On Painting 8

It is not the eye alone that perceives light, but the eye married to the mind: antar jyuotiih. The inner illumination is jyotisam jyotih: the Light of Light. It is the direct object of contemplation.

The One without colour appears
by the manifold application of His power,
With many colours in His hidden purpose.
May the Being of Splendour, in Whom the world dissolves
and from Whom it rises,
Grant us a clear Understanding!

Svetasvatara Upanishad : IV; 1-4

Bodies of Light, Number 39, Oil and Beeswax on Belgian Linen mounted on cradled Maple panel, !2” x 9” x 1”, 2021

On Painting 7

so I’ve been reading Sean Scully’s collected writings. I like it .. he and his writing are inspirational and interesting to me. Actually, he says what i wanted to say but could never quite formulate in a lot if not most instances throughout his career.

I am devising an essay in response to his essay on Rothko titled Bodies of Light.

I am titling my new watercolor series and oil paintings, “Bodies of Light” 1999 after that brilliant essay. Maybe I’ll make it through a decade with that like he did with Wall of Light. hehe…

Scully’s conclusions on the historical path from Van Gogh to Mondrian to Rothko to his own long engagement with those artists through his practice is very concise and makes sense.

He opens the essay with, “closing the book” on Rothko, linking that phrase to a larger writing, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition by Robert Rosenblum. Scully speaks of the “brilliantly elemental and symbolically religious” (spiritual, philosophical) in a single stroke” breakthrough that Rothko made. He ties it in with Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (1809) (front cover) and to Rothko’s Green and Blue (1959) (back cover literally closing Rosenblum’s book.

In 2005 Donald Kuspit wrote a review of Scully’s Wall of Light exhibit at the Met in New York titled Sacred Sadness (Artnet, October 2006). In that essay one can find the perfect explanation of both Scully’s lifelong pursuit and mine. So much in both the Bodies of Light essay and the Sacred Sadness review echo my own sentiments and ideas that have floated through the years of my painting practice—the painter’s path. They elucidate and catalog my own hard won understanding of the “human endeavor” of painting in both the “modern tradition of abstraction” and the Baudelraire-ian concept of “Romanticism” —”intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite”.

Untitled Number 11, Bodies of Light, Oil and Beeswax on Belgian Linen, 30” x 66”. Three canvases 30”x 22” each. ©2021 , Steven Plount

On Painting 6

Again, Hélène Cisoux in The Last Portrait or a Painting of God essay states that we can say mimosa, that we can give a carefully, descriptive narrative or a subtly crafted poetic metaphor describing “mimosa”, but in the end it is only words tracking time. Paintings (painters) give face to words enabling words to be completed and then done away with. “Painters are the great lovers of the world and everything in it… able to take possession of things. Painters are bird-catchers of instants… who, only through the act of love – by the clear, star like abstraction of what one feels [they] capture the unknown quality of the instant, which is hard and crystalline and vibrant in the air, and make (it) a calculable instant greater than the event itself” (Cisoux/Lispector, 584).

On Painting 5

“There is no science of the beautiful [das Schone] except Critique, and there is no fine science except for fine art”. (Nietzsche) We must in the act of painting deliver ways of cognizing in order to transcend romance. The balance must be struck between the Romantic Baroque and the Observant, Reacting, Modern spirit. The feeling of hypertelia along with some of the unusual prospects of the world has to permeate the work. A painting has to exude something that we are able to grasp intellectually without words and critique, something that goes beyond the techniques acquired to “make” it.

Number 44, Watercolor on Arches 140# wc paper, 30” x 22” , 2021

On Painting 4

It is good to contemplate the activity and ongoing mind/spirit/embodiment gambit while in the rectangle of the ground, Once one is immersed in the process, critical thinking, and activity of the painting practice …. one is able to attend to the vibrations around them and the nature of the material world while absorbed in a meditative focus that is tactile, sensual, plastic, glowing, transient, and full of sound. Some jeweled atmospheric apparitions embodying what’s left of a day in the life with music and color.

