Who are you? On a high school retreat, we paired off with a partner and were asked to write 1) how we perceive ourselves, 2) how we think others perceive us, and then our partner would write how they actually perceived us. Needless to say, these descriptions were not identical. It is safe to say that, though there are generalizations about us on which everyone would agree, we are perceived differently by each individual with whom we come in contact. So, in addition to working on our inner selves, we must also work on our public relations or no one will ever know who we really are.
When we meet someone, we size them up without thinking. We take in their clothing, their hairstyle, their general appearance and demeanor, their stance, their speech, their sexuality, even the shape of the muscles on their face which tells us what mood they're in and how their facial habits have affected their affect. We can sense if someone is an angry person, a joyous person, a serene person, an anxious person, and we approach them and treat them as such without any consciousness of it. There are people who draw us in and people who push us away.
I am reminded of this as I think about the way in which I think my co-workers would describe me. I think my boss would think that I am absent-minded and flighty. The people I used to supervise would see me as self-assured and implacable, even in the tensest situations. People in other departments might see me as quiet and thoughtful. My current co-workers would know me as creative and friendly.
I am all of these things, but if I were to write a description of myself, these are not the things on which I would focus. How do I want you to know me? I am a person who feels very intensely his own presence. I am living consciously and celebrating each moment I'm alive. Even when there's pain, I am thankful for being able to experience it, thankful of having the human experience of it. (Don't get me wrong - I'm thankful for pain relievers too!) I feel the connection between all things, and understand that all I know about matter is what I can perceive with my senses. I think there is more to reality than what we can sense. I feel that the arts are a way to transcend the prison that our mind and senses create. In making art, music, dance, writing, we are allowed to take what is otherwise un-sayable in our minds and give it manifest form. When we do this, we allow others into our minds and can more fully share our experience of being human.
If you were to listen to some of my songs, read some of my stories, or sit with some of my paintings, you might get a better sense of who I am than I could ever tell you. When we visit museums, we don't get descriptions of painters' day-to-day existences, we get the nuances of their souls. If a painting is good, it's because you know how the painter felt making it. And better still, how they felt about life - what it was like in their mind. If you looked through my oeuvre, you would see a mind that has never been at rest, a mind that has had explosions of energy and emotion, a mind that saw the world with new eyes every day. This is what I want you to know about me. That I am not a static, describable being - none of us are. I am a process that has continued for almost 49 years and continues to unfold every day. You can never know me, you can only know what I have affected.
So our identity is defined by what we affect. Like with the energy that we call light, we can't see it, we can only see its effect on matter. Our self-consciousness is built by the reactions we see in other people. We cannot judge any action good or bad without the reactions of others. We see negative reactions and we may change the way we act. We see positive reactions and we may repeat whatever action brought it about. From the time we are little, we are constantly seeing ourselves mirrored in other people's eyes and building the thing we call personality. We are an accumulation of all the reactions we've gotten. We think we can choose who we are, but we are largely a series of forks in the road - good reaction, one way; bad reaction, another way. It's why no two personalities are the same. They diverge as soon as we take our first action and then follow their own unrepeatable route.
I'm picturing an infinite game of Pachinko, where God drops a chip and it plinks and plunks its way down the pins of our lives, sometimes bouncing left, sometimes right, ending up making a path that is uniquely ours, and no other can follow it in the same way. Where our chip is dropped is our genetic predisposition for certain things, but where we go from there is a zillion decisions of right or left, yes or no, and random bounces based on where we've been so far.
Who am I? It is impossible to say. But you are invited to watch which way I bounce.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Monday, February 13, 2012
Discovering Color
A funny thing happened to me on the way to the canvas ...
Actually, my painting style has gone through so many changes (as have I) through the years that one can hardly keep track. As far as galleries are concerned this is artistic suicide. Most galleries want artists who have a signature style that they do well and can keep producing in the same vein. But I am a complex organism, not a machine, and so my output changes as I change in the world.
For our new CD, "Dreamtown," my co-writer, Bob Elliott, asked me to look through some old paintings to see if we could find any images to use. He talked about some figures I had done in trippy colors. I looked at what I had been doing recently and realized that I was not painting in trippy colors anymore. I was painting in perfectly sane colors - true to life colors. Colors that were appropriate to the color and intensity of the light from the sky. This had not always been the case.
When I started unrolling some of those old paintings, I was a little startled. They were done in my manic phases where the paintings weren't so much about subject as they were about paint! They were explosions of color - very expressionistic. I was obviously feeling intense feelings while I painted and exploring my emotional attachment to all the various colors. There was hardly a color that I did not use.
