Finding Your Line

Recently Christian Tissier, one of the best-known practitioners of aikido, gave a seminar at my dojo. People came from all over the world to participate. I was glad to learn from him, and also of the surprise opportunity to ask him questions. Aikido is as essential to me as art and, for me, they deeply inform one another.

So I asked him this: At this point in my training, how do I best advance internally? Is it about focusing on something in my practice, or attending more seminars? How does he approach it? [Stay with me here, I'm getting to the art part!]

He said: "You must find your line." He talked about aikido as having many lines, lines of ancestry in particular, and that jumping all over and trying to pick up something from everywhere is actually not so useful. That sooner or later I'm going to have to choose my line, and follow it.

As simple as this may sound, it had never really occurred to me before. I guess I've always believed that I should listen, look, and try to learn from everyone who has something to share. That it is important to remain entirely open. Not to select, if it means leaving out.

Sometimes people just say something at the right time and it goes 'thunk.' Yes, aiming involves going towards. But there is another part, which is about letting fall away the parts that are not the target. That at a certain point in one's practice, being continually open to all new influences may be just as stymying as being totally closed to them. That if I want precision, if I want to get to the core, I also have to hone.

So the obvious next question I had for myself was, what does 'finding my line' look like, both in aikido, and in art? Here is how I applied it to the art:

FINDING MY LINE
1. Literally: What are my unique mark-making techniques?
2. Methodologically: What do I choose to make, and also not to make?
3. Heritage: Who are my artistic ancestors?
4. Innovation: To what new places am I taking this trajectory?

It's not as if I haven't considered these things before in this context; they just haven't been at the forefront.  So I am looking forward to embarking on using these guidelines as a lens, and seeing where it takes me.

SFMOMA last chance dance

SFMOMA had some interesting offerings to experience before closing for renovation today. Most people were on line to see The Clock. For four hours. I didn't have the patience for that. But I did spend some time with a fantastical architect whose whose imagination and line quality had me struck dumb. I thought I was looking at lithographs or some such, but these were free hand drawings!

The images brought a number of science fiction films to mind - Brazil and Alien in particular. But set in the lighting of Metropolis and in something of the surrealist engraving feeling of Max Ernst.

I was also intrigued by a program called The Workshop, offering DIY classes, that had samples set up in the lobby. I haven't really caught on to the 'DIY' craze, but I thought this was a really ingenious use of a gallon plastic bottle. Something about the way it held the light was pretty compelling.

ART, AWAKENING & LOSS

Daisy Eneix, PERSEPHONE IN HADES, 2012 graphite drawing, 22x30

(click on image to enlarge)

Daisy Eneix, SONGBIRD, 2012 graphite drawing, 22x30

(click on image to enlarge)

Daisy Eneix, FELINE, 2012, graphite drawing, 22x30
(click on image to enlarge)

It has been five months since I sent a package to myself from Can Serrat, Spain, which contained preparatory drawings created over a period of six months, and the final drawings I created at a residency while there, a time when my hand was fully coordinated with my eye and the muse, and I had the luxury of drawing six hours a day and took full advantage of it.

I experienced pure joy in the making of these drawings. That I could address this multilayered material, be both isolated and surrounded and influenced by other artists who were also wresting with their muses, and not feel as if I wanted for anything except to be doing what I was doing was a kind of celestial experience. I was channeling a precise and clear energy, purposeful, sometimes huge, but remarkable in its focus and total absence of fear. In martial arts, the peak experience for me is similar. There was a deep awareness and contentment, a stillness inside of motion. It was a kind of awakening. I was realizing a vision, I was open to being guided, and I was in contact with pure creation.

The package of these drawings never arrived. I am lucky that I have any record at all, but I do really wish I had the originals, as well as all of the other sketches and beginnings of new works that were with them. Maybe their loss is the catalyst intended to force me to turn a corner, or release the subject matter altogether, or it's just part of the larger letting go of many things this year. Maybe they will show up one day. It's hard to say. I don't know entirely what to make of it. But I'm trying to listen.

