Resonance: On painting, process and the maturing of the creative act
Once upon a time, I was a visiting assistant professor at Vassar College. A stately school 2 hours north of New York City, I split my time between a room I rented in the gritty pounding of the East Village and a wee apartment in Vassar’s Victorian faculty housing. There were others like me who had residences in the city. A group of us traveling professors took the MetroNorth train to and fro, and were a family of sorts, the only ones of our kind. The train was our lounge and reading room, an alternate space in between home and work that existed only for us, stretching along the Hudson River’s changing water scenes. Winter was icy and Spring was warm. On the train, we talked and shared the intimacy of thought life, ideas, dreams, creative plans. One comrade, a professor of Physics taught me about resonance.
Resonance, in Physics, is the concept of vibration. It’s the occurrence of a vibrating object causing another object to vibrate. It is a phenomenon in which an acoustic system amplifies sound waves whose frequency matches one of its own natural frequencies of vibration.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Waves/funhar.html
Years later, a few weeks ago, I was interviewed on a podcast. The interviewer asked me how I came to paint, after a 13 year career as an academic in which my primary focus was writing ethnography & memoir, a life-long passion for dance, and an early life in which my parents focused my studies around music.
“It is my most mature art form,” I replied. “It’s different. It’s what I was put on earth to do.”
Like most interviews, during which you put on a brave face and stumble through answers hoping your make-up isn’t dripping off your hot, mortified face, I was making up it up on the fly despite hours of feverish preparations and sticky notes of bullet points taped to my computer. I was off-script. Which is not unusual for me. In life, we are so often off-script.
But later, in the quiet of late night hours I came to wonder about maturity and the creative process and why abstract painting feels different to anything else I’ve ever made, written, sewn or moved through.
And that is because of resonance.
I experienced resonance with a painting (below) that I decided to call STRANGE MAGIC and I will share the story here. I want you to know a little bit of what happened and how it happened. It’s exactly like in Physics and its also not like it at all.
STRANGE MAGIC.
24 x 36
Oil on Canvas
June 2024
The first thing that happened is that I drew a hummingbird. I draw and paint lots of birds except they rarely end up looking like birds. My grandfather kept hummingbirds on his patio backed onto protected wetlands along the coast of North Carolina. Once he caught one in his hand and I watched it tremble and flutter. It was the strangest color blue.
HUMMINGBIRD
Charcoal on paper.
12 x 16.
March 2024.
The second thing that happened is that I took the bird from the drawing and painted it onto a blue background. I hated it. I decided (the “I decided” part is important and I will mention it again at the end of this piece) that the painting would became a dump painting, which is, a painting which sits off the the side as I’m working on another main work. The job of a dump painting is to collect the paint that is already mixed but doesn’t make it on to the main work (because oil paint is expensive and I like the bougie kind and it makes me feel better about wasting paint.)
And then a major plot twist: the little dump painting began to resonate. It vibrated, resonated, and I allowed. I was no longer in charge, you see. The painting was painting itself, collecting things from my head (images, memories, songs) — and things from life — and cohering them on the canvas.
The first thing it collected for itself was a solar eclipse.
This is how it happened: it was midday in New York and I was drawing in the studio in midtown Manhattan as usual. Because I am a social media addict I knew all about the solar eclipse path but I had no intention of joining the midday fray. Still, as artists rushed about in paper glasses, spilling like plant fronds onto 7th avenue, I had the sudden thought that collective citywide events in New York are the best fun in the world. And so, I went outside too.
Resonance. It’s not like the painting told me to go outside, but I’m not saying it didn’t, either.
The solar eclipse burned my brain and my eyes and a few weeks later the painting did this:
STRANGE MAGIC, fragment.
As the months went on, the painting gave itself some new colors, some star-spangled birds, and lovely wide painterly marks. The painting flipped into consciousness a memory of seeing Jasper Johns’ Flag (1954), viewed in person as a young student of art two decades before on a class trip. It pulled in a mark from a painting I made a few months earlier, and then remembered how a mentor in 2020 told me a mark I made looked like a boat. So the painting painted itself a mark like a whale. It grabbed a piece of music by the Cocteau Twins, on their 1990 album Heaven or Las Vegas.
It cohered and vibrated and collected and resonated and informed me that it was time to put aside the main work I had been laboring over and make it — the dump painting — the new focus of my time. Paintings get jealous like small children.
Resonance doesn’t happen all the time, and it does happen sometimes. By that I mean, I had experienced paintings becoming living pieces of consciousness with their own self will before. I will try to explain how it happened.
The last time paintings were alive was during Pandemic time, and I was in Lockdown in a small studio apartment in Los Angeles. My neighborhood, West Hollywood, was the center of George Floyd protests. The National Guard came in with large tanks and rolls of barbed wire cutting streets in half and rearranging blocks. My friends who had lived through the LA Riots/ Uprising in 1992 told me to lock the door and not to leave the building for any reason. My neighbors huddled together, and stayed drunk smoking cigarettes in our tiny backyard. I painted in my kitchen, transforming appliances into palettes and my freezer into paint storage.