Then, I went through my MFA program and really learned to paint all over again. First, I limited my palette. Gone were the intense cadmiums and cobalts and quinacridones. I started looking at Rembrandt, and noticed the almost complete lack of any bright color. He used basically lead white, charcoal black, yellow ochre, raw sienna, burnt umber and a few others. He always worked on a dark toned ground. I found this appealing at the time. I took my landscape palette down to chromium green, Van Dyke brown, yellow ochre, venetian red, titanium white and maybe a little cerulean for skies, though most of my skies were gray made from Vandyke brown and white. There was such a balanced consistency to the whole scene. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we do not have a lot of bright blue skies, and gray and dark green are pretty much the extent of our natural palette. I've been living here for about 11 years, and I'm sure the lack of color has influenced my painting. Look at painting from Cuba or Ghana, or Jamaica and you will see a different palette. Look at Van Gogh in Arles and compare to his paintings in Holland. The light we live in affects our painting.
I had learned to harness color to make it do what I wanted. I had learned to limit color by graying it out with its complement. I had learned to portray the light of the Pacific Northwest. But that was not what was in my secret heart. I used to intentionally place bright complements next to each other for their vivid effect. If I saw a little blue in a shadow, I would intensify it to a deep ultramarine. I might see straw-colored grasses on a bright day as stripes of cad yellow and dioxazine purple, strewn with dots of cad red light and cad orange flowers. Everything screamed colors. That is what I noticed when I unrolled those old paintings.
And so I looked at what I was currently working on - some small 8x10 landscapes which were all very proper and unremarkable. I suddenly realized that no one needed to see these places I was painting. Who would care? It was just another tree among billions, another road, another mountain. My painting had become pedestrian. I exerted so much control over the light that they had lost the intense emotion that made me love paint in the first place. So the first thing I did was get rid of the blue sky. We've all seen enough blue skies in our life - I wanted to paint the sky vivid yellow - not just a sunset glow, but a happy yellow that had nothing to do with a color the sky could actually ever be. The light of the sky changes everything. So if this was the light from the sky, how did that affect the trees? The path? The meadow? So, just that suddenly, my painting style changed. I looked at everything as containing the colors of my emotions instead of the color of my eyes.
I went back in to several of the small works I'd been making and completely painted over everything, keeping the good compositions, but cranking the color knob to 11. Shadows were once again deep ultramarine and grasses, cadmium yellow. There were no more gray rocks, but blue or lavender ones. The ground was not longer neutral - it jumped out at you with a pink soil stabbed with ultramarine shadows and flecked with color. I realized that I had been a reporter, when I longed to be F. Scott Fitzgerald.
But now, I had left my manic tendencies behind and was in control of my painting again. Painting is manipulation, in a good way. I can not only force your mind to think of a tree where no tree exists, but I can force you to feel the feelings I want you to feel about that tree. Think of it - You can't look at a good picture of a tree and see it for what it really is - molecules of pigment which reflect certain wavelengths of light, arranged by the artist in a more-or-less two dimensional pattern - you see a tree! And yet there is no tree. You could see it on the moon, in the Sahara Desert or in the Antarctic and you would still think of a tree. The artist forces your mind. He creates thought patterns based on our life's experience of a tree.
And now, in addition to this manipulation of thought patterns, I am playing on all your life's associations with color. The tree can be red and blue and still you accept it as a tree. Yellow and red and blue light can play in the leaves and you may still see them as green. I don't have to report that leaves are green - we all know that. And I have learned my own color-connected emotional language. I know how an alizarin crimson is going to affect you as opposed to a naphthol red. I know when to use chromium green and when to use cadmium green. I know what emotions I connect with colors. It's like knowing when to use a minor chord to convey a slight sadness and when to use a minor 7th for a more serious color of sadness. Or a major 7 for dreaminess. Or a diminished chord for uncertainty. So a cadmium green is happy and optimistic, where an olive green (which is different mixes by different color makers) is subdued and sleepy. A chromium green is a strong adult, no-nonsense color, and a phthalo green is bossy. You can't just use every green in every painting or your head will explode with emotion. This is what I used to do. And that's what my head did.
Now I hope that I've learned enough about light, paint and color to manipulate the viewer in exactly the way I intend. I hope when you see a painted tree now, you will not only think of a tree, but you will understand exactly how I feel about that tree. You will understand why I had to paint that particular tree in a world full of trees. It's never really about a tree, it's about connecting what is inside of the artist to what is inside of the viewer. You can use a tree to do it, or you can use a figure to do it or you can just arrange color on a canvas to do it.
