Meditation/Lecture

It was a Sunday morning in November and my friend Chardin and I rode our bikes to the zen center located on the 3400 block of Grove Ave. It was my first time attending the meditation and lecture, and I was nervous to be a new face, but excited at the pretense of learning how to silence my body and focus only on my mind.

We arrived and Chardin helped me situate myself on a plump, black cushion in an unused corner of the room. Everyone was peaceful and quiet and sitting with straight backs and closed eyes. The first 30 minutes of the weekly event was silent meditation. We sat, surrounded by strangers and swirling incense and thought of nothing, but the sounds and what they meant. In order to meditate, you are supposed to disconnect your mind from your body, ignore the wants and needs of the vessel. Exterior sounds drifted in from the streets, but those were sounds that other people could concern themselves with, I had greater things to realize about myself. I have tried my hand at meditating before, but never so successfully as in this place of quiet, safety and rest. Before I knew it the 30 minutes had ended and people were gracefully standing to their feet. I awkwardly stood, with a completely dead leg. My body was unused to sitting still for 30 minutes and my leg had fallen completely asleep. Attempting grace, I tried to put weight on it and my body actually collapsed into the nearest wall. Embarrassed, I tried to pull it together and got into line with the others. The walking meditation was about to begin. Worried that I wouldn't be able to walk, I was grateful that the steps we were taking were so tiny it seemed as if we were hardly moving at all. There was a man in robes who began the chant and carried wafting incense in his hands. We walked this way, in a line that followed the walls of the room, with no person in the front or back, for 20 minutes. It was the perfect exercise for me to regain the feeling in my legs. Once the walking meditation had ended we relocated our cushions and sat again, facing a woman who was an unfamiliar face. Laminated cards were circling the room and they had the words of a Buddhist chant printed on the glossy surfaces. I took one and passed the rest along. Once everybody had a card, the chanting began. This experience, of vocal unity was uplifting. The oneness amongst us all was evident, even though we were strangers. The chanting prayer lasted about 15 minutes and then we settled back to listen to the secrets of life. The woman in brown robes spoke to us about her experience as a Buddhist priest. She was beautiful in her age, and she was so peaceful. She spoke to us about the world and our interactions with each other. Her words resonated with me in terms of letting little things slide away, like water over rocks. She said there were people who reacted with anger, and people who were greater than such base reactions. There is a way to live life in harmony with other beings. I would like to be the person who does not react negatively to daily holdups and mishaps. This experience was such an amazing, refreshing one. Once the hour long lecture ended, there was time for questions, but I was too lost in my own thoughts to have anything to say. I felt more refreshed and susceptible to creativity than I had in a long time. I left the center feeling clean, and relaxed. I felt like a pure vessel for creative thoughts and wholesome actions. The entire experience lasted about 2 and a half hours and I can honestly say that it was one of the most positive 2 and a half hours that I have ever spent in my lifetime.

A book I am reading currently: The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating your Artistic Life, written by John Daido Loori.

Artist Lecture. Diego Sanchez.

Diego Sanchez is a Colombian artist who was showing work alongside Mary Scurlock a the Page Bond Gallery on Main St. in Richmond.

Sanchez makes bold, colorful statements and he said about 7 coats of varnish on each of his paintings, because he wanted his viewers to be able to touch. Sanchez's dominating subject matter was architecture and chairs. He explained the chair paintings as part of a research project he was doing on chairs. He is curious about the political nature of a chair...the hierarchical aspects, whom is sitting higher than whom, for example.

Sanchez said that a great deal of the paintings he creates are solely intuitive. His color palettes are bold and bright and his subjects are strangely geometric. He paints the coliseum and famous architecture. He said that a lot of his friends and fans of his work will send him images of such places while they are traveling. I wonder if the rest of his images come from google image searches.

In some examples of his later work Sanchez takes some artistic liberties with the subject matter. He includes what he called "floaters." His inspiration for such was waking up early/standing up too quickly and having spots move across his vision. What the "floaters" actually look like are a combination of germs and the layered abstract circles that Chuck Close is famous for.

Sanchez remarked on his joy of using representational and nonrepresentational elements together. This was evident in his piece where he painted a large checkerboard overtop of his painting of Richmond overpasses. Again, this art appears to have been made for a specific audience, by a specific audience. It is work that I have not made myself familiar with for years and I am glad that education has taken me in the direction of contemporary. The experience of the lecture was nice, to remind me to strive work hard on the conceptual aspects of my work, so as not to become stagnant and cliche.

Artist Lecture. Mary Scurlock.

This was an interesting lecture for me to attend. In my years in art school, I had forgotten that there are still working artists in the world who do not fall under the contemporary label. Mary Scurlock is one of those artists. She was also the kind of artist who assigns little to no meaning to her work. One cannot be certain if she paints for any purpose beside aesthetic.