Painting is meant to depict depth and light: physical, tactile, and plastic as well as transcendental beauty and earthly beauty. Ancient and historical paintings hold some kind of alchemy like that in them. That is why we keep looking at them and studying them….. contemplating them.

Abstract expressionist contextual attitudes, processes, image/meaning makings where possibly the last of authenticity in the art world (as it is and has developed into over the last 60 years.

not completely true as there are some very perceptive, famous, extraordinary painters around in the world.

SP July 1, 2021

Number 30 (detail) . Watercolor on Arches 140# wc paper, 30” x 22” x .2”, mounted size: 40” x 32” x .25” . 2021 © SPlount.

On Painting 3

Still remember “quick work doesn’t mean less serious work, it depends on one’s self-confidence and experience” (Van Gogh). We all want to create a “sheaf of paintings, a herd of paintings, a flock, a tribe of paintings.  ....The greatest lesson of painting could be that of flinging oneself beyond the ego. For the ego is the last root preventing flight.” (Cisoux)

Black Hill, watercolor on Arches, 2009, 8’ x 12”.

Painting the emptiness that is full

Transcience . Transparency . Translucent . Transcendental .

1. “The one standard in art is oneness and fineness, lightness and purity, abstractness and evanescence. The one thing to say about art is its breathlessness, lifelessness, deathlessness, contentlessness, formlessness, spacelessness, and timelessness. This is always the end of art.”

– Ad Reinhardt: ‘Art-as-Art’, Art International, December 196
++
2. “In the diligent exercise of mystical contemplation, leave behind the senses and the operations of the intellect, and all things sensible and intellectual, and all things in the world of being and nonbeing, that thou mayest arise by unknowing towards the union, as far as is attainable, with Him who transcends all being and all knowledge. For by the unceasing and absolute renunciation of thyself and of all things thou mayest be borne on high, through pure and entire self-abnegation, into the super-essential Radiance of the Divine Darkness and Light.

– The Pseudo-Dionysius: ‘De Mystica Theologia’

Small Sketchbook Watercolor, SP 2021. no title. 15” x 12” .

Bone and Boneless

In the Way of the Brush the bone and the boneless ways of painting are desribed. The drips at the bottom of my paintings serve many purposes that are visually and transcendentally related. The are a reference in two ways….
They are architectural in three ways

They are both relevant and irrelevant

They have musical counterparts and timbres

They are falling down melting down
They push up
They pull down
They are actors and actresses
They are nothing

They are everything
Bone and Boneless

the way of the brush

cloud field
color field
glaze and layer
deeper and depth
inner light grounded pure ground
planting pine trees

May 2021
SP

Collider #2 , ProCreate/iPad work , dimensions variable , limited prints available contact the artist via the contact page and form .
from the artist’s collection of iPad meditation ashram paintings painted in Nabadwip , WB , India ©2018

On Painting 2

The whole thing is to peel away the scales on our eyes and make an attempt at seeing the truth without saying too much.

This is nearly next to impossible. We want to talk and describe. Everybody’s describing these days.

R. B. Kitaj said painters have one battle cry, “Look…. Look at my picture!”

Each layer of paint is applied in our material world and gathered in the realm of the invisible.

As “bees of the invisible” painters, musicians, poets partake of the nectar of reality at its sweetest core and remake it physically into their individual offerings.

It seems to me that no matter how hard we try it is nearly impossible to divorce even the most flippant of artistic responses as non-spiritual, as lacking in some kind of connection to the hidden thought or some unseen or unknown world, i.e. the transcendental.

There’s mystery there… somewhere in the process and the result. The various worlds that we are not allowed to “see” or travel into while living in the material world, yet have a taste for because faith, fear, or stubbornness cause us to secretly know something outside of ourselves beyond this “reality”.

The fear of what is unknowable keeps us resolving the problem of our despair over our personal deconstruction (death) and our cultural selfishness.  

Still working intensely this 2021

Helene Cisoux:
”“I love painting the way the blind must love the sun: feeling it, breathing it in, hearing it pass through the trees, adoring it with regret and pain, knowing it through the skin, seeing it in the heart.....I position myself towards the sun. Toward the light. Toward painting.