That is why abstract painting is hard for some people to do and hard for some people to look at. Amateurs think they can just splash paint around and call it an abstract painting, and they think this is what abstract painters do. But that is not unlike making a bunch of random utterances and calling it a language. Or making a bunch of unconnected noises and calling it music. Color is a language that has to be studied. The more you study, the more fluent you will be. You can write like a reporter, but you can also write like Marcel Proust. But you cannot write and you cannot read anything unless you know at least some of the language.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
On Disappointment
A friend asked for a few words about disappointment and my first thought was - what an odd word that is. "dis" is obviously a negative, but "appointment?" So, of course, I had to look up the etymology. And oddly enough, the original meaning of the word was to remove from appointed office. One was appointed, and then, presumably from doing a poor job, one was disappointed. My friend holds no public office, so I know he has no fear of disappointment in this way.
So, obviously, we are talking about the frustration of expectation. There are three kinds of disappointment: disappointment in one's self; disappointment in others; and disappointment in the way things are. If you never expect anything, you cannot experience any of these disappointments. But our brains are conditioned to expect things. That is how we plan.
Let's look at them one at a time. If we are disappointed in the way things are, irrespective of what anyone has done, then it is likely that we are experiencing a form of depression. If the universe just doesn't seem fair, if it has rained too many days, if you are not as tall as you'd like to be and somehow you are disappointed by this, then your brain chemicals may be imbalanced. The universe is not fair - it is a very neutral place where things are not set out just for you to be happy. You can find happiness in acceptance of this. Someone told me a Buddhist saying the other day: When things are good, they are good. And when things are bad, they are also good. We cannot expect anything from the universe or from God. We make life what it is. Accept the bad. Strive for the good. Another saying: To have more, desire less.
But somehow I don't think my friend was alluding to this kind of disappointment.
So, what about disappointment in others? We like to think that we are all on an equal playing field and that others will do what is best for everyone. But we all have unique brains built by our own experiences - so every one is different. Every brain has its own best interest at heart, or the best interest of its offspring. I experience disappointment when I see selfish actions which do harm to other people, but the brain always thinks it is taking care of itself. We have all gone through emotional injury in our lives, and our brains have all built defense mechanisms to prevent the injuries from occurring again. So, sometimes our brain works without our consent and does what it thinks is best for the individual without ever consulting us. So what can we expect from other people's brains? Unless we're talking about your mom's brain, we can't expect other people to try and make you happy. If you expect someone else to make you happy, you very well may be disappointed.
But I think what really matters is that which we can do something about: disappointment in ourselves. We want to be the best we can be. We want happiness. We want to achieve this and that. We want love. We want acceptance from others. We want recognition. Some want money. Some want fame. Some just want to please their parents. Let's look at that.
When you are an infant, you are a blank slate. You have never done anything to either please or displease anyone. But as you grow, you start making choices based on whatever feedback you get from your actions. Since no one but your parents chastises you, you at first only please or disappoint your parents. They want you to be a certain way and this is based on their own childhoods and the childhoods of their parents and so on back down the line. No parents come to Earth wholly made, unaffected by their own upbringing. We are all products of a long line of human evolution and things that may have happened generations ago are still affecting your relationship with your parents. They are deep and mostly unconscious things. We transfer what our parents expect of us to what we think we expect of ourselves.
And what can we expect of ourselves? We are in competition with everyone in our society. We mostly enter the world in a weak position. Most people do not come into the world with the proverbial silver spoon in their mouths. Those people probably are raised to expect a lot - and they get it. But the rest of us have to work our way upstream in life, against a torrent of limitations. We should first expect only that we will live, that we have the drive to continue eating and taking care not to get injured. In this, we are usually not disappointed. But then, we expect ourselves to do something called succeeding.
Another interesting etymology: to come after, or take the place of another. e.g. If Queen Elizabeth II should die, Prince Charles would succeed. Gosh, you'd think he was pretty successful already. But, again, back to our parents - to succeed in our parents eyes is to do better than they did. Our parents want this for us and so we think we want it for ourselves. In olden times, where your ancestors might have been peasant farmers, you might literally just follow after them, and that would be your success. But in modern times, our paths so often diverge from our parents' and how then do we measure success? How do I relate as a writer, musician, and artist to my fireman father? If I can take care of a family like he did, does that make me a success? I have no wife and no family - does that make me a failure? Not in my eyes. I have had to redefine success in my own terms, because the things I have come to value are different than the things my parents valued.
