Solid Universe Theory and being an abstract painter

Notes from Abstraction and Solid Universe Theory: An Artist Talk given at DaVinci Art Alliance, Philadelphia, PA by artist Martha Hope Carey / November 28, 2018

I wondered about what you need to have in place in your mind to believe that the universe is solid rather than what it is - which is pretty much empty space and things we can’t fully describe yet. I read a science fiction short story a few years ago that explores the impact of this belief being shattered. The beings in this story discover, using technology they developed, that the universe they believed or “knew” was solid (which they based their philosophies, their physics, their predictions on) was, in fact, not. They actually existed in a pocket of space within a solid sphere which was afloat in our universe. Which, mostly empty space and mysteries.

Both ends of that are fascinating to me: the systems and strategies we use to define and refine the universes we exist in, mentally and emotionally; the changes that happen when perception changes; reactions to traumatic change; what kinds of things push accepted thinking to new levels; how resistant we can often be to stark realities.

And it made me think about seeing. I mean, before glass was ground and used in eyeglasses, every person on earth who had any visual impairment short of blindness saw the objects in the real world around us as reality. The way they saw things, however distorted by nearsightedness or astigmatism, was the way those things were. For them. Before the microscope showed otherwise, there was, in the Western world, a belief that each thing in the natural world was symmetrical – had been made that way, in fact. But, nope.

The moment we are living in now, in the U.S., we are being led by a person who sees solidity where there it in fact empty space, and whose nearsightedness has him continually describing objects of all kinds in a distorted manner. And this is disconcerting and enraging and absolutely a call to anyone who can see clearly to challenge this.

Those were some of the thoughts I’ve been having, putting together the paintings in my recent show Solid Universe Theory.

Because abstraction itself is a challenge to any solid universe thinking.

I have been painting for 17 years now. Always abstraction, no “phases.” Canvasses are resilient planes onto and into which I extend my ideas, reactions, history, body, feelings, mind. It comes naturally to me to do this. And it feels like the opposite of many other things. By which I mean, much of life is figuring out strategies that gain one a sense of satisfaction or clarity in relation to others. Encounters with new people, for example: we “place” them, they remind us, they sound or look like, we go along with or against their identity or energy. All the time. We take in knowledge using strategies that satisfy, too. Ways of learning.

During the last 17 years of painting, I also got a PhD – not in art. My dissertation work was ethnographic research in a school, where I was learning how a group of teachers made shared meaning of an experience. The work they did to make sense of things, and the work I did to make sense of their processes, involved lots of strategies, to get to a point of satisfaction. This is common sensical, since we are all contingent, and knowledge is as well.

Abstraction, to me, is…not that.

When I paint, I get to the edge of that plane in front of me and my brain must open, and suspend, in a way. I must get to a tense and aware place – or I am in that place and then grab a canvas – where it’s as if the unconscious habits of mind are like big airport automatic doors, but intentionally stalled open.

What does that do?

I stop having strategies. I stop seeking for something that is contingent to be satisfied. I am not social or engaged or thinking about another person. I barely think about my body.

That tension is fuel. I work and shift and move and drag and pull and grab tools and work and work. There is no representational aim, since I am not thinking about strategies that may make things recognizable for anyone (including brush strokes or styles). There is no recognition. My mind is the stalled-open door for as long as I am in the work, and frankly, every time I look at the work from there on.

Which is abstraction.

When one looks at an abstract painting, the viewer is pulled in, sometimes by color as a trigger or a feeling, but the viewer uses strategies to immediately find the familiar and…finds none, and so creates some, and tries to apply them, but there is no place for anything to rest.

So, you try again – is that an object in there? I see a window! Maybe a train track. An aerial map? But those things are not there.

And if you stay in engagement with abstraction, you wear out your strategies, eventually. Which means the possibility is there for you to bust through the solid universe, and out into the real one, which is lots of empty space and things we don’t have words for yet.

In that moment, you get a view of the capacity of your own mind.

For some people this can be very uncomfortable. After all, there is a lot of space and unknowable stuff in there, too. And in my opinion as a human and an artist, that is glorious.

The titles of my paintings are markers, for me, markers of what the thing was that activated the weird tension, that made the doors stall open. And it is never a question that does this. 

Questions are strategies to get to satisfaction. It is, rather, just a moment of comprehension about things I can never fully understand or even imagine clearly – like what thoughts and visions one would have, to get to the point where you could conceive of sending a probe into space to take photos of the moons of Saturn. This has been done, which is fantastic, but holy shit, the creative thought and acts of imagination that went into making that happen. To strive and build and plan a way to capture images of objects which reside so far out in space that no human in our lifetime will ever see with their own eyes.

