I had an incredibility liberating and empowering experience last night, inspired by Pat Allen. I allowed myself to give total free reign to my visual impulses, with absolutely no consideration of outcome or technique. Well, naturally my technique was informed by what I’ve already learned about Chinese brush painting, especially since I have so little other art experience. But what enabled this experience of abandon was impermanence. I went back to the old Buddha Board. And I just went crazy. Because I knew that everything I did would disappear. This lent me the sense of safety, of courage to explore, that I needed. The trick I played on my self is that I documented this process. I took eight photographs of my disappearing painting, as it changed, grew, shrank, evolved, became. And wow, I really got bold. I got into some of that coveted Pollack and de Kooning territory, and I have the pics to prove it! What a lovely experience, because as I think I’ve mentioned, there is something that has long spoken to me in Abstract Expressionism, it seems to encapsulate what “art” or, more precisely “being an artist” means to me. While there is a lot there regarding the context, the concept of “coolness” and so on, the fact remains that those paintings just speak to me, and I realize I’ve had an urge to create images like that, but have felt intimidated and inhibited. The combination of Pat Allen’s open, encouraging philosophy of image-making, with the temporary nature of the painting, gave me permission to just go for it. And I’m so glad I did. In fact, I’m beginning to think that an aspect I’d like to continue to explore is the photographic documentation of disappearing paintings. The juxtaposition of motion and stillness, product and process, solidity and impermanence, is very intriguing to me. And it feels very resonant with Taoism and Chan (Zen) Buddhism, bringing me back to traditional Chinese philosophies. Yes! Connecting modern western painting with traditional Chinese painting, and with photography, and with spiritual philosophies that emphasize the present moment and impermanence, this direction feels valuable and important to me. The paradox of capturing frozen moments of an ever-changing flow. This feels closely related to music as well. I’m interested in the ways that movement can be seen in painting, and here it becomes more literalized as I create changing, vanishing paintings, and photographically record the process of change and decay.

11/13/21

Incidentally, today is the one year anniversary of my mother’s death. More on that later.

As I begin Pat Allen’s book Art Is a Way of Knowing, I already know that I do not want to get lost in a sea of learning technique. I in no way mean to disparage the importance and value of technique and craft. And I fully understand a firm grasp of technique is essential to produce paintings in the Chinese tradition. I will continue to learn this craft, with the assistance of instructor and classmates, at a pace that works for me. But, as I read this book, I’m immediately lit up by the possibility of creating images that simply give expression to my inner voice, unfettered by outer expectations or frameworks, images that give voice to my soul. Yes, that words resonates powerfully for me, whether I can define it or not. I intend to make this sort of image-making central to my practice for this class. The media at least for now, and the starting point, are traditional Chinese tools and techniques, and I intend to treat them with the utmost respect, while also allowing myself to experiment, explore, and play. Everything in my life seems so regimented now, especially since starting this PhD program, I feel I’m always struggling to block out my time efficiently, and to absorb huge amounts of technical information. I don’t want my arts apprenticeship to become one more area where I have to absorb tons of information and subject myself to stress and measurement. I want this to be for me. I need this to be for me. And Allen’s mention of feeling that she “didn’t exist,” of feeling “split off from sunlight and laughter,” resonate all too well for me. I guess I hunger for embodiment and integration, and I’m hoping this arts exploration process can lead me down that path. Once upon a time perhaps music served this purpose, and maybe in some ways it can, but music is way too familiar, and way too fraught, to really give me what I need here. I want to experience the new, the novel, but safely. I really feel the need to be a child again, to be childlike, to approach a new thing with wonder and not trepidation. As an adult, and quite frankly, much of the time as a child, dread and anxiety were my prevalent emotions. Growing up as the child of two alcoholics, mostly raised by my single mom who struggled with multiple substance abuse disorders and psychiatric diagnoses, I learned at a very early age how unsafe the world can be, and my attempts to cope with this were centered around staying logical, organized, and in control. I guess I thought if I could just understand, I could be safe.

