Letter to a Realist Painter

“Thank you for your thoughts and appreciation of the composition and transcendent depth of my work. Your experience summering on Monhegan would be very helpful when I get to that dreamed of location to work and breathe in more of the mysteries of Maine island nature. My short answer to your question on “seeing” is yes…most people assume perception happens through the outer physical senses alone and only recognize conditioned forms in matter as reality. Our attachment to familiar physical forms and the physical aspect of our own body, while giving us a framework to endeavor in and sustain life, binds us deeply to a limited human identity and existence where experiences of outer forms as exclusively separate and finite dominate our conception of both space and matter. This same deep attachment to what is known through the physical senses and past preconceptions also limits our potential for human advancement and an evolving understanding and experience of nature and the self. It is like a budget we have agreed to adhere to and uphold.  We can allow the budget to become our reality and limit us, but it is only intended as a baseline structure and reference point for anchoring our experience; an originating point of expression, and never meant to become the totality of our experience and potential. Failing to successfully navigate beyond the material, like failing to meet a budget, is due to an inability to see beyond it, and to see beyond it requires courage and confidence that there is more, and the will and discipline to evolve our inner capacity to access it. True perception emerges through the devoted cultivation of both inner and outer sensory systems.  It requires an approach to seeing which realizes the outer eye, while capable of receiving impressions of conditioned physical forms, is limited and when we go deeper within ourselves, we will discover a more refined instrument for experiencing the totality of our existence and human potential.

I am not saying how you see forms is wrong. When I begged you to leave the forms on your canvas less bound by detail, and you laughed at its “unfinished” state, I was only asking you to consider painting what is happening in the space and not just the forms.  But that is my perspective, and I appreciate that we are each working within the scope of our purpose and will expand according to what is needed to serve our highest self and others. You are an accomplished realist painter with a very aware relationship to color and its effects on the emotions. There remains great service in portraying the Light in its most dense and familiar forms. With the mountains of suffering, challenge and conflict we face in this period of global transformation, any artistic attempts to elevate the known material and depict what is in many cases either a violent or toxic and tired nature as pure, vibrant and richly colored can be very healing for our stressed human minds and bodies. Your work will continue to have meaning for many, and your sensitive representations of color, especially muted pine greens and sunset purples will always refresh me.  

You admitted being somewhat confounded when trying to label my work and felt it most closely resembled abstraction. Abstraction has a very specific role in art and while my work may seem to encompass it, it goes further, something I will explain later. Consciously or unconsciously abstraction is an expression of painters and sculptors rendered through a process of creative imagination in which the mind seeks to go beyond conditioned forms into the realm where matter is yet unmanifest as the structures we perceive with the physical senses. They are impressions of the unharnessed elemental energies and forces of life before coming into or after dissolving out of material form.  They are expressions of energy freed from its preconceived structures and whose intricate disorder helps free our own minds’ attachment and exclusive connection to familiar conditioned forms. The chaos of primordial soup becomes their perspective of reality and it serves as a liberating, chain-breaking form of art.

Let me put it another way…modern Realism and Hyper-Realism may elevate our experience of known forms or give us an opportunity to reconsider what we are attached to, but remain rooted in conditioned forms, and any attempts at referencing a more infinite connection within material forms while emotionally compelling may easily be discounted as a figment of the artist’s imagination. Abstract Artists portray the opposite extreme; an unmanifest mass of energies and forces that draw viewers out of the material context entirely, but also leaves them there. It is important that abstract artists continue their work as well, as I believe they support our minds’ opening by making greater space for an experience of reality that is more than familiar, finite physical forms.  However, while abstraction cuts the cord of our conditioned experience, it does not rise from a perception given to see and express how life energy evolves in infinite forms and multiple dimensions of subtly networked planes of existence between those points before birth into form and post-dissolution. That is the subtle interfacing space where my work begins; where unfamiliar interpretations of nature reveal a new networked order and give some harmonizing structure and light to the unknown, seemingly unbound complexity and chaos of a rapidly expanding future. 

