THOUGHTS FROM THE ARTISTS

Chang Lek

Before Art came in front of me, I never knew. I never thought of it. Then when we met, something happened. Then I saw it and I thought, yes, I can do that. And when I began to make art, then I could feel it. And I know it comes from somewhere in my heart. A spirit. Now, everywhere I look, I see it and I feel it.

Galen Garwood

RUMINATIONS AT SIXTY

This morning, a mass of black clouds spilled over Mt. Suthep, enshrouding the temple's golden chedi overlooking the city of Chiang Mai. Warm, torrential rain followed. It's July and I'm hunkered down in my unbelievably small studio, mulling over an unwanted blue passage, listening to Jami Sieber's ‘Hidden Sky', alternately gazing through the open door, then contemplating the subtle desiccation of skin that has sheathed me for six decades. It's amazing, isn't it? Not necessarily chiming in at sixty, but the multi-processing of the human mind—mass of black, rain, blue, open, space, withering, skin, connecting, what works, what doesn't, placing and holding—all of these a continuum of ideas, words—this letter.

Reaching sixty is no particular miracle. Or is it? More people haven't made it than have, if you consider the average life span of the human through history and that young men have always been the fodder of war; there has never been a time when, somewhere, a war wasn't being engaged. Or has there?

Where I currently live, one might consider it a miracle just to survive the traffic. Almost daily I pass the white-chalked outline of a motorbike or a body or the drying pool of blood of a careless youth too lazy or too drunk to bother to put on a protective helmet. Most fatalities occur at night. Not specifically because of alcohol, but also because the police only enforce the helmet law during the daytime working hours. At night, for the young, it is a question of fashion and hairstyle. Hair spiked with styling gel suffers pitifully under a sweaty helmet. The most common scenario of traffic deaths occurs when that few moments between the changing of lights is utterly disregarded.

I have thus far escaped cancer, tuberculosis, malaria, starvation, floods, and countless other leveling agents of the human species. As of this writing I've yet to be eliminated by an act of terrorism, though the chances grow daily. As an American living in a foreign country, I'm acutely aware that my country is being held hostage by the current political administration, a band of hawkish thugs more interested in money than in what America was truly meant to be. Whether they dress themselves in Christian ideology or patriotism, they are modern day oligarchs of the worst sort. For them, putting out a fire means throwing more petrol on it. After all, they have a keen interest in fuel.

What happens to the mind and the body at sixty that didn't happen at fifty or forty? One is simply a bit closer to seventy and beyond and the great beyond of gravity into which we've deposited such a rich accumulation of myth.

We experience the concept ‘now', ‘this moment', ‘the present' as a residue of potentiality; then everything is swiftly eradicated by the past. When we speak of this moment, we speak of the nearest mentally registered event in the continuum of our memory, our past. This is important when one is turning sixty because everything past is non-existent. We all know the future doesn't exist because it hasn't yet happened. If I blink at the precise nanosecond, I simply won't be any older. I like that. The Buddha teaches us to live in the present moment, does he not?

Even so, we tend to thrust ourselves forward on the ruminations of the past. On the occasion of my turning sixty, I have not so seriously calculated how much of my life has been devoted to the aspect of being an artist. All of it? In some ways, yes. But when I consider the place where I have made then sold art, I'd estimate about forty years. Considering the arc of developing intensity in one's career, eating, sleeping, sex and other miscellaneous social habits and biological functions, I'd say I've actively processed and actualized creative ideas for approximately 5000 days. This seems modest enough. I'm not an obsessive artist. 20,000 hours or 7,200,000 minutes. This represents 43,200,000 seconds or 43,200,000,000,000,000 (quadrillion) nanoseconds of fishing around in the unknown then serving up the results to the world. Why? Why, indeed, my unkind critics might pen. But my ‘why' is the bigger ‘why'. Some folks believe that creativity comes from a need to stoke the ego's furnace but once delivered to us, art can become a moral compass. Others claim a personal dance with the collective consciousness spirals the artist into that sublime act. I don't know. The reason I make art is not the same reason why we need art and yet, somehow, they are inseparable.

I think the difficulty of being a modern day painter is that we are utterly alone in our subjective world, struggling to connect our fabricated reality to something greater and we have no stick with which to measure our purpose and the result, except what we choose to believe and what others choose to tell us.

The true painting, which might fail in its craftsmanship, will succeed in its honesty. I've seen paintings that would fail in almost everything we were taught in art academia but resonate in honesty, seriousness and vulnerability. Primitivism and Outsider Art offer us the best examples. There are legions of painters who are technical wizards in the craft of image making but the art is dead.

Every act of painting is an engagement with uncertainty.

Images slowly appear from the studio, which was once a maid's room tucked away in the upper corner of the house. The new work is very much imbued with the spirit of Buddha, which gives me comfort, in spite of the constant intrusion of the ego and the equally constant battle to keep it at a safe distance. Of course, one can never entirely accomplish this, but doing so takes me to the unexpected.

I've never really wanted to be a prolific artist; I've never felt that capability has anything to do with art at all. I have no idea how many artworks I've created. I believe I've made a few good paintings and I don't mean to sound self-effacing nor laudatory. After forty years or so one should believe in oneself. Someone once told me that artists are the least able to judge the merits of their own work; this is true to some extent in that our judgments are easily shaped by the proximity of the work itself. But always, at some point, the artist should know, better than anyone, whether they succeeded or failed.

At any rate, for me, even at sixty, the more important thing to consider is what hasn't been made. My thoughts are akin to those of my painter friend Lennie Kesl. Nearing eighty, he talks about the work he wants to get done before he dies. He's already left a prodigious and eclectic assortment of truly wonderful art. Yet he's still in search for his one great painting.

The rains have come and gone. The shadows in the room grow sharper and darker. The sky holds a pearl of white, like the color of a morning lotus. The blue passage is now mostly scrubbed away to memory, most of it buried beneath an avalanche of black, which, in turn, will be scrubbed away. I'm grateful to be here, to be ‘here' at sixty. In fact, I'm in better health than I've been in years. Of course, the skin has begun its journey southward, but all in all, it has been a good friend and I have no complaints.

Everything is reductive. Everything is re-arranged by prayer, and myth, and, finally, by time—everything except this marvelous potential for life expressing itself in each eternal moment. It is enough, I think, to sit by the river, and become water.

When Buddha came from beneath the tree,

Buddha came down the mountain.

The light came down the mountain.

The elephant and bird and swirling

Wind came down the mountain.

When the sea was full,

The people went up the mountain.

 

Panom, Galen

Chiang Mai