Scurlock displayed work on wooden panels that were heavily gessoed. In places she scraped the gesso off the panel to create texture. Scurlock's only clear inspiration is the woods. I know this because the only imagery in her work is trees. Trees from below. The work was all created as if the artist was looking up the trunk of a tree. Some of the trees had leaves, some did not, however, in Scurlock's mind there was no real meaning behind this, just that she was initially afraid of painting leaves for fear of coming off as cliche. In more than one painting, Scurlock tried to create the illusion of words, not to add context or concept, but because she enjoyed the aesthetics of the scribbles. This essentially gives the effect that a bee from winnie the pooh has just flown across her painting and left it's trail behind it.

Her work was nice and shiny, very non confrontational, and of varying sizes. Scurlock employs subtle, pastel color changes that would compliment a wall in a variety of places, such as offices, public bathrooms or dentists waiting rooms.

Thursday post. 11.19.

After speaking to Jeff, I've got some ideas on my mind for my final.

feedback loops.
LCD in front of tv's or mirrors.
minerals. books on minerals. minerology.
how to make a fractal.
diptychs, triptychs.

making my own images/replacing the screen with my own hand:
shooting tinfoil
ice
broken glass
mirrors
cellophane -->material balloons are made of

Star filters for my lens...

INFINITY
FACETS
LCD when you point it at itself

ebay-broken video cameras/screens

FANTASIA-DISNEY
Disney World...the reproduction of other parts of the world, artificiality.
Synthetic world view..the idea that Disney can simulate and pre-package the rest of the world and present it in a theme park in order to make a profit.

Disney fantasty is always grounded in reality. The animations are always based loosely on real life with human beings as the lead roles. Fantasia strays from this...it's one of the more artistic Disney films, incredible imagery.

James Welling. Monday Post. 11.16.

James Welling is making photograms of plants, but they appear to be the negatives of photograms, instead of being white on black, his images are translucent and colorful and seem to radiate summer sun.

I just read that James Welling is the head of the photography department at UCLA. That's pretty rad. Welling's use of biological materials to make abstract work is relevant to my current thought processes and shooting methods.

"James Welling employs a wide variety of photographic tools and media. His abstract compositions are rendered as photograms, traditional gelatin silver prints, Polaroids, and digitally processed prints. In addition, Welling has used experimental shutterless cameras, digital, and vintage view cameras to create these images. His works challenge the technical and conceptual bounds of photography, but employ simple materials like crumpled aluminum foil, wrinkled fabric and pastry dough. In mid-seventies Welling worked with Polaroid and 4 × 5 cameras to create photograms and architectural views. He also worked on his Diary/Landscape series in which he paired abstracted Connecticut landscapes with pages of his great-great-grandparents’ diaries. This above work, from his 1986 series Degradés, is an abstract photogram made by exposing color photographic paper to various levels of light. In all of his works Welling filters the very tenets of photography, light, movement, and time, through his unique process, contributing to the continuous reevaluation of abstract photography." (http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/welling_james.php)

VMFA Submission. Friday. 11.13.

Shimon Attie Lecture. Wed. 11.11.

I really enjoyed the first works that Attie showed, the series from 1991 of the projections onto buildings. That work was effective in its emotional content. The layered messages of pre and post war and the changing government of Berlin at the time was all beautifully captured in these images.

The series of faces projected from underwater was very effective as well. Attie spoke a great deal about the fluidity of memory and the paradox between fluid vs. substantial. The way in which the water warped the portraits was very telling in the way people were changed by the times, by the war and by the horrors they experienced. The means of travel and escape over the water was extremely relevant to jews fleeing the country and immigration in general.

Viewing Attie's later works, the films, with their slow movement, gave me the feeling of being on tour in a natural history museum. The way the subjects were raised on platforms and slowly spinning was very much putting them on display, but it was not cold, or scientific the way we were allowed to view them; it was a tender experience. It's amazing that Attie was able to create that amount of emotion from such a studio influenced shoot, all the while not visibly tampering with the people or the situation beyond posing.

All of Attie's work is heavily steeped in the emotional and political climate of when it was made. The poetry that he displayed before showing the work from Aberfan and the Archaeology of the Racetrack was moving and complemented the work. The words he used to describe his work were telling of what he was communicating. Ethereal, visual, phenomenology, memory, layers, aging. All of these adjectives could easily be extracted from any one of the pieces he displayed. Even his method of showing his work, on a slide projector complemented the conceptual aspects of the pieces.

I love that he also used the word Glacial. You can view the image, and get something out of it and you can also investigate the image, there is so much beneath the surface.