In between days
In the haze of finishing the painting module, I went to see some art, a Brian McGuire exhibition. After the exercise of identifying what my taste in painting might be like through pictures of paintings, and the initial experience of pushing paint around, it was revelatory going to see life-size paintings, where you get a hint at how the artist got the painting to look that way.
The texture, the muted quality with intentional splashes of color, the drawn-on lines, I loved it all. He made trees with what looked like drips of water that etched away the paint. I have no doubt that he is a virtuoso and has control over what he’s painting, but, I take his paintings as a lesson, to give in to the rough look of gestural painting. In the moment, I might not like what it looks like, but there’s a magic to sparse brush strokes. I will need to defer judgement, defer fixing it, and have faith.
Which is very Zen, very Buddhist.
I’ve also started doing some library research about artists and Buddhism. There are two books about this topic in the library, and both of them are about D.T. Suzuki, John Cage, and others. D.T. Suzuki lectured on Zen Buddhism in New York to many well-known creatives. John Cage incorporated the Buddhist concepts into his pieces, like 4’33”, where the musician, for example pianist, “plays” silence for a set amount of time, punctuated by the opening and closing of the piano cover. Cage would throw I Ching to add randomness, to remove ego.
Random numbers and noise are an important part of creative code, to give it a sense of nature and the organic. Its use is just normal, prosaic. That it might be consistent with Buddhism is the sound of a puzzle piece slotting in place.