TIM
HAWKESWORTH
A Strange Time
to Hold a Brush
by Timothy Hawkesworth
September 2001
It is a strange time to hold a brush, to follow the flow of
paint into the silent world of painting. The mind staggers at
the run of events: the scale of the personal and communal losses,
the mountain of grief. It weighs on both our minds and our bodies.
We replay events and try to grasp the mindset that led the perpetrators
through flight school, to the brutal use of the knives, to the
final turning of the aircraft, right on target. Great painting
throughout history has often come from a sense of awe, usually
religious awe. Now we are filled with a different sense of awe.
It is the sweep of our humanity that staggers our minds: our
unbelievable aptitude for goodness and love all the way across
the spectrum to such acts of destruction and hatred.Philip
Guston counseled painters "to live without consolation,"
to keep their eyes wide open and not to look away. The studio
is a place to sit with things. There is work to be done; there
is a lot to sit with.
Robert Hughes, in less extreme times, advocates "the energy
and persistence with which painting embraces lived experience
of the world; gives that experience stable form, measure and
structure, and releases it, transformed, into one mind at a
time." This embrace of lived experience is rooted in the
physical nature of painting. Looking at painting is firstly
an act of secretion. We follow the artists touch, the movement
of the hand. The act of painting insists that thought and memory
be turned physical. Like an athlete, the artist's mind must
become fluid, to allow the hand to move. The paint records with
unwavering accuracy the attitude of application. If the artist
tries to foreclose - if he or she tries to impose their intention
too strongly - then this embrace of lived experience is lost
and the power of the painting dissipates. This insistence at
the heart of painting, that we must stay true to our embrace
of lived experience, and, in what the Buddhists call, "embodied
mind" makes the studio an important place at a time like
this. This is a place where our nature and learning cannot be
separated. Painting draws from the two great traditions of humanism;
the romantic tradition that relied on "the truth of the
imagination and the integrity of the senses," and the classical
tradition of a sensitive empiricism exploring the world from
all angles, looking for understanding and clarity. Seamus Heaney
says he "credits poetry with having a restorative effect
between the mind's center and its circumference." Painting,
like other art forms rooted in the physical as well as the intellectual,
can also be credited with restoring the health and fullness
of our humanity.
It is still a strange time to hold a brush. It is a time of
action and reaction. It is a time when there are things that
need our immediate attention. However, once we have done what
we can, being in the studio and rebuilding the routine is a
good place to be. Painting has always drawn from the primitive
forces within us that affirm life despite the obvious. When
we follow Rembrandt's finger through the paint we are feasting
on his humanity despite the shadow of his death. Painting has
always addressed our frailty. Part of its power and poignancy
is that it speaks from low to the ground. It speaks of body
fluid and pulse rate, of physical heat as well as the traveling
of the mind. The making of a painting is always a brash, stand-up
affirmation of life. It is shaky, doubtful and a little comic
in the world characterized by military strategy. It is however
a road into the complexity and contradictions of our inner selves.
Important work as we deploy a military force capable of unimaginable
violence and destruction. An indispensable tool as we sit, once
again, with our eyes open looking with astonishment and horror
at what it means to be human.
About
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