Announcing two exciting additions to the site today.
The artisans’ gallery welcomes artist, teacher and writer Jordan Wolfson, who lives in Boulder, Colorado. (What is it about Colorado? It’s strongly represented in the gallery!)
And – Jordan’s insightful and inspiring essay how painting can help to save the world, actually, has been posted as a page, with his generous permission.
Still Life with Red Tapestry X, 2013
oil on linen, 28″ x 25″
About his work, and the investigation fuelling its process, Jordan writes:
I believe it is through the identification of the self with a pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic sense of being that actual change occurs. While our identification remains within the confines of discursive thought and language our model of the world remains one of fragmentation and conflict. Language isn’t to blame – it’s just the way it works.
Actual change occurs through a shift in our identification of the self and the growing awareness of the essential and indivisible fabric of reality. It is to an investigation of this sheer presence, which is not only pre-conceptual but also resides before and between form, that my work is committed.
Visit his page at the gallery to read his entire artist’s statement and view more of his artworks.
how painting can help to save the world, actually
In this image-rich essay, I’m confident Jordan speaks for all of us who understand our practice as a passionate movement towards unity with something inconceivably larger than our programmed personality. Something that signals the end of fragmentation and disharmony by disappearing the illusory gap between the observer and the observed.
A couple of extracts:
What is presence? And how does it get associated with an object? What is the process with which material gets charged or imbued with it? How is it that a human being can take colored mud, smear it around on a piece of fabric and end up charging the materials so greatly that it resonates with vitality hundreds of years after the person is long gone? How is it that a human being can take raw material and form it in such a way that it moves our hearts and quiets our minds? And what does this have to do with saving the world? […]
We are not who we think we are. Painting carries the possibility of getting us out of our minds and into an awareness of our being. That is what occurs when we receive a painting, whether from another’s hands or from our own. The reality of our experience facing great painting, the power and force of transmission remains a mystery as long as we remain in the story of Separation. As we dare to allow our minds to enter into the story of Interbeing, painting affirms the larger truth of this new story. Its essential nature re-storys the world, reimagining who we are and where we are going. As we paint we have the possibility to not only make an object to look at, but to retell our story. […]
the awakened eye 