This summer I studied with Santa Fe-based painter and teacher Jakki Koufman. She was offering a studio critique and over a period of weeks I was able to bring in paintings for her thoughtful evaluations. It was helpful and expanding to listen in on her conversations with each of the other participants. But it was even more helpful to be encouraged to become more articulate about my own work.

She used Hans Hoffman’s metaphor of “push/pull” to characterize the dynamism in my paintings. Hoffman developed his theory as an alternative to classical understandings of perspective. He described the role of color relationships in pulling the eye into or pushing it out from the pictorial plane, and the tension among marks that moves the eye through the painting and beyond its borders.

This gave me a new vocabulary for something I had been doing intentionally but was unable to adequately describe. I have been exploring for years the edge between marks that are strong and call attention to themselves, and the integrity of the visual image as a whole. This edge is for me the place where the most life and energy become available to (or through) the image.

When one of my paintings “works” for me, its drawing or color threatens to fly apart, to become so agitated as to be incoherent. Edges are violated or ignored; bright colors recede as dark neutrals push forward; the object dissolves into its atmosphere; distortions become almost caricatures. But there is always a stronger force holding it together—the inner logic of the relationships among the marks that capture or describe the relationships I experience in the visible world.

The purpose of this captured energy is an experience of a two-dimensional surface as living volume. Not as an illusion of space or three-dimensionality—although that can happen as a by-product—but as a coherent form imbued with the inner light that allows it to be encountered as living and real by another.

This for me is the correct meaning of realism, the realism of the 12th century Romanesque sculptors who captured and conveyed the inner light of their world, rather than slavishly copying its outer appearances. It is the realism of Giotto’s saints, Grunewald’s crucifixions, Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pieta. It is the source of Leo Marchutz’s visual brilliance, gleaned from his close study of Cezanne.

For this reason, I don’t think of my lineage as Post-Impressionist or Expressionist, although the painters associated with those schools offer a visual language with which I feel a kinship. For me, the lineage represents an unbroken line from cave paintings to the present, a tradition that has always sought to render the spiritual or energetic reality behind the manifest world.

Shortly after I posted my last blog entry, I received the following letter from Sam Bjorklund, my teacher at the Leo Marchutz School in Aix-en-Provence and an extraordinary painter. In it, he expands on the role of “presence” in his own artistic process. (For more on Sam, visit his website at http://web.me.com/bluemonk2/Site/S.B._FINE_ART_WELCOME.html)

Dear Ben,

Interestingly you speak of ‘meditation’, and being present. This is a practice that has been a part of my life for many years. Slowly I think they are beginning to blend into a state that is mine and guides my work, my working sessions. I have pretty much given up taking on projects, tasks or challenges. Rather I am finding that if I can create the open space, the subject will find me, and more often than not, the ‘how to’. It is very much a process of letting go. I look back and look at all the things I had to ‘fight’ with, and realize that the only real moments of success had little to do with me. Moments of grace where somehow I was not in the way of things happening.

I also remember a statement I found in the chicken coops of Leo’s house at Chateau Noir written by an architect friend of his. The thrust was that Leo should have no concern with the finished product, with the end. That his only job was to stay present and devote himself to the good of the work at hand, the process. This was something with which I struggled for many years, always hoping for results that could justify the hard work and to a certain degree suffering that went into the whole task. In other words, what could satisfy my poor insatiable ego.

That was a lot of years ago, and I still find it the principal concern. I do believe I have made progress, but then I am not sure about anything at this point, because whenever my mind creeps in I have learned that I must distrust it, not believe a word it says.

What you write about time, and what you are after in the moment of work, takes me to lines in the Four Quartets about how evasive time is, how the present contains the past and the future. I have had moments in my work, or rather periods or phases of my work, where I seemed to be floating in a space that contained no time. At those moments there seems not to be room for error, because I don’t seem to be doing much, just standing there recording something, some correlation between the colors on my palette, what is in front of my eyes, and the canvas or paper. I was able to find that most readily in the watercolors of many years ago. And more recently in oils where I sink into a work and a state of working where I really don’t seem to be part of it, just sure that something in me knows exactly what to do from one stroke to the next.

This happened at a point for me in Memphis back in the 80s, and recently I have found it again in my studio in Florida, working, strangely enough, from a photograph. I guess it is the trance you speak of. But it is full of assurance – the absence of doubt, of struggle. And it can carry on over days, weeks and even months if I don’t get distracted. More and more I find an increased dependence upon meditation not only before the work, but constant, ongoing. Flannery O’Connor called it the “habit of Art.” I would say, the habit of simply being present not only in the moment but in the work.

My process has changed. It used to be short, quick. Watercolors from less than an hour to maximum a couple hours. Oils, if they were to ‘work’, were a single session of from an hour to a few hours, on rare occasions maybe a long 5 or 6 hour session (exhausting, those). Now there is just putting in some time on a single painting, getting present. There is not really a beginning and not an end.