NOW to address your candid comment that apart from mine, you see most photographic attempts at abstraction as lacking depth while abstract painting and sculpture, although left brain challenging, can be deeply engaging and plant the seeds of profound impact. I recently heard a very relevant quote of Isadora Duncan where in her own exploration of dance as an art form she believed it was essential that we “be natural” in reference to nature and our own nature “not an imitation” or a contrived expression which panders to an established market demand. One of the dancers in the company who had studied Isadora’s thoughts and movement for over a decade explained that she would say, find your connection through nature to an understanding of what you are uniquely here to perceive and translate as part of humanity’s unfoldment. It was a message whose movement was perfectly synchronized with my own awareness. At its fundamental roots photography is a reflection of the material, so as an art form it can try to imitate abstract painting and sculpture, but it does not usually have the same depth because it is not tapping into that subtle more primordial space which other artists do when they are not bound by what is in front of them. So why does my work feel different? As humans we have an innate desire to constantly evolve, so we cannot live in abstraction forever or in the limited physical world of the outer senses.  There is more to nature and our human nature than the subjects and objects we are familiar with, and also more than the elemental forces which give birth to matter in form. There are more varied densities of creation in the vast universe between what we identify as Earth and the Source of primordial energy, and I have found with devoted discipline, a meditatively refined inner perception can exceed the scope of the physical eye and access an experience of a more unlimited reality.  I have found a multidimensional universally networked existence where subtle and dense forms and planes overlap and intercommunicate, and inscriptions and portraits of this more unbound reality exist everywhere in Nature waiting to be discovered. Whatever powers and potentialities we theorize exist in the vast expanses of the universe also exist in the space of nature surrounding us and interwoven in the very fabric of our being, even in what we ourselves project as co-creators in the process of manifestation. What is concealed to the conditioned outer senses is more apparent to their inner counterparts, and the camera, like the brush or chisel serve the awareness of the artist who wields it, is as limited or unlimited as the mind of the photographer who holds it. Instead of photography trying to document known conditions and forms or trying to imitate abstract paintings in closeup images blown up to 60” by 60” prints, its future value and true contribution as an art form lies in how it can uniquely support an evolving inner perception of nature and the self. Its gift to humanity is not only in the silver radiance its early alchemical development showered upon us, but the radiant and more unbound experience it has the potential to make tangible.  Photography will find its true purpose where beyond an ocean of I-phone images, documentation, socio-political storytelling, and imagined tech facilitated surreal, hyper-real and abstract explorations, there will emerge more transformational photography that walks us through portals of nature into a more potentiated world of integrated dimensions and infinite beings and forms, in a way that is harmonizing, elevating and teeming with the seeds of new understanding and awareness. 

Where abstraction continues to help break the boundaries of the mind, photography will realize its capacity for tangibly opening wider the door to the vast dimensions which coexist in a convergent reality between primordial non-material energies and the dense physical plane which we have defined as finite, exclusive and separate. This is the path I follow and serve in my own work.  As you observed, my work can draw viewers into a greater depth of experience than most photographic attempts at abstraction because it is not abstract. It embodies tangible impressions of a subtly entwined convergent reality in Nature which delivers an experience not of what is imagined, but what tangibly exists beyond the ordinary frame of the conditioned eye. It can evoke a depth of feeling that unlike works that resonate solely on a physical or emotional level, it rings natural and true, even if unfamiliar, and connects with a part of ourselves a greater wholeness of being we may not yet be aware of. As humans, we all want to expand and advance in more ways than just technologically. We want to know there is more to this world and more to ourselves to discover. My images are like signposts pointing where to look; the tangible notes of one who has taken a few steps ahead, following the Light into unknown dimensions of Nature and the self, and the more infinite, universally networked potential that waits to be accessed and refined within us.

