Being Many Voices

an essay on painting

It took me more than twenty years to figure out how Modern Art painting is done and the secret (which is not, of course, a secret in the least) shows something fundamental about our nature. Each of us is many voices, voices which are more than us.

A recent painting, a goddess image, might illustrate this pretty well. I was yearning for some clear depiction of the moment when a deep inward journey brings you to the Lady Guardian of the Veil. For me the place where that occurs is very shadowed and dreamlike so I did the surrounding setting with a kind of heavily colored sketchy cartoon style like William Blake used in his great graphic novels. But I only know one way to illustrate the intense intimacy which I feel so palpably with that great spirit then; so I made the center of the painting a full-on realistic human face. So in this working viewers of the painting may experience two voices, of the spirit and of the place, through two different kinds of visual comprehension. Somewhat as though you simultaneously recited poetry and sang. That's Modern Art.

Or something else:

I was studying a painting in a museum one time, last spring, lunchtime from my paycheck job, perched on one of the little stools provided, sitting very still for quite a while and staring fixedly, stalking a picture like a cat. It was two fuzzy gauzy patches of two different colors, three feet tall or so, a Rothko piece from maybe 1956.

Entered then some high school kids upon the scene. They gathered around this curiosity with smiles and silent nods for introduction. Most of them crowded right behind me, leaning down and actually craning their necks to peer scientifically over the shoulders of this purported Galileo and along his line of sight. Amusing. Practically a Monty Python sketch. But one bright forward commendable young woman, standing to the side, spoke up, rather shrugging off some irritation, asking if I understood this picture. I claimed I did. Sure. I'd better, although I didn't say that. Furthermore, I asked what she might make of it. Rothko was a mystic visionary, more or less an esoteric Jew.

The smart girl took a fair stab at the thing all right, lunging toward the canvas with a hand up, pointing. She allowed the red might be to stand for passion of some sort, fear or anger, and maybe green might be to symbolize . . . Her waving fingertip was like to hack the picture deftly leg from wing and I could not help but cry out immediately "no!" several times repeatedly, actually in a sincere fit of mental anguish. That sort of intellectual decoding mode can awake some pictures, Kandinsky’s from his theoretical years and Torres-Garcia generally, some others, but never Rothko. Never Rothko. She was spouting nonsense, going nowhere, and she knew it from the silence she got back. Therefore her irritation at this thing. That picture simply does not talk in "symbols".

But how was I to answer? I did not know her. And besides, my thoughts before – when I myself was looking for a way through that particular canvas veil into the Holy Mysteries – had equally gone nowhere. What if some well armed seeker strode boldly up to you in a public square, loudly demanded a koan or a rune at once and you (obediently rifling through your pockets) found none? Embarrassing. Especially with a crowd of slackers lounging round. But here's a dodge that's sometimes handy for such moments: Glance outward and snatch an omen from the air. To wit: The smart girl had deftly demonstrated fencing; actors learn fencing; she might be an acting student; I might try an acting metaphor. This works more often than you'd think.

So I quickly conjured up an Arts Professor voice and turned its spigot to see what might come through. It spoke – to me as well as her – about a practical approach. You should look into that painting like an actor pondering their part in a script. Does it say "red"? Well then, put yourself in various modes of thought and feeling till this red is what you see, then speak from there. Green? Likewise cast about until you find yourself in such a place, then try to speak from both those places. I said all that.

But I thought: All right, but what about some promise of the Mysteries? What about some little hint at least of Kabala or something of the sort? And yet that's all the Arts Professor said, and that even in a quite pedantic tone, rather scolding even, which I did not care for in the least. And even worse; to my horror, one of the slackers lounging round behind me actually giggled at the worthy girl getting marked down.

And yet she took it in good spirit. After first growling menacingly at the fool who had laughed, evidently in an on-going rivalry where she held an upper hand, she took the Arts Professor seriously enough to gaze into the painting for a long moment silently. And I could plainly see the colors of her mind folding in and out like a kaleidoscope or rather like one of those delicately tinted origami paper flowers that you can morph from shape to shape.

And then, wanting to respect her mental privacy, I looked away into the picture. And there was Rothko’s mystic vision waking up to present life. There was not what you would call a flow of energy but more a wave of complex harmony standing there now between this woman and the man who stood before that self-same surface with a brush. The colors of that Veil which stood before them both were billowing, overlaying, separating, merging. Amazing.

That’s Modern Art.