Nihil (Part II)

Solfeggio I | Mixed Media on Canvas, Linen, and Other Fabric | 50 x 45 in. | 2021
*Installed in Abandoned Post Office in Yeso, New Mexico.*

Why is it, I wonder, that I find myself making work about things and places few in my former enculturated city centers would take interest in while using materials many would see as garbage? I seem to identify with the forgotten and overlooked, which suggests a longterm psychological consequence of my work long overlooked in the course of those fifteen years. As for why the images in my paintings seem to dissolve further and further into abstract fields, and why sound now seems now to rival the image in terms of what compels me to make paintings, I can’t be entirely sure.

I try to retrace my steps to the moment or succession of moments when sound became intensely more important to how I think about painting. As far as I can tell, a convergence occurred among my growing interest in the composer Arvo Pärt, my improved commitment to seated meditation, and one particular event in which I was invited into a prayer circle by a group of men who happened to be ex-convicts, helping my wife and me to load our moving truck at the home we were leaving in Roswell, New Mexico.

My formative involvement with religious groups until the age of 22 had much to do with my later anxiety and skepticism toward group worship, organized religion in general, and eventually, by extension, groupthink and its influence everywhere. I have gone out of my way all these years to avoid encounters with religious groups and groups of all kinds. I physically shutter at the prospect of holding hands with others to pray to an idea of God I find insipid.

When the men kindly and almost shyly asked us to join them in a circle, fist to fist (not hand in hand), it was impossible to decline after all they had done to help us. The plain fact was, we loved these men, were ourselves humbled and uplifted by them, and I did not recoil at the invitation.

The first man began his prayer in a typical fashion, dear ‘god’ or ‘heavenly father” (I can’t remember exactly) and before long the next man and then the next broke into each other’s prayers, one prayer coming in over another like a jet in crowded airspace. By the time all fifteen-or-so men were simultaneously speaking their individual prayers, they had established a kind of oceanic tide of prayer, coming in and going out, not rhythmic, but arhythmic, at once soothing and enlivening. The prayer has not left my body since and I am humbled that I don’t have an intellectual defense against it. I had not heard one like it before or since that day.

I find this kind of presence in sound among other forms of consciousness as well. It was only the following night, when we moved into our new house in Placitas, that the yipping and howling of innumerable coyotes, some no doubt on our property just yards away, seemed to arrest me in the same way. It seems to be in the asymmetric imbrication and near parallels of individual voices that I am most likely to feel an encounter with the numinous.

Many things seemed to begin operating in this way all around me. During meditation, whether in my own back yard or out in the nearby desert hills, I began to notice sounds like very small bells, but sleeker, like the sound effect of a sharp object quietly unsheathed in a film. This subtle sound would come in and out, over or under sudden gusts of wind, chirping of birds, the quiet croaking of crows, the stomping or snorting of a wild horse, a distant train, military aircraft overhead, even the distant sound of cartoons from inside the house where my daughter played. There is a way in which, when patient, everything around oneself begins to take on structure: the held breath, (this is the picture), the inhale (step into the picture), and the exhale (let go of the picture). The mind seems either to discover or invent an interjecting order around which the aural world weaves

Arvo Pärt’s famous musical innovation, his signature “tintinnabuli” style (literally meaning “little bells”), is itself inclusive of the fleeting and discordant individual voices and the holistic voice on which all operate. Though I don’t assume Pärt thinks this way, I tend to understand the relationship between broken and the whole, not as hierarchical, but as coemergent. One evokes the other in mutual need and consequence.

“The M-Voice [the melodic line] always signifies the subjective world, the daily egoistic life of sin and suffering; the T-Voice [the triadic tintinnabuli part], meanwhile, is the objective realm of forgiveness. The M-voice may appear to wander, but it is always held firmly by the T-voice. This can be likened to the eternal dualism of body and spirit, heaven and earth; but the two voices are in reality one voice, a twofold single entity. One line is like freedom, and the triad line is like discipline. It must work together.”

- Arvo Pärt

It was with the three “Solfeggio” paintings that I experimented with trying to translate Pärt’s principles into the visual field. “Solfeggio,” also a title for one of Pärt’s works, is a vocal exercise in which each note is assigned a syllable. From the time of the middle ages, it was thought to have healing properties. By looking at the various vocal layers in Pärt’s composition, I assigned colors to notes and tried to mix them in relative proportion (though I can’t pretend to understand music sufficiently). Pärt’s Solfeggio seems to operate in four main layers, and so I did the same for each painting, making each four layers deep. When I hear his piece, I can’t help but think of the men. It’s as if their voices had been slowed down and played from an underwater vessel.

Each of my layers responded visually to something around me at the time which I associated with sound. Coyotes, wild horses, the indeterminate sounds of an open field, the quiet voice of a friend. In fact, it was the initial study I made by having my friend, fellow artist Kim Kei, sit for me that I used as the top layer for each of the three paintings. In this way, they ended up, at the final moment, as portraits of some kind, though they had not originally been intended that way.

Someone Appearing in the Field | Mixed Media On Linen | 60 x 48 in. | 2021

The method was actually reminiscent of a couple of earlier paintings I made, “Someone Appearing in the Field,” and “In From the Field.” Both of these had been made by layering portraits of individuals I found in an obituary page of the local paper caught in a salt cedar in the field where I was sitting for meditation. One woman named Wanda had died of Covid.

It’s not so much that I think of a painting as an offering to someone living or dead, but I do think of the attention directed, the process itself, as a kind of offering, however much or little it might be worth to them. There seems to be an intersection of consciousness—that of the individual, my own, all of the forces at play that put the newspaper in the salt cedar at that time and place, the sum total, which is the real field in question—whose portrait it is on the canvas.

Thinking of the aural frequencies of the solfeggio form, the way in which they are intended to heal, thinking of how Pärt’s music makes me feel, and taking it all in as a kind of instruction, does put me in mind to consider the visual field in a similar way, how this implicit pull toward compassion is inevitably healing, however unpopular the idea, for either the maker or viewer. I’m aware of the woundedness appearing in my own “Solfeggio” works, which I think is appropriate to the concept itself. One who has not experienced profound wounding is reluctant to enter into the wounds of others. But the wound is also the conduit through which we reach a more profound understanding and acceptance of ourselves and the world put in our care.

Nihil (Part I)

Nihil (Part III)

Image | Object | Space | Word | Time | Contact