Part One

Karl Marx, in criticizing the 1851 coup d’etat in France that horrified a young Manet, wrote: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” We, today, are not exempt from this sort of thing. The problem is that often such inhibiting traditions are not seen as nightmares because they are not seen at all. They just weigh in, uncontested, and are assumed to be the furniture of life, generally.

For example, as the feudal world was eclipsed in the 16^th and 17^th centuries by what has since come to be known as “modernity,” truth claims passed from interpretations of The Word to the empiricism of science. And since then we have been taught to believe that mind and body are not only separate but that the mind, compared to the body, is vastly superior. Consequently, it is widely believed that behind all forms of human creativity lies the almighty “idea” and the power of human “imagination.” Worse, we moderns are taught that “emotion” interferes with “rational thinking.”

Now you know the rest of the story: all the things we plein-air painters paint, the nature around us – bowls, fruit, flowers – are separate from us, too. And through observation and right calculation and disciplined copying, we learn to master nature and paint pictures in the service of a better world.

This is the nightmare that weighs upon our brains from 16^th and 17^th century traditions. Or to put it as succinctly as is possible, we live in our heads.

Part Two

Here’s another way of saying the same thing: living in our heads kills creativity. Those of you who know of Ken Robinson have heard this argument before. His TED talks have been seen by millions. He also has a the wonderful knack of using humor to get some heavy thoughts across. Just look at how Robinson uses humor to make the same argument I made in Part One:

Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side. If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say “What’s it for, public education?” I think you’d have to conclude, if you look at …[those who do] everything that they should…— [that] the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn’t it? They’re the people who come out the top.…I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn’t hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement….they’re rather curious….they live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side. They’re disembodied….They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads.…It’s a way of getting their head to meetings.

There you have it: education teaches us to live in our heads and slightly to one side, the left side where we see ourselves as individuated isolates, separate from everything. So what’s the problem? Well for starters, it’s wrong. Robinson goes on to point out that our mind and body are always one thing: we think in sound, we think kinesthetically, we think in abstract terms, we think in movement. He tells the story of a young girl of eight who was diagnosed as having “a learning disorder” because of her constant fidgeting only to learn that she wasn’t “sick; she [was] a dancer.”[i] And most painters know, at some level, that the body thinks and the mind feels but I think it is important to move this knowledge from the shadowy tacit level to the level of explicit consciousness.

Part Three

Maya Angelou, when asked if she was nervous when she read her poem at the first inauguration of President Clinton, responded, “No. I was in the poem.” Translation: No, I had exited into the realm of sensual activity where I experience moments of pure presence and conditions of exhilaration, and where I am able to make audible how the world touches me.

Did you catch that? The world, sensuous vibrating sounds, light – nature – isn’t some inert thing over there that we observe. It is touching us. It has agency and we can be one with that world. In fact, I’m arguing that as plein-air painters, we must be one with that world.

Part Four

In a recent review of Wolf Kahn’s work, Phillip Barcio explains to the reader that he is struggling to find the right concepts to describe Kahn’s work which he believes is so rich in color that “The brilliant surfaces [Kahn] creates… seem to glow.” After rejecting several categories because they fail to help him adequately describe Kahn’s landscapes he then takes a liking to Hans Hoffman’s maxim that there are only two types of paintings: “intelligent painting” and “stupid” painting. Barcio runs with this: “The important thing, is that Kahn is an intelligent painter….[and] what makes a painting intelligent is the same as what makes a person intelligent: the presence of ideas.” Sigh! Bad move.

Part Five

Kahn has said that “Nature and the artist’s feelings are merely the raw materials.” Interesting. Feelings, for Kahn, are not off-to-the-side emotions. They are raw materials, the same as paint. Kahn is telling us that mind and body are one. And just as his work, like a photographic plate in development, slowly emerges and is realized on the canvas, so do Kahn’s feelings, and so does Kahn himself. And the mind-sensuous activity of painting is simultaneously one with nature as well. “Art is playing, dancing, spontaneity,” says Kahn. Nature is not inert. It is affective; it plays and dances. It possesses agency.

Concludes Kahn, “The practice of art should have an effect not only on the public, but even more importantly, on the artist himself, by enlarging his sphere of freedom. Once this is understood and becomes a profound part of artistic practice, the problem of being a mere manufacturer of expensive objects disappears; pictures are justifiable because they are steps in their maker’s artistic development. Each picture is valuable only insofar as it contributes to this development, because it enables the artist to go on in a freer, larger way to his next picture (my emphasis).”

We could take this truth a step further: the painting process is valuable only insofar as it allows us to find fulfillment in creating who we are. Bottom line: we are about a life-giving process called work. When properly organized, our work allows us to come alive and that liveliness is then imparted to our paintings. But first we need to do something with those nightmarish dichotomies from the 17th century. We need to let them go.

NOTE: The featured image at the top is by Wolf Kahn, “Hidden Greenhouse”, oil on canvas, 52 x 52 in

[i]   “She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School; she became a soloist; she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School, founded the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, met Andrew Lloyd Webber. She’s been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, she’s given pleasure to millions, and she’s a multi-millionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.”