Category: Walt Whitman

A New Way of Being in the World

Walt Whitman Examining a Butterfly

Skill is something an artist understands intimately. It is the very means by which we convey our intentions and express meaning in our work. It is the method by which the very sensations that I feel or am compelled to feel by my subject are transferred to the viewer. Without this skill I am almost mute. As a poet is able, with few words, relate a wealth of feeling, so too must the artist, visually touch on the same poetic nuances. The artist through their skill, their craft, their hands and vision embody reality in a singular way.

The artists’ engagement is a type of embodiment in the world. I am present, I am engaged and I am open in mind and spirit. The artist takes on this role of embodiment and presents a new way of conceiving the world and one’s place in it. This skill, this sensitivity of one’s hands to craft matter creates a connectivity between myself and all living things. And this sensitivity provides an emotional framework that opens one up to envision reality in a new way by placing things in their proper relationship of meaning. This is not a rational knowing but an intuitive knowing that is more intimate, more personal.

Objects in the world carry an emotive logic that connects to my humanness. My body and those animate and inanimate objects in the world, share an intertwining of substance (we are made of the same atoms), a moment in time (which we presently occupy together), and a spacial proximity (a physical relationship). But this is not something that we can possibly be always conscious of. Most times we are unaware of this connection. The meaning has been obscured, our eyes glaze over. But the artist through his practice and engagement- his attentive gaze- establishes an awareness, a re-connection, between himself and the life force that makes this world a living, breathing thing. It is the only reason that the artist keeps at it.

Because of the artist’s willingness to take on an attentive posture, re-engaging with objects in the world, art becomes a humanizing act both for the artist himself, as well as, all those that may see his work. Through this tactile skill and open awareness I become more human, more empathetic, more emotionally tied to others, more open to the unexpected- to things too subtle to see outright. I am most human, most alive, when empathy becomes a pattern of being and enriches my creative engagement allowing me to become highly attuned to those images that are seeking to find material form, to find an embodiment in the world.

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A Master in the World

Robert Henri, Cori, 1907?

I have been reading a phenomenological study of trans-personal experience by David M. Levin of Northwestern University. Levin describes a trans-personal experience as the sensation of an intimate connection to all living things. One has a physical experience of how one’s being is part and parcel of the whole world. Time seems to flow between past and future in an ever-present wholeness. One experiences an awareness of being that heightens an attentiveness within ourselves, awakening us out of a slumber, and tactility binding us to ‘life’. I can only describe it as a ‘oneness’ that is vitally alive. I have had this experience only a couple of times in my life and each time it has felt profound. It always reinforces my desire to paint and is at the core of what my work is about- holding a mirror up to this magnificent and beautiful world in all its immensity and profundity, always conscious that we ourselves are made of the same element, the same magnificence.

There is a quote in Levin’s text that got me musing. An R. Blythe interviewed several people in a very rural English village, Akenfield, in 1969. Granted this was from a time, prior to our modern age of excessive connectedness, but it is still rather interesting because I have seen this same feeling expressed in the writing of Whitman, Emerson and in Henri’s Art Spirit. The interviewed is an old blacksmith, Gregory Gladwell,

I have a lot of my grandfather’s features although I’m not as tall as he was. I have his hands. Hands last a long time, you know. A village sees the same hands century after century (Blythe, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, New York: Dell Publishing, 1969, p.131)…My wife went around, keeping her eyes open for bolts, latches, handles, grates, drawing them and finding out their dates; and I made more of them as exactly as you’re not likely to tell the difference. Mind you it took time. It took hours. But it was a fine thing for me to have something lying on the bench before me made by one of the old men, and my hands doing again what his hands had done (Ibid., p.136).

What is so incredible about this account is that Gladwell feels entirely connected to craftsmen of the past, that he is in fact, their presence within the world. Gladwell does as his ancestors had done and do, now, in this present moment. He is the embodiment of all that they had mastered. And from his own hands the very same objects are created once again in all their perfection. Gladwell feels within himself that he is a vital and integral link between the past, the present and the future. He intuitively knows that some future blacksmith will enter the world and will carry on the same work with the ‘same hands’. He also understands that shaping beautiful objects takes time and requires the skill worthy of a true master. And that this masterly skill is not solely of his own making. It is a shared inheritance.

Henri expresses almost the same idea in the Art Spirit, that interconnection of all artists bound by their skill and motive, through time from all ages,

The Brotherhood is powerful. It has many members. They are of all places and all times. The members do not die. One is member to the degree that he can be a member, no more, no less. And that part of him that is of the Brotherhood does not die.

The work of the Brotherhood does not deal with surface events…No matter what may happen on the surface the Brotherhood goes steadily on…Let the surface destroy itself, the Brotherhood will start it again. For in all cases, no matter how strong the surface institutions become, no matter what laws may be laid down, what patches may be made, all change that is real is due to the Brotherhood (Art Spirit, p.19)

Henri describes here a trans-personal experience and I think he saw himself as a living link to the masters of the past. It comes with an admiration for all the skill it takes to create a work of art but also, with all the responsibility one has to take care of that skill and the moral obligation that that skill entails.

The finer the motive, the more the artist sees significance in what he looks at, the more he must be precise in the choice of his terms (Art Spirit, p. 135)

This idea of our shared connection both of masterly skill and our ability to create real change, should evoke an appreciation and a feeling of gratefulness on the part of every artist. The skill we have was not only acquired with great effort by our own individual part but also the combined effort of those artists whose skill we have inherited. This keen awareness highlights the dignity of our vocation and the awesome responsibility we have to create work that is vitally alive and meaningful.

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