If we can divorce our own notion of success from our parents', we will more seldom be disappointed with ourselves. Of course, we can try things and fail, but if we tried our best, there's no reason for disappointment. If we did not try our best, we must look at the reasons why we were trying in the first place. Was it to please others? And disappointment is inextricably tied to the past. We cannot be disappointed with the present moment. In the present moment, everything just is. We can only be disappointed with the past, and the past is unchangeable. When we accept that fact, we learn a lesson about the past that can be applied to the future. There is always a lesson in disappointment. Take it with you or the disappointment will be without value. Be grateful for the failures as well as the successes. Be grateful that you are having the full range of human experience. It is a miracle that we think and feel at all.
Let us take a moment to step outside of our brains and look at them as observers. Our brain is an amazing machine, but much of what it does is automatic. Right now it is sending electric impulses to you heart to constrict and relax, pumping blood throughout your body. It is doing the same to your lungs to infuse that blood with oxygen which nourishes every cell. It is turning food into energy. It is making certain muscles and tendons constrict to hold your body in the position it's in. It is also storing nearly all of your life's experience. And it is making sense of some of the stimulus it collects through our senses. But somehow we think we are in control of it. For the most part, we do not use our brains - our brains use us. We can learn to control this amazing machine better by getting to know it.
When we experience a disappointment, we have to look at how our brain is processing that information. Disappointment makes us feel bad chemically based on experiences that we have had in the past which were negative. Our brains have pleasure centers which are stimulated chemically when things happen which are life affirming. These pleasure centers, when the brain is functioning properly, are constantly fed by neurotransmitters and our normal, waking state should be one of happiness and well-being. Of course, we do not always feel this. Some things threaten our sense of well-being. Our pleasure centers shut down and toxins from our environment and adrenaline are free to flood our bodies. We sometimes get rid of toxins by tears or vomit or sweat or urination or defecation. Sometimes we feel so threatened that our body goes into "fight, flight, or freeze" mode. Our automatic brain does the driving and we react "without thinking."
Awareness of the present moment and the miracle of consciousness can put all things in perspective. Before an event occurs is the time to think about disappointment. What will I feel like if I don't get that job? What will it feel like if I am rejected? What will it feel like to be laughed at? And why will I feel this way? How is this coming experience like that of my childhood? What do I expect of myself? If you act consciously instead of reacting unconsciously, you will seldom feel disappointment in yourself. That is the only disappointment that you have any control of. If you're disappointed with others or with the universe - get medicated and seek therapy. Focus on your expectations. Remember, to have more, desire less. Accept what is. Not just take, but embrace the bad with the good. You are insignificant to the universe, yet the whole universe dwells inside of you. Is the raindrop disappointed that it has to fall? That is its nature.
So, obviously, we are talking about the frustration of expectation. There are three kinds of disappointment: disappointment in one's self; disappointment in others; and disappointment in the way things are. If you never expect anything, you cannot experience any of these disappointments. But our brains are conditioned to expect things. That is how we plan.
Let's look at them one at a time. If we are disappointed in the way things are, irrespective of what anyone has done, then it is likely that we are experiencing a form of depression. If the universe just doesn't seem fair, if it has rained too many days, if you are not as tall as you'd like to be and somehow you are disappointed by this, then your brain chemicals may be imbalanced. The universe is not fair - it is a very neutral place where things are not set out just for you to be happy. You can find happiness in acceptance of this. Someone told me a Buddhist saying the other day: When things are good, they are good. And when things are bad, they are also good. We cannot expect anything from the universe or from God. We make life what it is. Accept the bad. Strive for the good. Another saying: To have more, desire less.
But somehow I don't think my friend was alluding to this kind of disappointment.
So, what about disappointment in others? We like to think that we are all on an equal playing field and that others will do what is best for everyone. But we all have unique brains built by our own experiences - so every one is different. Every brain has its own best interest at heart, or the best interest of its offspring. I experience disappointment when I see selfish actions which do harm to other people, but the brain always thinks it is taking care of itself. We have all gone through emotional injury in our lives, and our brains have all built defense mechanisms to prevent the injuries from occurring again. So, sometimes our brain works without our consent and does what it thinks is best for the individual without ever consulting us. So what can we expect from other people's brains? Unless we're talking about your mom's brain, we can't expect other people to try and make you happy. If you expect someone else to make you happy, you very well may be disappointed.
But I think what really matters is that which we can do something about: disappointment in ourselves. We want to be the best we can be. We want happiness. We want to achieve this and that. We want love. We want acceptance from others. We want recognition. Some want money. Some want fame. Some just want to please their parents. Let's look at that.
