_{Images from my show at AMZehnder Gallery, September-October 2024.}

Sian Robertson and I gave an artist talk last night at AMZehnder Gallery. The talk was moderated by Anne-Marie Zehnder. 

At one point, I evoked Ellen Dissanayake’s work, as I often do, making a point about the human proclivity toward making meaning through aesthetic experience. We’re trained to reflexively understand that rationality and language are means through which we build meaning and create knowledge. But we do it through aesthetic experience, too. The manipulation of the physical world is a way of bringing what matters to us (meaning) into relationship with others — art is one example, but how we keep our home, make a meal, attend to friends are all other examples of aesthetic experience as meaning. But the point I failed to bring home last night was that aesthetic experience — in my case the process and product of making pictures — is also knowledge. A painting is knowledge as much as any book or theory. We simply receive the knowledge differently than through a language-based thesis. Very often we receive it through our whole body, not just our rational thought process.

This morning I’m thinking about content and why some of my paintings feel more successful than others. In this case I’m thinking about motif — landscape v figures v architecture. I suspect I have more things to say about landscape than I do about other motifs (say, the human body) — which is why I’m drawn to the particular subjects I paint. But in a deeper way, I suspect it has to do with knowledge — what I know. At this point in my life, I have a more intimate relationship with the landscape than I do with bodies. That’s not to say my point of attention might not shift. They certainly have in the past. But it is an attempt to offer myself permission to go deeper into the territory that calls to me — and a reminder that I can’t be all things.

I’m about to start my teaching season, and these reflections feel important. We’re trained by our schooling to respond to the assignment — which in adult life often manifests as reacting to the various expectations and projections laid upon us by other people. This process can kill art because it inhibits pursuing a calling in service to meeting the desires or needs of others. And in teaching/learning these ‘desires’ can be arbitrary assignments — so-called things that are ‘good for us.’ I don’t want to be arbitrary as a teacher — any more than I want to submit to expectations that aren’t relevant to my sense of calling. So I need to think more about how I can call forward the curiosity and joy of the people with whom I work. Because it’s from unfettered and exuberant exploration that our greatest contributions might emerge. 

_{Me, Anne-Marie and Sian. Photo by Cole Cook.}