SUBJECT MATTERS
Copyright 2014 Charles Wish
Manipulating material solely for the purpose of some visual display is a curious undertaking to be sure. What I often find equally curious though is the variety of objects (or non-objects) which finally end up in these displays. I like to keep notes when it comes to these things, the following are some of my favorites.
What’s it All About
For me the basic aim here has been to harmonize the visual stylings of some rather clichéd American ideals, and possibly castoff some of their jadedness while doing so. That told, there are usually three things that come to mind most while I’m working: ideo-aesthetics, cultural exchange/cultural pliability, and last but not least just the act of painting itself; something which always seems so clumsy and dated while I’m not doing it and pretty much the exact opposite while I am.
I also often tend to view what I do as a consideration on how to deal with some of the Regionalist movement’s inherent contradictions. If you study the work (especially the landscapes) of Wood, Benton, and Curry you will find visual ties to Dow, Fenollosa, and Batchelder. If you study the work of Dow, Fenollosa, and Batchelder you will find ties to Kakuzo, Koun, Hokusai, and the Japanese Ukiyo-e school of painting and printmaking. And, if you study the work of the Ukiyo-e you will find ties to Buddhism and Tao, which means ties to China and ultimately India. So, in their push for an art-form that screamed hyper American localism they ended up borrowing from compositional habits that were anything but… which is something that has long fascinated me.
Agrariadelic
Once upon a time I set out to paint some pictures about a relationship; or, more specifically, my dad’s relationship with America and my mom’s relationship with America having a relationship. Both of my parents have boatloads of love and devotion for this thing we call the USA. However, both of them also have very different expectations about what they should be getting in return for their patriotic investments.
So, one of the very first things I needed to do in order to achieve the goal of painting the complexities of these liaisons was to find two distinct sets of aesthetics which best conveyed the differing points of views regarding my parents’ national-identities. Funny thing about it is, where my mom is concerned, the set of aesthetics which best described her ideas of the American promise would come from an entirely different country. Not only that, but in the country where these visual ideas and symbols have been kept alive for some time now, these particular images would be considered on the conservative side… where my mom’s ideas and expectations of America are most certainly not considered conservative at all… at least not here in the USA.
A set of aesthetics is an entity unto itself; an entity with its own heart and ideals. And, the real truth about it is, they couldn’t care less about our social wrangling. Oh we put on a good show of trying to weaponize and pit them against each other. But at the end of the day, when all the dust has settled, they are still completely unscathed and self-secure. What’s more, the ones we have vainly tried to label as enemies (you know, in the name of our limited causes) will always get along just fine… all we need do to experience this eternal comradery is simply step aside and let them play on their own terms.
Narratives
Narrations are important to me. None of us can ever totally observe what’s wholly going on in the universe. So, since we all have these observational gaps, we fill them in with stories. You know, like the one about the angry dragon, stingy leprechaun, generous tooth fairies, God, emptiness, the story that there is no story, whatever we imaginably choose. These narratives are crucial to our human development; often times helping us to reach a place of better understanding than say mere repositories of empirical experiences ever could. However, one doesn’t want to wither away in a world of futile fantasy. To temper this I’ve come to live by the following rule: the more a story suggests reasons for us to fall under the daze of extreme negative concepts (i.e. hate, jealousy, intolerance, despair, outright frustration, outright injustice, absolute hopelessness, absolute fear, etc.) the more discordant it is with reality. Of course painting has not only helped me to widen and fine-tune my own narratives in regards to this maxim, but it has also helped me to deepen my understanding and relationships with the stories of others; always reconfirming the validity of the altruistic compass which I’ve come to gauge all narratives by.
Uniqueness with an Armature
As far as I know human beings are the only living organisms on the planet that produce their own external time pieces. I love clocks. Each one is a distinctly crafted gadget with its own specific characteristics while still being capable of precisely performing the same universal function. However, not too many of us ever directly ask a clock what time it is. Instead, we look elsewhere for the answer and then forcibly manipulate the clock into conveniently reminding us of what we’ve found. I like to think that every clock has something unique to say entirely on its own. And, without having to dismiss our collective ideas on temporal stability, each and every one of us should never feel discouraged about asking just what these firsthand statements might be. This attitude of subjective autonomy tempered with objective mechanism has always fascinated me. So it’s no wonder that this genial outlook would offer some influence when it comes to appropriating subjects into my work.
Sex, Death, & Forms
Symbo-pantheistic is a pretty good way to describe the abundance of imagery you’ll find in Tantric art with Shiva and his eternal consort Devi (the mountain’s daughter) being the two central immutable characters. Although you may find a reversal of gender roles and even the total dismantling of concepts like absolute consciousness in some Tantric Buddhist texts, Shiva (the divine masculine) traditionally represents universal unqualified awareness and formlessness while Devi (the divine feminine) traditionally represents absolute energy and the ability to manifest form. And, whether implied or directly stated, it’s overwhelming clear in all Tantric literature: no manifold form falls into being without the interwoven union of these two principals and no manifold form falls out of being without the transformation of something into something else.
Consciousness, energy, creation/transformation, all of these are adoringly entwined in the eternal play between forms and awareness. From a symbolic Tantric perspective everything is sex and everything is transformation. In this regard, it would be absurd to allow one’s disposition to become overrun with a morbid obsession for distinct moments of death or a wanton fixation for distinct moments of sex. But, it would also be just as absurd to ignore or (even worse) try to escape the omniscience of these things. All forms are connected and in possession of these cosmically sexual and transformative generalities. Discovering these generalities, not so much by studying sex or death in particular but by deducing the general from all various particulars, is the objective. To me this is much of what my art is about (i.e. helping extrapolate such generalities from objects where they may not be so readily apparent).
Surrealism vs. Psychedelia
When I first began to publicly display my work (circa 1999) many of those who came forward to discuss it used the term: “surreal.” This is understandable because there is a dreamlike attitude there for sure. Freedom of interpretation is paramount, so if surreal is what you would like to call what I do by all means feel free.
However, the imagery that finds its way into my work really doesn’t come from an attempt to describe my dreams or any other part of my unconscious thought process. All be it, I’m not opposed to including images from my dreams in these paintings; some of them do contain them. But, most of what’s included here stems from symbolic sources connected to older and more universal preexisting traditions, whether I’ve ever dreamt about them or not. The differences between Surrealism and Psychedelia are both subtle and striking. Where surrealism seeks to create an illogical interdimensional hybrid of an outer-reality with “another” inner-reality (a dualistic sentiment which fundamentally goes against underpinnings of a cohesive whole) psychedelia describes a continuing reconnection from our current and often fuzzy geminate misperception of a unified single reality; which is almost always followed by the logical conclusion that there was never any substantial variance or disunion to begin with…just a more complete and transparent experience of the same One entirety, within or without. And though I may be splitting hairs here, it is for these reasons that I like to think of my work as more psychedelic than surreal.
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