When you are an infant, you are a blank slate. You have never done anything to either please or displease anyone. But as you grow, you start making choices based on whatever feedback you get from your actions. Since no one but your parents chastises you, you at first only please or disappoint your parents. They want you to be a certain way and this is based on their own childhoods and the childhoods of their parents and so on back down the line. No parents come to Earth wholly made, unaffected by their own upbringing. We are all products of a long line of human evolution and things that may have happened generations ago are still affecting your relationship with your parents. They are deep and mostly unconscious things. We transfer what our parents expect of us to what we think we expect of ourselves.
And what can we expect of ourselves? We are in competition with everyone in our society. We mostly enter the world in a weak position. Most people do not come into the world with the proverbial silver spoon in their mouths. Those people probably are raised to expect a lot - and they get it. But the rest of us have to work our way upstream in life, against a torrent of limitations. We should first expect only that we will live, that we have the drive to continue eating and taking care not to get injured. In this, we are usually not disappointed. But then, we expect ourselves to do something called succeeding.
Another interesting etymology: to come after, or take the place of another. e.g. If Queen Elizabeth II should die, Prince Charles would succeed. Gosh, you'd think he was pretty successful already. But, again, back to our parents - to succeed in our parents eyes is to do better than they did. Our parents want this for us and so we think we want it for ourselves. In olden times, where your ancestors might have been peasant farmers, you might literally just follow after them, and that would be your success. But in modern times, our paths so often diverge from our parents' and how then do we measure success? How do I relate as a writer, musician, and artist to my fireman father? If I can take care of a family like he did, does that make me a success? I have no wife and no family - does that make me a failure? Not in my eyes. I have had to redefine success in my own terms, because the things I have come to value are different than the things my parents valued.
If we can divorce our own notion of success from our parents', we will more seldom be disappointed with ourselves. Of course, we can try things and fail, but if we tried our best, there's no reason for disappointment. If we did not try our best, we must look at the reasons why we were trying in the first place. Was it to please others? And disappointment is inextricably tied to the past. We cannot be disappointed with the present moment. In the present moment, everything just is. We can only be disappointed with the past, and the past is unchangeable. When we accept that fact, we learn a lesson about the past that can be applied to the future. There is always a lesson in disappointment. Take it with you or the disappointment will be without value. Be grateful for the failures as well as the successes. Be grateful that you are having the full range of human experience. It is a miracle that we think and feel at all.
Let us take a moment to step outside of our brains and look at them as observers. Our brain is an amazing machine, but much of what it does is automatic. Right now it is sending electric impulses to you heart to constrict and relax, pumping blood throughout your body. It is doing the same to your lungs to infuse that blood with oxygen which nourishes every cell. It is turning food into energy. It is making certain muscles and tendons constrict to hold your body in the position it's in. It is also storing nearly all of your life's experience. And it is making sense of some of the stimulus it collects through our senses. But somehow we think we are in control of it. For the most part, we do not use our brains - our brains use us. We can learn to control this amazing machine better by getting to know it.
When we experience a disappointment, we have to look at how our brain is processing that information. Disappointment makes us feel bad chemically based on experiences that we have had in the past which were negative. Our brains have pleasure centers which are stimulated chemically when things happen which are life affirming. These pleasure centers, when the brain is functioning properly, are constantly fed by neurotransmitters and our normal, waking state should be one of happiness and well-being. Of course, we do not always feel this. Some things threaten our sense of well-being. Our pleasure centers shut down and toxins from our environment and adrenaline are free to flood our bodies. We sometimes get rid of toxins by tears or vomit or sweat or urination or defecation. Sometimes we feel so threatened that our body goes into "fight, flight, or freeze" mode. Our automatic brain does the driving and we react "without thinking."
Awareness of the present moment and the miracle of consciousness can put all things in perspective. Before an event occurs is the time to think about disappointment. What will I feel like if I don't get that job? What will it feel like if I am rejected? What will it feel like to be laughed at? And why will I feel this way? How is this coming experience like that of my childhood? What do I expect of myself? If you act consciously instead of reacting unconsciously, you will seldom feel disappointment in yourself. That is the only disappointment that you have any control of. If you're disappointed with others or with the universe - get medicated and seek therapy. Focus on your expectations. Remember, to have more, desire less. Accept what is. Not just take, but embrace the bad with the good. You are insignificant to the universe, yet the whole universe dwells inside of you. Is the raindrop disappointed that it has to fall? That is its nature.
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