I am grateful that my dear friend and traveling companion Susan Schen took photographs of the drawings with a real camera. They were taken in a combination of sunlight and indoor light, as they were never intended as a final record. Unfortunately, large, gray pencil drawings on gray paper --particularly when so detailed and full of purposely faint lines alongside dark, coarse ones -- don't photograph well without professional lighting, if at all. But since I do have these 'ghosts' of them, I wanted to share them (above).

It is so much harder, while operating in the world of practicality, human relationships and the social and professional practices that are just as essential to me as art, to remember how important this relationship is, the one waiting there, with the Muse. I can only access it when I am truly solitary, and only when I give it my full, undivided attention. Since I am not the kind of person that naturally leans toward solitude, this is always a challenge. But the memory of this and the posting of these drawings may help me to keep striving towards it amongst the other, competing strivings.

I am so grateful to Can Serrat for creating the kind of holding space that they do for the artists who come. It is not only the delight and aesthetic wonder of the place but also its hosts, who imbue it with the kind of spaciousness and quiet, love, tending and merriment, eclecticness, chaos and edge, that allows artists to feel both at home in solitude and in the company of their peers. And also dinners to die for. This seems to be especially helpful for artists.

Overall, I'm just grateful that I got to have this experience, and how vivid it remains in me.

More about Can Serrat:
http://www.canserrat.org/

Additional details of the artwork above are posted on the Can Serrat blog at: 

http://www.canserratart.com/2012/07/meet-artist-daisy-eneix.html

ON MAURICE SENDAK:

Believer: How did you find your artistic style?

Maurice Sendak: It's spontaneous combustion. I don't know what's going to work until I start to draw. It is so out of your hands it is amazing. It just started to happen. Bumble-Ardy was a little boy many years ago and now he's a pig. I don't know why. There's so much I don't know about the procedure.

From:
p78
"I REFUSE TO CATER TO THE BULLSHIT OF INNOCENCE"
Maurice Sendak interviewed by Emma Brockes
The Believer
The 2012 Issue

http://www.believermag.com/

SYMBIOSIS

Painting completed. Commission delivered. Yes!

Daisy Eneix

SYMBIOSIS

ink on wood panel

36x18"

Symbiosis ©2012 Daisy Eneix

Symbiosis (detail) ©2012 Daisy Eneix

Symbiosis (detail) ©2012 Daisy Eneix

Symbiosis, detail ©2012 Daisy Eneix

Symbiosis, detail ©2012 Daisy Eneix

All artwork photographed by Susan Schen.

Color Craziness

I do a lot of color testing and settle on a palette before painting. 

The evidence sometimes looks pretty chaotically cool, so I thought I'd share. 

This one was tricky to work out but I think I have my almost final palette now :)

It was so nice to settle into work this evening. Hoping to do the same tomorrow.

A Revelatory Manifesto ~ Patti Smith, Just Kids & Why I Make Art

mJUST KIDS by Patti Smith - a set of artist revelations

This book really touched me. Some incredible ruminations on being an artist, creating, love, collaboration and innocence:

'The creed we developed as artist and model was simple. I trust in you, I trust in myself.'

'Robert trusted in the law of empathy, by which he could, by his will, transfer himself into an object or a work of art, and thus influence the outer world. He did not feel redeemed by the work he did. He did not seek redemption. He sought to see what others did not, the projection of his imagination.'

What is the soul? What color is it? I suspected my soul, being mischievous, might slip away while I was dreaming and fail to return. I did my best not  to fall asleep, to keep it inside of me where it belonged.'

'I didn't feel for Warhol the way Robert did. His work reflected a culture I wanted to avoid. I hated the soup and felt little for the can. I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.'

'I wondered if I had really been called as an artist. I didn't mind the misery of a vocation but I dreaded not being called.'

'In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.'

'In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?'

'Robert had little patience with these introspective bouts of mine. He never seemed to question his artistic drives, and by his example, I understood that what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of color and graphite scrawled upon the sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life-charged.'

THE BOOK: http://www.harpercollins.com/browseinside/index.aspx?isbn13=9780060936228