Revelation vs Analysis

Revelation also eludes analysis. One can feed one’s ego by applying their intellect to a piece of art, analyzing it for substance and meaning and then attempting to convert it all back into words. And this is possible and often shines a thin beam of light over a part of the object of revelation (the art). And to the extent that sense and order is revealed by those words, the ego feels puffed up by its success or victory over the mystery. This can feel wonderful and often unlocks the sensual value of otherwise overly conceptual, incomprehensible art.

But this victory over the mystery is a small one when compared to the experience of the non-intellectual revelatory “art-moment”.  When the artist in creation or the viewer in the experiencing do so without the intellect stripping away all of the substance that cannot be put into words, they have the pure experience of revelation. This is an open channel to God, the atman, the Truth, whatever. 

The art is always smarter than the artist. The image is always more complete than the analysis. Stick with the image, the feeling, and have faith that this experience will move through you, will move you over time, beyond the boundaries of the particular art moment. If you analyze it, its power to move you is reduced even as you gain the pleasure and lesser power of comprehension.

Some Advice

You can find a kind of dynamic stability by riding the waves of meaning that appear and disappear on the face the void.

You will still sometimes fall in. 

More waves will come. Don’t fret too much as you tread the void. 

You can try making more waves but this is hard and rarely works. 

You Are Inside My Art

You have felt the happy mud between your toes. You have heard the wilderness speak in the sighing of wind through thick summer leaves and you have felt your own voice within the contours of that voice. Your heart has understood its unintelligible non-intentions. These are the unknowable rites and mystic icons of our Appalachian foothills. You are already within them. 

Sycamore Revelations

Swallows

Sycamores.

Do you know

That elephants worship Moon?

The small birds of the Rivanna dive

And clutch to one another in the air

Tumble down

Softly to the lush grass.

Is this worship also?

Heaving and cleaving. 

How could it not be? 

The air comes apart in ecstasy 

for this love making

This god-making

And falls around my ears

I can feel it wet in my curls

The way the green-hued wind speaks

Of cool wet air

The way tendrils of thought

Dive also on the breeze and ripples

And clutch also to one another.

And cleave also to one another.

Of what do we give thanks

In the sunlight heat and chilled air of carnal spring?

A cathedral of trees carves out

A Darkness for us 

and bears witness to the 

Sacred grasping and gasping

Of our thousand, thousand hearts.

Gratitude like sunlight needles

Piercing everything.

What Am I / Doing?

I was not born but came fully-formed, dropped as a buttonball out of a sycamore tree and plopped! Right into the green river waters where I learned the wordless language of frogs and predation and flow until I found rest at the bottom of the deep wide and slow. Now I don’t speak but look out with eyes that are not eyes straight to the coeur of you, who are everything.

When this river dries up I swear I will carry its ghost with me. I’ll carry it bones and all to your doorstep and I’ll sit until you invite us in. Take root take feather take a flight that is a falling. Into divine madness and go around again, nothing learned.

Strange Memoriam

I randomly overhauled my website today, and I kind of want to save this strange, old version of my “about” page. It feels odd to me not because anything I said in there is wrong - I still agree with what I said there - but the language is alien to me. It is the language I adopted when I made my art career my main focus for the first time and I was trying to figure out what shape I was supposed to present to the Art World to be seen and taken seriously. Several years on now and I guess I’ve found a less contrived voice, if not a completely authentic one (I’m trying!). Probably I’ve finally just relaxed a bit. Anyway, here it is:

__

Fisher has felt the urgency to create their entire life, but only in their twenties did they truly enter the world of Art. As a self taught artist, this pursuit started as a technical one focused on skills, anatomy, and rendering without much thought to meaning or feeling. 

Our modern desperation for meaning led Fisher to attempt to revive archaic stories and archetypes through their art. This proved to be a path towards contrivance. The meaning-making structures of our collective past simply did not connect with the modern mind. Their attempts to conceive of their own meanings felt similarly hollow, though the power of erotic art did hold sway for a time.

In their thirties, they began channeling their art exclusively through a shamanic process. Putting their critical, logical, conceptual mind away, they instead attended to the richness of their lived experience and became saturated with qualia. Being attentive in this non-conceptual way allows raw experiences to find their way to the Deep Mind where Fisher believes True meaning to be cultivated rather than constructed. During the act of creation, Fisher now allows faith to guide their hand, allowing the harvest of cultivated meaning to percolate up from the Deep. The symbols and compositions that arise are allowed to manifest through Fisher without question. Like a dream, the resulting work is always mysterious and compelling - not conveying meaning but inviting the blossoming of meaning in the soul of the viewer. Fisher considers the paintings that result from this process to be more akin to sermons, poetry, or mystical utterances than to the contrived conceptual.

Fisher now requires that all commissioned pieces follow this process. The process of sowing the Deep Mind for a commission is a delicate, sacred one. Clients will meet with Fisher several times at their homes and at Fisher’s studio to develop a trusting relationship. Clients will entrust Fisher with the story of their families, their secret pain, their joy, their lived experiences. These stories, places, and images are allowed to sink into the Deep Mind via meditation until harvest time.