The Green Hills of Africa

Painting is a process of action and reaction, the call and response of an inner dialogue. To quote the late great Bob Ross, “we don’t make mistakes, we have happy accidents”. Without accidents, without constraint, we fall into complacency and indolence. George Gurdjieff wrote about the importance of actively engaging our consciousness, being constantly wakeful to the senses. The same is taught through the mindfulness practices of ancient Buddhism and modern psychology alike. Our modern way of life is ever more opposed to such thinking, and contemporary art reflects that.

When we are comfortable, and everything is proceeding in an orderly and predictable way, our minds tend to relax. It’s a pleasant feeling, mimicked by narcotics, and is the reason for their addictive potential. Thinking is a lot of work. Our brains grew progressively with our ancestors’ capacity for speech and abstract thinking. Larger brains required a larger caloric intake, and that required more thinking to provide the skill required to hunt and forage enough food. All of human history has been reconciling that urge to innovate, to adapt to change, with a desire to take pleasure in the bounty of our progress. Social interaction became our hunting ground and with that gone, we are safe to turn off our thinking altogether.

For thousands of years, religion has taught ways to turn the mind from the mundane to the divine. This can take the form of meditation, prayer, dancing, chanting, or drumming, etc. Such rituals were often performed before hunting or warfare, and in more recent times before meals and sporting events. It’s a way to prime the brain for action, or more poetically to speak to God before serving His will. This concept has been fundamental across cultures throughout human history until the past half century or so.

This isn’t to say that we’ve moved beyond religion, many of us still cling to tradition like a veiled bride in an arranged marriage. But religious practices like prayer have been mostly forgotten or lost all meaning. When I was a child in the rural south, everyone said grace before meals. As an adult, I’ve only heard it said a couple of times and both were very odd and anachronistic. I try to observe such rituals myself but usually forget or simply don’t care enough to bother. We live in a fast food drive-thru culture and our time is being increasingly commodified in strange ways; often even more useless than prayer!

I spend at least an hour most days preparing media for presentation on corporate social media platforms like Meta and Youtube. I adjust the camera for photography or timelapse video, digitally adjust the photos, edit videos, export the files, transfer the files to my phone and between various corporate file repositories. Last week I was uploading photos and arranging them for an Instagram slideshow, duly captioned and hashtagged. I noticed how many people post daily, how many I rush through to “engage” with, like an assembly line of synthesized human interaction. Everyone feigning sincerity and trying their best to compete in some game with no prize. Even the most contented and leisured people feel compelled to interject themselves into this insatiable digital Moloch we call social media.

When I’m not painting or preparing paintings for market, I’m checking social media, checking emails, posting, sending, yearning, lamenting, never resting. I still try to read books occasionally, but like most Americans I find my attention span has been drastically reduced. When I’m reading there’s the persistent thought that I should be making better use of my time. Elon Musk commented recently that his self driving cars are intended to allow us to work more during our commutes. Saddest of all, I can see the logic and enthusiasm of such an idea.

We live in this state of constant distraction, semi alertness in which we monitor the assembly line of our social media feeds. This hypnagogic state of awareness leaves us easy prey to news media propaganda, and bad art. Most of the artists I see are producing the same style of paintings over and over. They find what sells and they repeat it. I do the same with landscapes. They’re easy. I don’t especially enjoy it anymore, but I can turn my brain off, listen to Dr. Phil’s latest interview with Bibi Netanyahu, and work contentedly. When I’ve exhibited paintings, it’s the conventional images that sell, the ones that are expected.

But I fall into routines. I often work until dawn and am so tired my mind doesn’t process mistakes well, and I’ll double down instead of correcting them. Such paintings are often my worst. I usually manage to fix them later, but there’s always wasted time. It’s like speeding to a destination and getting delayed by a traffic ticket. My best work is when I fully and intentionally engage with the paintings. More often than not that happens when I challenge myself with something unfamiliar. For years that was portrait painting. Now I tend to work on portraits for about a week until I get confident with the technique and then I pause and move on to more marketable subjects.

Life is the same way. When we become comfortable there’s little interest. It’s why marriages fail and sobriety leads to relapse. Life is tragic and paradoxical enough to permit me some lingering vestige of religious conviction in the form of fatalism. Love is often described as a garden to be tended, and we have to preserve a sense of wonder in life. The purpose of art has always been in the service of love, and love in the service of art. The best artists become genuinely enamored in their work. It’s a rare thing for me, really, but I can always tell when the thrill is gone.

So, I rein in the goat cart chariot of creativity and keep it on the path of commerce. I have to take breaks occasionally. It’s really not predictable, and that’s what distinguishes art from other occupations. There’s that semi-divine aspect of inspiration, like the ancient concept of the muse, genius, or daimon. Maybe it’s some neurochemical that runs dry and has to be refilled in the cerebrospinal fountain of youth. Maybe it’s just a matter of needing time to rest the creative faculty of the intellect.

My rest involves working on personal projects, most of which I don’t share on the internet. It’s a way to wake up my intellect, to hone the edge of the blade worn dull from idle whittling for the marketplace. My creative work, abstract paintings, neoimpressionism, poetry, music, they require my full undivided attention. They demand conviction and passion. I make no secret of the fact that I am not passionate about southern landscapes or wildlife paintings. But, I’m able to bring along the energy from my serious work into the more marketable images. It’s like the old-timey hand crank starters used on the automobiles of my youth in the early 1900s. We have to step outside of the machine to get it going.