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Marilyn Banner writes:

When I was at VCCA this time I went “empty”. I had no ideas, but took all my encaustic supplies. I decided, in Ram Das’ words, to “be here now.”

It wasn’t hard. The Blue Ridge mountains greeted me in the distance daily. The boxwood trees spoke their ancient language. The cows hung out. The horses asked for apples and to be petted. The sky was everywhere. I was surrounded by 22 other people who spend their lives creating. I didn’t need anything else.

So I took my new wooden panels and layered them with beeswax and encaustic medium.
I photographed the land with my digital camera. I had no printer, but I did sketches from the photos by looking at that little window on the back of the camera. I began to “copy” my sketches onto the panels.

For 3 weeks I tried to get a lot of paintings to “work.” Visual artists know what that means. I have high standards, but my paintings either looked like someone else could have painted them, or like someone was forcing the paint to make something “look like something,” but it didn’t fit right on the panel, or FEEL right. I kept working, revising, overworking.

After 3 weeks something happened: I let go of all my need to “get it right.” I just gave up, and let whatever I had actually taken into me, come out. I remembered a book I had read 40 years ago in art school, “The Chinese on the Art of Painting,” where the author described someone understanding or integrating the landscape, or the bamboo, or the mountain, in a profound way.

That’s what I was doing, finally, after 3 weeks. I had “become” the mountains and the land. Or they had “become” a part of me. I hardly kept my eyes open when I worked. Something on a deeper level was happening. I worked in an altered state for the last few days, heat gun in one hand, brush full of encaustic paint in the other. Maybe you can see that here in the work.

Last night (I have been back in DC for a month) I went to my basement stash of old meaningful books, found that book immediately, and opened it to the exact part that my art teacher in the 60’s, David Lund, had guided me to. He loved the painters of the Sung Dynasty.

Here is a quotation from the book:
“Su Shih wrote, “There are men who possess Tao and possess art; others who possess Tao but have not art, although the things take form in their hearts, they do not take form under their hands.”
The spiritual inspiration alone, however pure and deep it may be, is not enough to transform a man into an artist; he must also know how to work, how to make the hand co-operate with the mind, he must possess the power of visualizing his pictures mentally, nay, of becoming the very motifs that he paints. Yu-k’o was, according to Su Shih’s poetical expression, transformed into the bamboos that he painted, and “when Han Kan painted horses, he truly was a horse.” Also other great masters like Wang Wei, Wu Tao-tzu, and Li Lung-mien are praised for their complete self-identification with the things that they did with their brush. When Li Po’shih stayed in the mountains he did not pay attention to one thing only but his spirit joined in with ten thousand things and the mind penetrated every kind of workmanship.”

Aside from the fact that they were only talking about male masters, I think this concept is “where it’s at” for painting, and maybe not just nature.

Labels: VCCA