Grace of Shadows Edition
On channelling randomness. The letters of John le Carré, the legacy of Arvo Pärt, the slander of ice cream, and the notebooks of Anna Kamieńska.
Recently I’ve been thinking about randomness. Specifically the interplay of randomness and craft, accident and intention.
I consider myself a student of the representational tradition, that is, image-making that seeks to recognizably represent people and things as they communicate themselves to us in the light of the world. As opposed to abstract work that seeks to limn the interior logic of shape and form, or expressionism, which seeks to give visible vent, or expression, to internal emotions or ideas.
Yet things are not so simple. The lines get blurry quick. The more “realistic” one seeks to be, the more it becomes apparent that reality is slippery, mysterious. Like the poor physicist who in seeking to nail down the most fundamental particle only finds more layers of reality receding away beneath, and what’s worse, behaving in increasingly unnerving ways.
Even in classical representational art, the approaches are nearly endless. Painter Nic Thurman recently explained one major division, between “direct” and “indirect” realism.
In direct painting, marks are made in essentially one opaque layer, often in one sitting. John Singer Sargent was an undisputed master of this. The realism of direct painting is in its freshness, immediacy, and energy:
Indirect painting, in contrast, relies on the slow buildup of many transparent or semi-transparent layers. Light filters and bounces among the layers, imparting a sense of translucence, a glowing aliveness. The resulting soft, organic, ethereal quality is just as realistic, in its own way. Rembrandt:
In both of these styles you can see how randomness infuses even the most controlled and expert mark-making. How accidents of material and brushwork contribute to the overall perfection. How, close up, the marks resemble not fabric or skin but seemingly arbitrary abstract patterns of light and dark.
In my overly literal mind perfection has always meant absolute control. But that sort of tightness leads to deadness. And in the work of others, what excites me is often the freedom and play of randomness and the emergence of seemingly abstract elements that somehow contribute to the realistic fullness of the whole.
This is the mystifying process by which randomness gets taken up into a higher level of order, as if by magic. It is not magic but a particular genius that is capable, paradoxically, of harnessing randomness. Herding it, one might say, as one guides living animals without ever fully understanding or controlling them.
For instance. Is Jamie Orr’s work representational or abstract? Landscape or decorative illustration? A tidal pool or a star nebula? It is both. Most importantly, it is alive.
Likewise in Žanić’s work. The unpredictability of the behavior of the materials—water and pigment freed to flow over paper and canvas—is somehow intrinsic to the overall narrative coherence of these images. In this they reveal an important principle of nature, its orderly randomness, with equal emphasis on both parts of that phrase. Nature is intrinsically meaningful—comprised of living beings whose exertion of will is scaffolded by knowable laws—and yet guided by the inexorable unfolding of chance, giving rise to abstract but recognizable patterns that go on repeating in endless permutations, soloists improvising on their themes.
This helps explain why incorporating chance into a created work—given certain technical conditions that still remain somewhat inaccessible to me—makes it feel more realistic, more solid.
It’s a bit weird, if you think about it. If life can be defined at all, it is that which overcomes local entropy. And yet chance marks—thoughtless splashes of paint, the casual scrape of the palette knife over an undulating surface—are a form of local disorder. These techniques, which harness a path of less resistance, which embody the energy discharge of chaos, nonetheless give rise to a higher order—life. As in nature, the movement-toward-order of the striving branch echoes so perfectly the movement-into-decay of the eroding coastline or hillside.
It also helps explain how, in iconography, illustration, and other “flat” or abstracted design, the very “unreality” of an image can be a doorway into an aspect of reality that is not as easily accessible to literal representation. That’s why photorealism, while often beautiful and impressive, can feel not very realistic. A naive literalism—here I am speaking of my own tendencies—can threaten to flatten the emotional and symbolic valences of reality that are in the background shaping our perception of the world whether we are consciously aware of them or not.