What seems important, I’ve found, is that each session end on an up stroke. I mean at a point where I feel deep inside that it is going well and could maybe go like that for a long time. I’m in the state, but it’s time to go. Just so I don’t end in a sentiment of frustration or struggle. Rather grace. Never look back at the painting, don’t look at it between sessions. Then I can easily come back, sit quietly in front of it a moment and be right back in the flow. I think I got this many years ago from reading Hemingway’s Moveable Feast where he describes writing in the cafes of Paris. How he would always quit when it was going well, so he felt anxious to get back the next day.

S

I use the term “all-at-onceness” to describe a quality I am always trying to capture in painting. All-at-onceness is related to the experience of seeing something—really seeing it—in the present moment, whole, unmediated and without deliberation. The idea is inherently paradoxical: an experience so completely in present time that it is outside of time. This is what I am trying to produce, images so immediate that they operate outside of time.

This demands a concentrated working process. In my case, I have to work very rapidly if I am to sustain a state of altered awareness (or trance as I usually think of it) where I have no experience of time. This is like a meditation practice, though more active.

The approach is related to “alla prima” painting, where oil painters apply wet paint over wet paint to complete a painting in a single session. Alla prima painting was central to the practice of the Impressionists, especially Monet, who sought to capture the qualities of light operating at a particular time of day. For me it reached one of its highest expressions in the work of van Gogh, who painted two masterpieces a day during the last period of his life, working in a state of heightened concentration and perception that is difficult for me to imagine.

All-at-onceness is also, I imagine, related to Asian practices of calligraphy and Sumi painting, where the painter hones the instruments of body and mind to allow essence (or, perhaps, absence) to be transmitted unimpeded.

My primary influence was Leo Marchutz, who dedicated himself to extending the discoveries of Cezanne’s late work, especially the watercolors. Leo was able to capture with a few gestures an entire world, spiritual and outside of time, illuminated by an inner light. I have neither his temperament nor his restraint, but his work seeded in me a faith that painting could still serve a spiritual function for both painter and viewer.

“Did you write a blog about it?” Well, uh, no.

“Well at least you got some photos didn’t you?!?” Um, well, not really…

Lisa was quizzing me about my three week visit to Republic in the remote Upper Peninsula of northern Michigan. I had been telling her about the strawberry Jell-O we made and her journalistic instincts got the better of her. “That’s so cool,” she told me.

On my insistence, several of us had gone to pick strawberries. The U.P. is almost entirely rural, and u-pick strawberries, raspberries and blueberries are common. (Not to mention the miles and miles of wild berries that grow along the roads and railway embankments.) The weather had been unseasonably cool and wet and the ripe strawberries were rotting fast on the plants. I checked each berry carefully as it went into the lug, eating on the spot the ones that were too perfectly ripe. On the way home the car filled with a delicate perfume.

The next afternoon we made jam—strawberries, sure-gel and sugar. The recipe insisted on 6 cups of sugar for 2 cups of fruit. We reversed the ratio and got a delicious conserve but an unsure gel. That didn’t stop us from putting it on everything.

The next project was Jell-O. Jell-O is ubiquitous in the Midwest, central to regional identity. “Salad” in local parlance refers to Jell-O with carrots or fruit in it. In our attempt to go native and fit in, Joe and I were making homemade Jell-O with plain gelatin and fresh fruit. We raided the local St. Vincent de Paul for authentic Jell-O molds and scoured vintage copies of “The Joys of Jell-O” for inspiration. In the rugged backwoods of northern Michigan we were pioneering a Jell-O renaissance!

A half gallon of strawberries were cored, cut and sugared to release their juices. The gelatin was melted in hot water and stirred in. Spoonfuls of homemade jam were added to intensify the flavor and the whole thing poured into a mold. Brilliant! The essence of strawberries captured in a perfect mid-summer form.

We went on to experiment with uncooked strawberry pies (pastry cream in a baked pie shell buried in strawberries with a little gelatin), strawberry parfait (homemade strawberry Jell-O unmolded onto a basin of fresh tapioca pudding), and strawberry dessert (Joe made a sponge cake, cut it up and stirred it into homemade Jell-O and served it with whipped cream).

And there were still plenty of strawberries left over to put on cereal in the morning. The day before our visit ended, the wild blueberries and raspberries came ripe. And the chokecherries and pin cherries were on the horizon. If we’d had another month there we could have transformed the world of Jell-O forever.

Rembrandt: late.

Not long ago a friend expressed to me her dismay that I had been so harshly critical, even dismissive, in my postings on Liebermann and Corinth.  Why, she wondered, hadn’t I simply appreciated the work that I do admire, as I had with Bonnard?  Wouldn’t that have been more gracious, less gratuitous?  I believe these are good questions, so I have continued to think about them.