So, family crisis hits and two weeks go by with nary a brush stroke. As the dust clears, delayed assignments are handed in, and I pick myself up and get back in the race. I seem to have gone backwards, struggling with mixing ink correctly to get pale, yet clearly defined, grays for stems and flowers. A parallel experience seems to point to the folly of overemphasizing technique: Having noticed that my vocal range, once reaching the metallic stratosphere inhabited by adolescent favorites like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, has decreased, a combination of age and of simply not practicing the high end leading to the loss of a fourth (i.e. I once could hit an F5 and it had dropped down to a C5), I went down a bit of a rabbit hole of voice coach videos, and even less productively, of live recordings of various hard rock vocalists at various ages. Somewhere in there I began specifically practicing my current highest notes during my warmups before music therapy sessions, and somewhere I picked up a half step, then another half step. Fine, so after a month, I can hit a D5. But I recently realized this whole experience was not exactly “sparking joy,” but was rather about desperately grasping for the lost power of youth. Not entirely of course, and it’s never too late to develop good vocal technique. But it suddenly hit me I was not having fun by obsessing over technique. After listening to way too much metal shrieking, I had to cleanse my palate with a healthy dose of Tom Waits, with a Lou Reed chaser. The point? On a much simpler level, I find that worrying too much about the right way to paint orchid stems is a bit of a buzzkill. I want and value the foundation that basic technique offers, but I can’t let fear of not having the technique down stop me from “just painting.” That improv session a while back was by far the most generative thing I’ve done since I picked up the brush. I’m definitely going to return to that type of practice as I progress. In the mean time, I accept that I’m going to feel like a six-year-old whose parents just took off the training wheels of his bike. Buckle up folks, we’re in for a bumpy ride. But relax, you can’t hurt yourself painting.

OK, well, yesterday I finally made my first “real” painting, following a class exercise to paint a simple orchid plant with leaves and flowers. The instructor is informed largely by a manual called The Mustard Seed Garden, which offers a number of “rules” for Chinese painting. The interesting thing is that, despite the use of certain conventions and restrictions, not unlike Western renaissance painting notions about perspective and so on, this approach to Chinese painting allows for quite a bit of freedom. In an exercise like this one, the instructor encourages students to choose for themselves where and how many leaves and blossoms to put in, while remaining within the “rules.” So, don’t have more than two leaves intersect; don’t have leaves intersect at an exact 90 degree angle. But put them where you see fit.. Put in however many feels right. Interestingly and amusingly, this for me evoked, of all things, Bob Ross. As someone who always felt uncomfortable in, and thus grew to really dislike, art class in elementary school, one of the strangely positive experiences around art-making that I had, however indirect, was watching Bob Ross’s painting show on PBS TV. The nurturing, nonjudgmental, calm atmosphere that Bob created, his ideas about “happy accidents,” or, after painting a tree or bush, putting in another on a whim after saying “….and we’re gonna give him a little friend,” almost made me want to paint. This was in stark contrast with my perception of painters from Kandinsky to Matisse to Pollack as lofty, rarefied, hypertalented, Artists with a capital “A,” toiling away in attic studios driven only by their own internal genius, releasing their work to inspire the fawning – or scathing – reactions of critics, leaving others to struggle to project meaning onto their work. I perceived the “real” art world as incredibly “cool” and totally unreachable. I loved looking at paintings, and, when I had the opportunity, talking to painters I knew personally, admiring both their work and their inspiringly messy studio spaces filled with unfamiliar intoxicating colors and smells. Anyway, Chinese painting seemed, and seems, far from either of these visions of what painting is about, and seems to offer a pathway through into a different world, free from either the welcoming kitschiness of Bob Ross or the seductive bohemianism of, say, abstract expressionism.

My brain feels fried. A constant bath of stress hormones, amygdala on red alert 24 x 7 even though nothings wrong nothingswrong everythingswrong? Strands of trauma tentacles seething through neuron soup, feelingsarentfacts but you know this is what is happening you feel it now what even is it?

Somehow trying to tie all the loose ends of school and life and work (or lack thereof) together under the umbrella of global compassion fatigue, days blending into nights blending into days blending into knights blending into spending into spent. Time spent. Money spent. Energy, gone. We’re all gone, we’re all real gone, man. Grief rattles under the surface of everything. Personal. Political. Polygonal.

I can’t keep it all together. I can haz cheezburger? What even is this? It’ll all come out in the wash. Plaintive poignant pensive prehensile utencil. Ink hits brush. Brush hits paper.

I’ve been avoiding painting for days on end. In desperation, I decided to completely turn my practice on its side and just improvise while listening to music. Fusion guitarist Dave Fiuczynski’s Planet Microjam, a collection of dense, frenetic, microtonal distorted electric jazz guitar that has always resonated for me as an epitome of defiant and authentic artistic expression that takes multiple listens to truly appreciate. Here is what I painted, allowing myself to be in the music, be moved by the music, and to really drill down into exploring the texture and feel of the brush and the many deeply varied ways this texture shows up through the ink on the paper. Some foggy and dreamy, others sharp and piercing, some rough and jagged, others smoothly transitioning from dark to light. I really really like what I’ve created here. Although part of me was observing myself and thinking how cliched and pretentious I was to be madly painting abstractly to “challenging” jazz, it actually felt wonderful. I felt myself get into the flow of it for brief moments, which were blissful, but even when quite self-conscious, I still got a huge amount of enjoyment out of this experience I’d created for myself, loving both the idea and the execution of improvisatory abstract painting to jazz, and at the same time, very much appreciating the unique qualities of this particular medium, Chinese ink and brush on rice paper.