As I watched the big beautiful California sun rise and set over glistening green palm trees I wondered if I was still sane, and what was real. We heard that the local Nordstrom blocks away was boarded up after rocks were thrown through its windows and the security desk out front set on fire. Trader Joes was boarded up. People were walking in groups below my window wearing hazmat suits. I painted and texted: I couldn’t emotionally handle talking to anyone outside of San Francisco, New York or Los Angeles. There were two different Pandemic/ Lockdowns in America at that time, and I only wanted to talk to people who were living in mine.
Friends zoom called and shared images from Hollywood where red flames lit up the sky and smoke poured out along heavy feet running and sirens screamed, I stayed up nights painting and slept during the day. Weeks passed. Months passed. I didn’t leave the apartment. I ate sometimes, there was plenty of food. I had bags of frozen vegetables and rice that I had spent days stockpiling and packing away in every available cabinet over multiple visits to the grocery store after a friend called and told me I had to go now. I went as soon as I got off the call. There was no evidence of anything wrong in the perfect glamorous Los Angeles 72 degree sunshine. I gathered food making trip after trip despite my cynical New York brain that believes conspiracy theories are hoaxes created by the alt-right to distract ordinary citizens from their political maneuverings, despite my loathing of grocery shopping, despite life as normal.
Energy. Resonance. Knowings beyond the veil.
The news said my neighborhood had the second highest amount of Covid cases in California. I painted a red lines into a yellow sky, a city on fire, wounded.
The smell of linseed oil mingled with the smell of half burnt rice.
Friends in New York texted that a makeshift hospital was built on their street and they watched dead bodies lifted into it.
As days were nights and nights were days, as our neighbor across the street was shot while walking his dog and the CVS where I changed my quarters into dollars and shopped for secret make up finds was robbed at gunpoint, as Fuck the LAPD tags covered the walls of the buildings, I began to sense that my paintings were living beings. Not beings like humans. More like pieces of consciousness. They felt alive, but alive like a snail or slug or piece of seaweed washed up on the pale golden beach is alive. They vibrated. They requested, they asked. They had neutral energy; they didn’t feel heavy or unfriendly — but neither were they warm and comforting. They just were. They existed.
Lockdown came to an end. Covid cases were falling. Talking heads argued about vaccinations on TV. I could take walks around the block and smell the flowers. Kids biked outside on the quiet carfree streets. The crows still circled overhead.
My neighbors packed up my life and put it in storage; my oldest friend in the world stayed on the phone with me as I boarded a plane back to New York. I slept for a year or so, in friends’ spare rooms and rented sublets. I slowly acquired new things, a winter coat. I worked a little, drew some, took the subway, missed my stop, watched little girls sell candy and young boys hustle coins after “showtime”. Life began to resemble something known. I started painting in a big, busy studio with lots of snacks and gossip breaks and paintings felt like paintings again. Normal.
And yet. Yet — during a gallery visit, or a drawing class, or a trip to MoMA analyzing a painting technique and deciding something about it and how I could use it in the creative process [deciding: using logic linearly, intellecting, controlling] — I would feel a sharp stab of longing for Pandemic days. Longing for the strange gift of collective loss of control over anything we thought we knew about how things were supposed to be. Longing for my little West Hollywood studio cluttered with paintings looming like totems. Amulets of peace, of protection, of stability. When I studied Visual Anthropology at University College London, we read a theorist who wrote that objects act on humans, just as we humans act on them. We read about cultures carving animals into totems that protected or punished. Unlike the Western World’s conception of art as an object created/ made/ shaped/ controlled by a special human with special skills, cultures around the world knew the objects that surrounded them were imbued with divinity. Magic was common and everyday. Human life was brutal and short. Objects outlived humans, they were the ones with special skills — not us.
I wish I could give you the formula for how to slip beyond the veil where paintings create themselves. I’ve tried my best to explain it, and my face is hot because I am not sure I have succeeded.
It’s like this: you will never know which days or moments that you are living will be the meaningful ones.
You see, humans cannot hold fast to the meaning of it all when we are busy living at the same time. A long tiring commute after a full day of teaching introduces a concept that sparks a changed relationship to creativity. A global pandemic becomes the quiet and solitude needed to mature as a painter.
You will see snails and seaweed and an eclipse of the sun. You will hold a small hummingbird in your hands, listen a piece of music — but you won’t remember any of these things. You will remember the weddings, the time you graduated, your bonus check. You will remember the feeling of buying a new car. You will remember the birth of your daughter, the smell of her head.
All the other things become strange magic inside you, buried. All the other things become free things, bits of living consciousness, packets of energy and vibration with a trajectory of their own. Just there. Just there on the other side of the veil.
And the paintings know it too.