We don’t experience the world in photo-like sight, though we may often fall into thinking we do. Photographic realism is one artifact of vision, a shard of sight mediated and structured by specific technologies, like any artificial image, a latter-day trompe-l'œil.
Even the most methodical and intentional mark making cannot escape the effects of chance. The weft of the canvas, the imperfections of a particular batch of paint, the under or overcaffeinated hand that shakes in excitement or fatigue.
And just so, even the wildest, most apparently random smears and rivulets cannot escape their own hidden order. The order that lurks within the creator’s mind or the creator’s limbs or within the structure and limitations of the materials themselves, which channel and unveil persistent truths about the behavior of the material world.
How is this power deployed, in practice? That’s the hard part. I’m only beginning to see how hard. It’s not much more or less than total ego-death. Each decision a battle with your pride and your illusions. You have to make the mistake, accept the mistake, love the mistake, be the mistake. Make it your cornerstone and build upon it. You work back and forth between skill and disaster, now unleashing randomness, now responding to it with ruthless intention. Letting go of skill takes the supreme skill. Cling too hard and you strangle it. That is what I observe in others and in a few precious fleeting moments in myself.
This is the mystery that I love. The spontaneity that only emerges out of years of sweaty dedication to technique and craft. The craft that only emerges out of a dance with randomness, an openness to the unknowable. Like Alexander’s pattern languages, it is agnostic as to aesthetic and infinite in form, and yet it resonates with an underlying unity.
I love clarity emerging out of chaos like the prow of a ship nudging through fog. For our glimpses are only ever partial.
I love bold angularity struggling to hold back soft and nuanced flesh. For that is what loving a human is like.
I love cold digital and warm analog sleeping side by side. For that is the life we’ve been given.
I love pattern, shape, and form not didactically forged but instead precipitating out of a seemingly random dance of light and color. For this is how our eyes serve us.
I love everything nature says to me, even when I can’t understand her. The struggle to learn her language flatters and amuses her. I love how she is as solid as the wood handle of my trowel yet her secrets are always receding from my grasp. All inquiries are met with playful deflection, welcoming yet inscrutable, like the waves. Like water, holding you up even while giving way beneath you. She blushes as she sits for her portrait, which will never be completed in a thousand and one attempts. Yet each one a perfect likeness.
Links.
In these latter days I’ve been catching up on my John Le Carré, somehow passed over in a childhood immersed in pulp fiction. In his review of Cornwell’s recently published private letters, Peter Hitchens traces how the erstwhile spy’s early life among the security services, that “parade of sinister clowns,” informed his tales of quotidian human betrayal amid the absurdity and squalor of a declining imperial power.
The late Carmen-Helena Téllez on Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and the “ecstatic, serene, and nonnarrative” style that came to be known as “holy minimalism.”
Several pieces worthy of close attention from Plough Quarterly, the single best magazine operating today:
Selections of Easter homilies from St. Óscar Romero, in which the Salvadoran archbishop, who was murdered at the altar by the U.S.-backed death squads, pre-emptively forgives his persecutors. “To all of them I say, ‘Your crimes do not matter. They are ugly and horrible. You have violated the highest dignity of the human person. But God calls you and forgives you.’”
Andy Stanton-Henry on the virtues of hiddenness, quoting Merton: “If I had a message to my contemporaries, it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.”
Zito Mado on the glory of the home library.
The conspiracy against ice cream.
A new USDA report outlines a framework to combat the global seed monopolies.
The U.S. Bishops have produced a useful reflection on transhumanism, with an emphasis on genetic engineering and other emerging technologies, drawing on the Church’s perennial affirmation of the goodness of our embodied natures and the inherent “grammar” of the created order.
Glad to see Ai Weiwei is enjoying life in sunny Portugal.
I received the grace of shadows. The grace of remaining in the dark.
—Anna Kamieńska, “A Nest of Quiet”
May the rains of May bear you fruit,
As ever,
J
o portugal :(