suggests the containment of a utopic vision. The poster display unit is interactive. With 15 double sided wings there is a possibility of 30 works on view to be flipped through. The usual use for the unit is to present posters that are for sale. The posters in the wings at department stores represent utopic vision as well. Each wing encapsulates a desire; whether it be the whimsical world of cartoons, a sports star, a psychedelic black-light poster, a musician/band, or a scantily clad female/male. People flip through the case and find what they want; something that is a signifier of themselves. It is a literal construct of the process of looking at art. It is as Bann so elegantly puts it, a "sacred prototype", "an endlessly transformed and transforming agent". There is a metaphysics of presence contained here. The display is a terminal where one passes through their desires. Like a window through which the eye must pass to reach its goal.

Triptych of the Family Moreel 1484 by Hans Memling

Bann sites Norman Bryson's use of this metaphor in his book Word and Image. Bryson describes this situation as resulting in "the supremacy of the discursive over the figural". Bann goes on to say that: "With the irresistable(sic) rise of the theory and practice of perspective from the Renaissance onwards, the Word will become predominant: color and form will be valued not in their own right, but only insofar as they enable and facilitate the telling of a sacred tale." Color and form are their own sacred tale. The question is, what's yours?
Paul Klee's epitaph: "Here lies the painter Paul Klee, somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual, but far from close enough."

mind your god

(Quantum)Physics in the past century has become more and more comparable to ancient religious or spiritual beliefs that typically revolve around a deep spiritual "knowledge" or experience. Studies in Particle physics seem to show that simply the act of thought and observation could be the only reason a particle of matter exists. This is like saying looking for something is the same as creating it. At the very least, it means it is impossible to observe reality without changing it. Issac Newton was a very religious man; but the church took a dim view of his motto: "Hypothosese non fingo" or "I make no hypotheses". He based his laws on sound experimental evidence that anyone would be able to reproduce. This is still the way scientific theories are accepted and validated(The idea that the atom was the building block of nature was proposed about four hundred years before Christ by Democritus, but until the late 1800s remained just an idea), but the findings of physicists keep getting stranger and leading to hypotheses that seem too psychedelic to be real. Newtonian physics are still applicable to the large scale world, but don't work on a sub-atomic level where common sense and intuition have no place. This disconnect is what led Einstein to denounce quantum theory and declare "God doesn't play dice", but Einstein also said "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen". Although Newton disproved Aristotle's view of matter's natural state being that of rest, He was very Aristotelian in his rejection of the(very eastern)idea of Hylozoism , the belief that all life is inseparable from matter; in other words, all matter has life. I do believe in Hylozoism. I believe plants think and that rocks live, and that thought alone is living matter, that prayer and meditation have a very real and physical effect in the world. In Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth Campbell says: "God is a thought, god is a name, god is an idea, but it's reference is to something that transcends all thinking. The ultimate mystery of being is beyond all catagories of thought." How can a thought think about itself? Perhaps Consciousness itself is our concept of God. And with the findings of quantum physicists one could conjecture that consciousness, at the most fundamental levels, is a quantum process. It is information like this that leads me to say we must accept science as mythology and mythology as science.

In this day and age we need a personal mythology just to survive. Our old mythological constructs and rituals have broken down to such a degree that out of human nature grows personal or what I'll call prescriptive mythologies. Some of the largest and most obvious people practicing this are artists. Indologist Heinrick Simmer told Joseph Campbell: "The best things can't be told...the second best are the misunderstood. Because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can't be thought about, and one gets stuck with the thoughts. The third best are what we talk about." Visual artists of course know this. It's one of the reasons we do what we do. When someone asks what ones work is about one might say "if I could put it into words I'd be a writer." I might say "If I could put it into words I'd be a physicist". I consider scientists artists. In fact, there are far more interesting things going on in the scientific community than in art. This is one of the motivations behind my proposal that if someone wants one of my works they must start an art magazine, of which I will serve as editor and chief, in which all of the articles are written by scientists.

I like the story about President Eisenhower going to see one of the first computers. Upon walking into the room one of the scientists explains to the President that the computer has been programmed to answer any question he may have. Eisenhower asks the computer "is there a God?" and the computer responds "now there is".
And the scientist is the new Yogi.



Yogi 2006, oil pastel on paper © R. Sullivan

the poetry of motion

In physics, motion means a continuous change in the position of a body relative to a reference point. Newton's third law of motion, that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, is common knowledge. If we can consider an accumulation of smaller actions one large action, such as the creation of a work of art, then it only makes scientific sense that the following work of art would be an opposite reaction to it. Okay, that's a bit of a stretch, but it feels that way to me. I mean this isn't an ADD thing. It seems to be a part of a natural order that when I finish a piece the next one must be contrary to it somehow. Why am I having trouble with this situation one may ask. Well, because people tend to distrust an artist who moves around a lot. It's taken as a sign of indecisiveness or immaturity. Like just about everything else in America(the whole concept of suburbia) this situation seems to be directly linked to war. It doesn't seem to be until after WWII that this idea of the artist brand comes into play. It has been conjectured that after the war American artists, in order to separate themselves from European artists, began to paint in a solid identifiable style revolving around common imagery or concept. Whether this was consciously done or not is beside the point; it happened, it was the sense of the times. Take two of the patriarchs of their eras as an example. Picasso painted two very different paintings(on display adjacent to one another at MOMA)in the summer of 1921: Three Musicians and Three Women at the Spring.



Willem DeKooning spent the majority of his career making biomorphic paintings. Certainly everything he did after 1945 applies to this description.


Woman 1, 1952-3 / The Visit 1966-7 / Untitled XXIV, 1983

It's pretty obvious that there is more variation in Picasso's two works painted at the same time than in the three DeKooning's spanning thirty years. Of course this idea of the brand and American consumer identity was taken head on with the advent of Pop Art. If it was a national sense of solidarity due to America's enormous economic "success", having virtually a monopoly on manufactured goods and agricultural exports, after WWII that was part of this consistency in artists' practice what's in store for the America of today? The America that is virtually split in two because of war. The America in which the dollar consistently declines in comparison to the English Pound and the Euro. The America in which the average person spends 10% more than they earn with 70% living paycheck to paycheck. Keeping Newton's ideas from 1687 in mind might be a pretty progressive idea.



Newton, Painted C-Print on paper, tagged pinecone w/seeds, 2006 © R.Sullivan