The painter is the combatant of enigma.

The painter, the true painter, doesn’t know how to paint. He looks for the secret. He will put his life into it. The painter is always Percival. He sets off, he leaves the forest, but in order to come back, on his way around the world, to the forest. I sense the painter’s superhuman task: to capture the hundred cathedrals that are born in one day from the cathedral of Rouen. To see them being born. To see them succeeding one another.

A magnificent thing happened to Hokusai:

‘In loving the pretentious style of He-ma-mu-sho-Niudo, the painter Uamamizu Tengu, of Noshi-Koshiyama, appropriated for himself the incomprehensible art of his drawings. Now, I who have studied this style for almost a hundred years, without understanding any more of it than he, nevertheless had this strange thing happen to me: I notice that my characters, my animals, my insects, my fish, look as if they are escaping from the paper. Is this not truly extraordinary?’ “

A Book for Artists Who Love Experimenting in Color.

A link to an artist’s book pubished on Blurb. No words just pictures. Click the Image for a Preview.

Color Practice

By Steven Plount

These Odd Small Watercolors... like Shivling and Abhishek

In the morning I paint with watercolors on paper and in the afternoon—the oil painting. Living a a simple life. Everything evolves more quickly and authentically when in solitude.

It's traditional painting practice working within a consciousness of both Eastern & Western art focused on the touch of hand with brush using colored muds. Painting transparent layers works the surface up to a luminosity. Making a still yet active space.

Beeswax adds depth/translucency enhancing the luminosity present in the underlying linen ground (or paper). Final layers even the plane creating a seeing-through phenomena matting the reflective paint adding a depth.

I am inspired by skies and clouds, emptiness, color, the hand, brushes, early to mid-twentieth Century poetry, the focused intent of the Pahari miniatures, the great masters of painting, Indian and Western Classical music, brilliant fine surfaces filled with hovering, luminous clouds of paint imbued with life and the mark of being human.

from the Watercolor Suite Bell Wave Number 8 …. 12” x 16” Sketchbook paintings, abhishek, linga, shivling, India, Bharat. a head, a mask, a face, a space, a gate, a path.

from the Watercolor Suite Bell Wave Number 12 …. 12” x 16” Sketchbook paintings, abhishek, linga, shivling, India, Bharat. a head, a mask, a face, a space, a gate, a path.

10000 Ugly Dots to Vex Wei Wei (Mi Fei)

Title of four paintings made in 1685 by the Chinese landscape painter Shih-t’ao (1641 – 1720). The fourth painting includes the poem:

Ten thousand ugly ink blots to vex Mi Fei;

A few flaccid strokes to make Tung Yuan roll over with laughter.

The perspective lacks unity from my ignorance of a winding landscape;

The foreground is too confused, just a few rustic cottages can be made out.

I have broken out of the mold and liberated my “mind’s eyes!”

Like a Transcendent riding the wind, whose flesh and bones have etherealized.

– Shih-t’ao: ‘Ten thousand ugly ink blots’, 1685

Shitao, Master Shi Planting Pines, c. 1674, ink and color on paper. National Palace Museum

That was then this is now

Today a normal cloudy day with empty blue and strong sun

On Painting

Every color seems to have its own weight or gravity so when one starts combining them a whole world of experiences and lived life erupts and containing that within a given space is the challenge of making and activating a painted surface. Making a thing to exist separately from yet in alignment with some conscious intent . Each part needs to be in sync and out of sync as well . If relationships are too obvious than it fails but if they are not found then it fails as well . I suppose it’s all about putting things together without too much philosophizing and only a touch of rearranging that eliminates unwanted tidbits of subconscious meanderings and that aggression to think your “the only one”. The ego trip that comes down to us from art history and previous successful painters.  

For me the urgency of making paintings is no longer preeminent as it was at 22. Now  it’s more of a methodical intensity that pervades waking moments and dreams .  Hot coals for roasting whole potatoes in a field rather than raging out of control forest fires devouring surfaces.

SP21