Michael S. Parkes

This is a church that I pass every day coming home on my commute from Spokane.

I have finally come to understand that it is the spaces (time) between painting (sincere creativity), cannot be trusted. All thought, reason, logic, appraisal, feeling, all words, all conversation, review, criticism, more words, more thinking… absolutely NONE OF IT CAN BE TRUSTED as having any bearing whatsoever on the art. I have danced around this issue for so long, but have never had it hit me full force until last evening while I was painting. Only when you are actually creating can you trust anything. All that comes afterwards is a lie waiting to pounce, meaningless abstractions of thought which make utterly no difference at all. 

Even these words that I write at this moment cannot be trusted as having any bearing on the art. All of this journal making activity is actually quite senseless (although I do enjoy stringing words together). But shall I write my way into being a better artist, or a worse artist? No. The words absolutely don’t matter. Emails and websites don’t matter. Critical regard or condemnation doesn’t matter. None of this land between the act itself, has any weight. This has been the hardest realization for me to come to, but I think it carries within it the vestige of hope. As long as I can hold to this understanding, and refuse to allow the mind to have any authority over the art.

This might explain why we create the way we do, I think our heart must know the exact path to an expression that will force this issue. She understands the precise method or approach or activity that will most perfectly bring this spectre out in the open, and force a healing to begin. For it is a healing that must take place, a final burial as it were of the mind, a turning away from “meaning” as a source for truth. For there is no truth apart from creative action.

With too much time between creative sessions to think, I have fallen victim to all manner of evil. Heartaches and a feeling of pointlessness, hopelessness. Well exactly! Certainly the mind will feel these things, but they don’t matter. If you awake and look at your efforts from yesterday and recoil in horror, or think it perfect, it doesn’t make any difference. Only until you can become immersed once again in the act can you trust yourself. There is nothing to be gained by placing any faith in these vacancies left between the times you actually hold a brush in your hand.

Words and thought are of a lower order. When you are actually in the art-poetic realm you are resurrected out of this lower order and ascend into heaven. In that span of time, you live free. The times that come afterwards are the abstraction, the sorrow of shadows, a meaningless pit of nothingness, in the sense of it having any capacity to understand or “frame out” the art. It can never happen. All of this, the vast systems currently in place by which we have organized the art-poetic expressions, are senseless, artificially derived constructs that our minds have foisted upon us, and as artists we have allowed this tyrant to take hold. Now we are the prisoners, we dance to their tune, we think to believe in these thought-derived assertions, that they actually have significance. Which they do not. They only have validity if we assign them such, if we willingly surrender. But refuse to bow, and you will live free. For the art is free, and can never be understood.

And this is art’s power, to liberate the soul of man from his assumed meanings.

And this is art’s power, to accomplish nothing, to acheive nothing, to celebrate senseless activity.

Our technology isn’t helping matters either. It is moving us further away from the intrinsic holiness of creative works, into a realm where the object itself no longer matters, all that matters is what comes afterwards, reproduced images of art, digitized phantoms that adorn websites, all of the chatter surrounding art… all of this noise feeds the assumption that thought-meanings can be trusted. No, it is all an abstraction that we made. The only source for truth is the object itself, the touch, the smell and light of the colors in your hands. All else is an absurdity that is increasing in intensity, fueling our fears, robbing the sacredness of our hearts, destroying the beauty of the substance of life itself.

I am becomging convinced that the electronic media is only making matters worse. It has done more harm than we realize, moving us away from touch, and ushering us deeper into thought alone as dependable. Take a wonderful story, lift it from paper, from the touch of the page, turn it into a flicker from lcd screens, and you trivialize humanity in her physical state. It is touch that means everything, the object means everything, the act means everything.

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