The East Village of the Mind

Yesterday, I decided to indulge and give expression to my inner voice without thinking about technique or subject. My only objective was to somehow contact the energy that the New York School of abstract expressionism seems to elicit in me. I found a Spotify playlist called “Jackson Pollock,” which really was just a bunch of 50s bebop, and started it at John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” and just began painting. My initial intention was to make an abstract painting, but as the music played, images of an idealized East Village that exists now only in my mind, if it ever did once exist in physical reality, kept coming into my head. I started with black ink, and began making lines, which began to take shape as buildings. I made strokes and held the brush as I’ve learned to do in traditional Chinese painting, but the landscape that took shape was New York all the way. I let go of inner judgments that what I was doing might look “childish” and really allowed the music, and the interior energy of “boho East Village painter” flow through me. I’m very happy with the end result; my wife was a bit surprised at the harshness she saw in it, and called it “gritty” which actually pleased me tremendously. Although it looks quite different, the impressionistic cityscape for me rather evokes the work of Romare Bearden. I’m still trying to figure out where I’m going, and why, but this direction feels right. As much as I yearn for soothing pastoral beauty, I also long for the hard, gritty, edgy urban intensity that surfaced in this painting. I’ll continue to work with this tension. It forms an interesting parallel with the tension I’m feeling between structure and formlessless in terms of technique and approach, in that here, I threw technique to the wind, but the subject matter itself was structured, meticulously constructed objects, namely buildings, street lights, fire escapes, water towers; whereas on the flipside I’ve been making paintings following the strictures of traditional technique but with subject matter that is itself free-flowing and natural, i.e. plants and flowers. The theme of liberation and freedom seems to be recurring to me, and while that has old and deep roots in my life, it most certainly feels connected to my recent interest in disability activism and research that is informed by it. Even the emergence of qualities I associate with Bearden, an African-American painter working in the troubled 20^th century (as opposed to the troubled 21^st century I suppose), feels connected, an expression of solidarity with other marginalized groups, and perhaps an echo of the fact that the unprecedented activity and visibility of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 was one of the forces that helped inspire me to become more involved in disability activism and in fact to apply to PhD programs with an intention to research disability issues within my own field.