If, in any painting or photograph, a person is depicted as very small within a wide space of nature, there is a possibility that the viewer will recognize that small form as one’s self and that this self is not separate from the vast space.
That is to say, such a picture may inspire the realization that one is the vast space itself.
When it is recognized that the vast space contains the form and that one is both the vast space and the form — at the same time — this is a realization of nonduality.
– Jerry Katz
Reblogged from Jerry Katz’s treasure trove of nondual expression:
Jerry, whose contributions to this site go back to its launch in 2007, has agreed to pen a guest post in the near future. This is something to look forward to!
I’ve been wondering lately how to better share the rich resource of information hiding on pages in this site. For its first decade, the awakened eye was a self-hosted website, and it seems that the content enjoyed much higher page rankings then than it does now, hosted (freely) on WordPress. I have come to understand that blog posts, being interactive, tickle the toes of the search engines in ways that static pages do not.
My new plan is to present much of the material published on static pages, as posts. These will not simply be replicated pages; they will link to the original pages but/and also contain fresh material. I hope this strategy works to introduce both old and new subscribers to more information that may be of interest, and that it throws a hook to the robots so that the artisans and writers who have contributed to the site will feature more prominently in search results.
Usually when a new artisan is added to the artisans’ gallery, a blog post is published to introduce them and their work. However there are a few who were added years ago when the site made its quiet entry into online orbit, who missed out. Let’s start with them.
Vija Celmins:
Night Sky, 2002
Made, invented – it is not the image experienced in life, but in another reality. – VC
Influenced by Ad Reinhardt’s Twelve Rules for a New Academy 1953, Celmins started to consciously strip away elements in her art and rejected gesture and composing. Returning again and again to ocean views, lunar surfaces and star fields she depicts vast expanses and creates depth through her investigation of the image and her chosen material. Most of her images are painted or drawn very close to the edge of the surface she is working on and seem to extend beyond the canvas and into the space occupied by the viewer.
The focal point is the small compressed image in front of you; the illusion of space from the image stays on it. As the artist describes it, the image is ‘pinned down, in your mind it wants to expand out. Reality (the art) makes it stay where it is on the wall.’
As I was working with the pencil, I got into some of the qualities of the pencil itself. That’s how the galaxies developed.
Although Celmins has been associated with several art movements during her career she seems always to have operated outside the dominant trends of the day. The rigour and the intuitive nature of her process has restricted the volume of her creative output and in turn limited displays of her work. Celmins works at her own pace and has likened herself to the spider for its precise and industrious constructions.
Maybe I identify with the spider. I’m the kind of person who works on something forever and then works on the same image again the next day.
Web #1, 1999
Tedious [work] for some; for me it’s kinda like being there.
For Celmins a work of art doesn’t represent anything but itself. Through the photographic source material of oceans, night skies and deserts she relentlessly explores the image and the richness of its variation. As subjects they are united by their depiction of boundless nature and suggestion of the infinite.
I’m not a very confessional artist, you know. I don’t ever reveal what I’m feeling in my work, or what I think about the President. I use nature. I use found images.
In Celmins’ work however, the subject matter is secondary – her primary interest is that of making.
Sometimes I’m convinced that there is nothing else but the physical act of making the art.
The reason I think I do images that require so much time is that I feel the physical work itself lets some other thing that came through, letting something unconsciously seep through, some subtlety that my brain was not capable of figuring out…
I do like kind of impossible images. I mean images that are hard to pin down. That aren’t like a tabletop and an apple, but images that are really almost like mind images. Images that are space but they’re hard to grasp. But then they’re very graspable here, I mean, I make them accessible through another way, through manipulating the paint.
And from the video, a comment that will strike deep into the heart of those engaged in a contemplative art practice:
I really do like a lot of solitude. It’s impossible to do anything without it.
Clear, shadowless sensing; inspired writing. Who else but David Abram?
– – –
Late one evening, I stepped out of my little hut in the rice paddies of eastern Bali and found myself falling through space. Over my head the black sky was rippling with stars, densely clustered in some regions, almost blocking out the darkness between them, and loosely scattered in other areas, pulsing and beckoning to each other. Behind them all streamed the great river of light, with its several tributaries. But the Milky Way churned beneath me as well, for my hut was set in the middle of a large patchwork of rice paddies, separated from each other by narrow, two-foot-high dikes, and these paddies were all filled with water. By day, the surface of these pools reflected perfectly the blue sky, a reflection broken only by the thin, bright-green tips of new rice. But by night, the stars themselves glimmered from the surface of the paddies, and the river of light whirled through the darkness underfoot as well as above; there seemed no ground in front of my feet, only the abyss of starstudded space falling away forever.
I was no longer simply beneath the night sky, but also above it; the immediate impression was of weightlessness. I might perhaps have been able to reorient myself, to regain some sense of ground and gravity, were it not for a fact that confounded my senses entirely: between the galaxies below and the constellations above drifted countless fireflies, their lights flickering like the stars, some drifting up to join the constellations overhead, others, like graceful meteors, slipping down from above to join the constellations underfoot, and all these paths of light upward and downward were mirrored, as well, in the still surface of the paddies. I felt myself at times falling through space, at other moments floating and drifting. I simply could not dispel the profound vertigo and giddiness; the paths of the fireflies, and their reflections in the water’s surface, held me in a sustained trance. Even after I crawled back to my hut and shut the door on this whirling world, the little room in which I lay seemed itself to be floating free of the Earth.
the awakened eye 