Realism is an art of limited forms. Abstraction is an art of unbound elemental energetic flow, as imagined in the mind. Photography can operate in either of these realms of expression, but it can also portray a very uniquely integrative experience in that it can in the same moment in time both reflect and transcend known forms of matter and reconfigure our conception of time and space itself.  In photographic images we can explore more unlimited dimensions of being from the point of our own physical nature and human bodies. Without having to discard them we can be liberated from the limits of conditioned form, if the photographic artist has liberated their own capacity to see.  Photography’s dimensions and reach are more flexible than any other art form.  It is and will remain a medium of the tangible, but what is “tangible” evolving with the perception of the photographer and the technology of digital capture and development. It can portray conditioned forms, it can use the imagination and the power of technological tools to create imaginary or abstract impressions, but “real photography” will evolve as a process of refining the self and our own capacity of perception to see and project more expansive dimensions which transcend the known boundaries and capacity of forms in matter.  Ansel Adams was very clear on this point and insisted his work was never abstract rather a collection of tangible “extracts“ of his perceived reality. Minor White and Paul Caponigro would go further and say their efforts were to portray manifestations of spirit, and I respectfully consider their work as early attempts at accessing and projecting a more multidimensional experience of the infinite within the finite. As my work continues along that line of endeavor, it is not meant to mirror the chaos of abstraction as a way of breaking our attachments to known forms, but to illuminate a network of infinite creation between the immaterial primordial forces operating in the universe and the known forms we associate with physical reality. My work emerges where abstraction and realism converge in a new tangible and more wholly integrated experience of Nature.  

We are looking at a future where we will colonize other planets, work on the moon, and have to integrate the experience of many new forms and phenomena along the way.  To pursue this future with sustainable energy, confidence and stability, we need resources which help prepare our minds for a more expanded and unbound experience of Nature and the nature of the self as multidimensional and universally networked. We need art which challenges our preconceptions and frees humanity from the limits of our past conditioned identity, ideas and perception; art that bridges abstract images and past conditioned realism with a tangible convergent realism where we can experience known forms as portals through which we may transcend past limits and fearlessly and peacefully explore a wider realm of possibility and human potential.  It is no longer enough to break the limits of conditioned forms or to recall in art an increasingly lost but innate beauty in known forms.  It must offer viewers an opportunity to participate as co-explorers in the discovery of new capacities and expanded experiences of nature and our own human nature.  Art must nurture a tangible experience of a greater, more unlimited totality, and photography has the potential to make a uniquely empowered contribution toward that end.

Until we meet again, may your work in bringing light into known forms through energized colorization continue with great success, trying to do it in such a way that however beautiful, it does not distort or discolor the totality of our existence. May all who endeavor through art to carry Light into this transitional grey period of existence never doubt the effect of their efforts.  May we skillfully, fearlessly and courageously fulfill our responsibility not only to create (everyone creates), but to create in a way that expands humanity’s curiosity, awareness and capacity.  If we relate to ourselves properly, not clinging to our label as artists; if we are relentless in seeking to discover more of ourselves not just more about our art forms, what we create will be more than cultural entertainment. It will ease the fires of anxiety, neurosis, aggression and ignorance and facilitate a clearer perception of the phenomenal world, because we have practiced cultivating that state and opening our sense perception before we even pick up a brush or camera.  When we learn to surrender our connections to conditioned forms and root ideas while remaining in the shadow of their presence, we will become part of an army of gatekeepers opening new doorways to a more potentiated future. If art resonates with that frequency and intent; if it projects an awareness of revolutionary totality, even where people have to reach with some strain to grasp it, it will be a part of refining, uplifting, and expanding the minds of humanity and the experience of a whole civilization. Then wherever we expand our human presence in space, what we build upon will be a harmonizing foundation which has transcended conflict through a greater working knowledge of our multidimensional, universally networked nature.

REGARDS IN LIGHT, DAG”