“Beginning is often the hardest part. I often urge clients or students to just begin even if they don’t know what to do. This is like diving off a cliff for some. What does it mean to just begin? How does one just simply engage in beginning? These are not easy questions to answer, but as Rilke urged us, we must stay with the questions themselves because, as he says, one day we might learn how to actually live them.” – Mitchell Kossak

I had a bit of a revelation today. I realized that I actually need to indulge my desire to paint freely in an improvisatory fashion. Doing this seems to get me into a deeply meditative, contemplative, “flow” state. The brilliant thing here is that I can do this using the magic cloth. It allows me also to really play around and discover how a Chinese brush works, to learn the ins and outs of what it can do, without worrying about either “wasting” supplies or creating a product that isn’t “good enough.” The product disappears, the process is central. While I understand that a big part of the point here for me is to learn to embrace creating “product,” at this point, I’ve come to realize it’s immersion in the process that has to come first. And there will always be room to “improvise” and to “flow.” I’m learning a form, but that doesn’t mean I can’t play with it.

Well, I finally bit the bullet and tried working with ink. On actual paper no less. There are a number of forms of ink delivery used in Chinese brush painting these days, and I’ve opted as a beginner for an ink cake. It’s a solid block of ink that can be activated with a wet brush. Simple and not too messy. I just practiced a few brushstrokes, and I can see I still have much to learn about how to use this medium, and that’s just working with black ink. I haven’t even begun to think about colors yet. Whew. Even just writing these few lines is anxiety-provoking. I’m quite activated in a positive way as well, but learning a visual art is surely pushing a lot of my buttons. I feel awkward and self-conscious. And yet I also feel as if I’m at the precipice of a universe of possibility. There’s exhilaration here, not just terror. This is definitely not my “comfort zone.” I’m reminded of a cartoon in which an extroverted person tells an introverted person, “You need to get out of your comfort zone.” To which the introvert replies “I’m never in my comfort zone. I’m literally always uncomfortable.” Remembering this always makes me laugh, because it hits home but in a playful way. As a musician, I’m enjoying the feeling of looking at a static product I’ve produced. Listening to a recording is not at all the same. And yet the process of making a painting (or at this point, practicing brush strokes) feels quite embodied to me. If I let myself go, I can start to feel in the flow as I paint. In fact, I really really want to play around and improvise in this medium. That thought excites me more than learning to paint orchids or bamboo. Although there is an appeal to that too. Medieval Chinese landscape paintings are what drew me to this form in the first place. But I’m also intrigued at the way some modern artists seem to play with it. At the most basic level, though, just the incredible variation of texture and shading that is possible with just black ink, intrigues and astounds me. My eye is especially drawn to thick brush strokes that form a “gradient” of light to dark from one side of the stroke to the other. And now I’ve made a couple of these! I can really see and feel the water in these brush strokes.

I’m still just working with the “magic cloth,” but today felt like a major step, as I followed along with one of Henry Li’s recorded zoom lessons, just getting comfortable with making some basic lines and shapes and practicing various brush strokes. I’m already finding that I’m feeling more comfortable and confident with the fluidity of this style of painting, versus what little experience I’ve had with western style painting and drawing. Not only does the feel and appearance of the technique resonate with me aesthetically on a visceral level, but I found practicing along with the instructor and students in the video to instill me with a sense of calm and groundedness. I’m going to tread lightly and hold myself gently, and resist the urge to chastise myself for not yet “jumping in” with actual ink and paper just yet. Although it’s easy for me to compare these “baby steps” unfavorably with the advanced work and finished product of others, in truth I’m quite pleased with my initial attempts at a house, a yin-yang symbol, and a grouping of rocks:

OK, so I’ve finally broken through my resistance enough to begin practicing brushstrokes, with the help of Anita Yan Wong’s tutorial. Using water and the “magic cloth” though, not quite ready for ink, but hopefully tomorrow! It was an enlightening and very humbling experience, but I’m so glad I’ve begun in earnest. I feel like this is going to be a deeply transformative learning experience. I’ve long felt a disconnect with my embodiment, particularly around tasks that involve hand-eye coordination. In fact I’ve for a while suspected I struggle with undiagnosed dyspraxia; learning to paint may well prove quite therapeutic in that regard. As little as I’ve “done” today, it feels like a profound experience and the beginning a new phase.

Well, I finally went ahead and ordered some basic supplies for Chinese brush painting. I’ve been delaying really jumping in with this. I guess I’m feeling a lot of resistance because it’s pretty scary to really commit to a new art form and take it seriously. It’s already September 12, and I’m not sure how long my supplies will take to get here. However, I’m also going to start Henry Li’s courses, I’ll probably register for 6 months of access. I do have my Buddha Board which actually can be useful for beginner learning. And of course, everything disappears, so that’s a big plus! Hopefully this process will have some kind of positive impact on my overall well-being as a creative artist, a clinician, and of course, as a researcher.