My answer rests on a distinction between “appreciation” and “discrimination.” To appreciate is “to value or regard highly; to raise or increase in value.”  To discriminate is “to note or observe a difference; to distinguish accurately.”  As Joe puts it, a food enthusiast might be able to appreciate cotton candy, but one would think he lacked discrimination if he ate a lot of it.

This distinction is fundamental to how I think and work as an artist.  I can appreciate all kinds of things—ceramic figurines, B movies, tacky drag, Jello desserts with tiny pastel marshmallows, “My Fair Lady” sing-alongs.  I triangulate among the values these things represent in themselves, the context within which I hold them (which, in the examples above, might be irony or “camp”) and the contribution they make to my own creative life—a process that is most potent when it simultaneously works both objectively and subjectively.  In this way I elevate or appreciate their value.

Discrimination, on the other hand, is the ability (which I find must be continually developed and refined) to make accurate distinctions.  If I am to grow as an artist, I need to hone my ability to distinguish good work from bad, successful from failed, authentic from false, meaningful from vacuous, spiritual from mechanical, vital and challenging from safe and familiar.  As I mature, I expect the distinctions I make to become more numerous, interdependent, and subtle.

I use a different part of my mind to discriminate than I do to appreciate.  One drives toward excellence, the other toward potential.  One works on discovering when and how something is good, the other seeks to see the good in everything.  They are not mutually exclusive—they are simply different mental operations.  Nevertheless, my friend’s point is well taken:  the harsh critic will himself be one-sided and inauthentic if he fails to also hold in mind the larger context in which everything can be appreciated.

Rembrandt: early.

A couple of years ago I discovered a group of late paintings by Lovis Corinth at the art museum in Hamburg. Corinth was a Berlin painter at the turn of the century, generally associated with the impressionist movement. I had always ignored his work as precious and cheesy. But these late paintings knocked my socks off. So I looked deeper.

It turns out that he suffered a stroke in 1911 after which his work changed profoundly. Really profoundly—I’m not kidding when I say the early stuff is cheesy. From then until his death in 1925, he produced an extraordinary body of work that overlaps in interesting ways with the mature work of Kokoschka.

This is a group of his portraits. To enlarge an image, double click on it. Over the next few days I’ll post examples of his landscapes and other subjects.

Two months ago, my colleague Tim and I paid a visit to the land of mezcal. We were working with a band of young, Mexico City-based architects, artists, and idealists. Mezcal, as far as they were concerned, is the essence of Mexico.

Our purpose was to launch of a Story of Place for Mexico City. Though we were supposed to be paying attention to more important things, I was mostly aware of the food and drink. On our first morning we were taken to an old Mercado for a breakfast of tacos made from goat roasted in the traditional underground pit. From there we toured an ecological park in the ancient chinampas (floating gardens) of Xochimilco and then into a narrow cleft in the mountains where we stopped for quesadillas prepared with squash blossoms and corn smut. The open-air mountain kitchen also served homemade pulque, a sweet and lightly alcoholic beverage made from agave—the first stage in making mezcal.

That night, to celebrate more than eight hours negotiating nightmare traffic, we stopped in Coyoacan for a pre-dinner snack and the main attraction—very good quality mezcal. Spicy roasted grasshoppers and orange slices were offered as accompaniments. The mescal was clear, vaguely sweet, delicious. We tried several varieties and styles.

I warned my companions that I’m a cheap date—half a beer is my limit. They smiled and surreptitiously refilled my glass every time I looked away. Before long I certainly was high. We all were. It was pleasant, cheerful, and definitely mind altering—on the edge of hallucinogenic. It was the first time I had the experience of an alcoholic beverage as a “plant medicine.” It had a personality, a point of view about the world. Wine elevates spirit. Beer is, well, beery. Mezcal is a journey. The most surprising thing was I had no hangover the next morning. They had told me this would be so and I didn’t believe them.

Mezcal is exciting in part because it is often still produced artisanally, made in small quantities by village craftsmen using an indigenous desert plant. The agave is harvested just as it is preparing to send up a flower spike, when the sugars are concentrated in the heart. It is traditionally roasted using oak charcoal, then fermented and distilled. It carries the signature of its terroir, of the place where it was made, and is highly differentiated from region to region and maker to maker.

Because it is a high value product that can be produced in a perennial agricultural system while leaving the majority of biomass on site, mezcal has an ongoing role to play in rural economies of Mexico. Agave can be grown as an understory plant in a mixed oak savannah, making it useful economic element in a regenerative land management program that restores habitat, heals watersheds, and diversifies ecosystems. Mezcal has so much potential—as an economic driver for land restoration and rural viability, as a distinctive product with international appeal, and as a carrier of cultural traditions and craftsmanship.