Beyond time and space and the material world is transcendence. When an artist makes art, he or she enters into a separate reality, away from physical needs.
As we open ourselves to the flow, we enter into stretchy time, hours are minutes long or minutes are hours long. Our minds, our thoughts, our senses of being travel beyond the walls of the room, through the picture plane, outside of the barriers of spoken language. And when art is flowing through us, there is only the color, or the sound, or the word. Or the smell of the paint, or the ink, or the clay.
My experience happens through my hands. They know where to go. The impulses that run through me, borne by my breath, pour from my hands and bounce back to my eyes, my ears, my mind. My hands are like magnets that pull line and color and music from the ether and translate them to the tangible, either visible or aural,
I guess the “feeling” of expression is a “spiritual” one. I can’t define the language of creativity. I can’t tell you why I hear music when I paint, or see imagery while I play piano. I can’t predict when or why I’ll feel compelled to adjust the waves of light before me. But I can tell you that when I allow myself to go “there,” I am “there.”
I’ve never felt that what I make is directed by me. I use the word “allow” when I’m asked about making art. Art just roars through. Demanding.
One of my favorite painters, Wassily Kandinsky, wrote about his spiritual bond to his art. He said that music could make the listener “see” and that the artist needs to be a poet. That more or less sums up my philosophy.
This is Composition IV painted in 1911 by Kandinsky:
“Color is the key. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.” - Kandinsky
Is there any wonder that I felt drawn to this artist? When I began to play piano outside of the regular structured composition, and I felt compelled to draw or paint, I experienced a shift in my mind. While my friends were experimenting with drugs and meditation in order to feel an altered consciousness, I was just making music and painting.
I can’t remember the Kandinsky quote, it’s out there somewhere, something about the object ruining the painting? Maybe one of you dear readers can find it. I’m not sure I agree wholeheartedly, because when I have been painting the most abstract of paintings, objects just make themselves known. While playing a 12-tone piece, in the middle of it all comes a birthday cadence or a I-IV-V progression. I think that accentuates the abstraction. Maybe, though, this is all overthinking.
I backed into artmaking through music. Or maybe I backed into music through artmaking. Sure, I had drawn and designed and played notes, but until I had that moment of transcendence, I was just thinking about making a drawing or a painting, then doing it. I was thinking about playing a piece of music, then doing it. Once the portal of wildness revealed itself, I was done for.
All this to say, these past few years of feeling blocked have been the worst kind of spiritual constipation. Right now, my challenge is to sit with consciousness, to acknowledge the flow. To let the white space dictate what it wants to say, through my hands. I am making the decision to “work” through this block, but as I exercise my hands and sharpen my tools, I am beginning to have “those” dreams again. Clanging, melodious scores laid thick with color. It’s really exciting, and I can’t wait to see what is on the other side of this dense gray wall.
Until then, I’m going to let myself breathe on paper for 10 minutes at a time. I’ll doodle illustrations for my newsletters. And when the time is right, mmm.
I’ve been searching for a painting of “artist’s block” and I can’t find one. HA! I shouldn’t be surprised that there aren’t a plethora of paintings of blocks. I thought that there would be some illustrator’s interpretation, though. The dense gray flabby block. Or the black steel block. Or the cloudlike pasty block. Then I realized, *flash*! I think that my 10-minute drawings are often like blocks.
Could it be that the block is just an incubator, that, cracked open, will reveal the big vibration embodying truth, beauty and goodness?
Ah well, I felt moved to write about transcendence, so there, you have it. And, for the record, I found the quote.
“Must we not then renounce the object altogether, throw it to the winds and instead lay bare the purely abstract?” - Kandinsky in Concerning the Spiritual in Art
"There" is the artists' home. You will visit again soon.
Favorite sentence : “Art just roars through”.