That is an achievement of mind that awes me. The vast leaps of thought that had to be taken to even imagine maybe, and then if, and then yes, and then how. And to take those leaps for the sole reason of expanding the known, for the benefit of all of us. Remarkable.

Abstraction allows me to stay in that tense, aware, and in this case, amazed moment of awe.

It is glorious. It works my mind. And I paint.

Equivalence

Reading science fiction tends to reaffirm for me that the law of mass-energy conservation (that there is a constant amount of both in the universe, and the two can interconvert) really applies to all things emotional as well. In emotional exchanges you also have products and reactants and, as in all things universe-physics-Einstein-y, the energy generated in such an exchange exists and goes ... somewhere. It does not suddenly just blink out. But the rub is always, where is the somewhere? Who does it land on, sink into, impact, or change?

And what about the sub-level stuff, the actual electron level stuff -- is it possible that there really are humans who are inviolate energy expellers, never absorbers? Which of course would have to mean there are an equal opposite number (well, in pristine physics thinking, anyway) of energy absorbers. Does one get trained for this in childhood, I wonder, or is it really a genetic thing? And if it is genetic, can we develop a sci-fi kind of solution, some trippy procedure, which might reverse one's 'natural' state as expeller or absorber? I wonder about just who would sign up for that.

To me science fiction is psychology, abstracted out; sci fi makes it easier to face the limits and constraints of human being-ness in the present moment. Unlike, say, classic murder mystery novels, which offer psychology parsed out; killers have clear motives (well, most of the time), pain is pain, there are specific steps to redemption, and closure is possible. Both offer a kind of weird comfort.

They seem to always be about closed systems, though, about emotional constants that must balance, as hope with despair, violence with calm, imaginative leaps with limits. Because we all are in a closed system, causing and reacting, expelling and absorbing. Which makes me wonder how many writers are more absorber than expeller, or vice versa. And about what it would be like to inhabit my opposite number out in the world. I feel like this is a deep failure of imagination on my part; I find it much easier to spend time imagining the inner lives of absorbers, generally. Because I am pained by expellers, especially the truly oblivious ones, I feel a lot of anger and lack of trust about them. The energy has to go somewehere, after all. But I want very much to be able to imagine the joy expellers must experience. They must go through time and space with such lightness.

I know now that painting is an interconversion. Looking over my work over the past dozen years recently, I came across a fuzzy photograph of the first painting I ever sold...I had a seriously crappy camera at the time. The piece was called 'Found, grounded' and I painted it, and sold it, in 2002. It was actually four small canvasses (16x16 each) composed as one piece, and I painted it in early 2002 while my studio was set up in a tiny section of the tiny living room area in our tiny apartment in Seattle. A friend of a friend very kindly allowed me to hang some of my work at a coffeehouse downtown (I had just started painting about 6 months before) and a writer, visiting town from Chicago for a few days, saw the painting and wanted it immediately. I met her when I delivered the packed-for-the-plane painting to her, and she told me she had to have the painting hanging on her wall above her writing desk, that it would fuel her.

What the painting was to me -- the discovery that I had found that I could paint, and that this could be my work, my life -- seemed evident to this writer, without me explaining it. But in truth it mattered not at all to her, and rightly so. What mattered to her was the way she felt when she looked at 'Found, grounded' and the way she knew she would always feel when she encountered the piece. I have met only a handful of the people who have bought my paintings over these past 13+ years, but she fits with what I know of the others. They are absorbers too.

Integration Phase

Yesterday I worked on finishing a painting, the subject of which was an old friend. The work was fueled by my own recognition of her as someone who is not well emotionally, and/or psychologically, and by the further recognition that she has, most likely, never been. I just had not seen it until now. Which maybe says something ominous about my own ability to see people for who they actually are, or says something wonderful about her ability to manage and perform in a way that conveys to others, especially new acquaintances, that she is ok. Possibly both.

Seeing things, people, patterns, places for what they are is difficult if one is trudging through the world making your own meaning. There is always the temptation (or perhaps it is just the habit, after all this time) to fit perceptions into your self-made structure. Maybe it is easier for folks who have a ready-made structure or system to rely on, an external system that filters and organizes meaning for you? Then again, their commitment to this type of structured thinking seems to task them; life seems to be a continual stress test, for believers, to stay true to the language and rules of their chosen system. I can see why people are concerned that Donald Trump may blow a gasket at some point.

I suppose the upside of a commitment to the ready-made is that you are socially knowable, since most of what you communicate are signals and signifiers to others in your group. And yes, those of us outside your group can read your signals, too. So you can be seen clearly for who you are, because you have allowed this idea of self to be defined by the belief system you adhere to and promote. And, speaking of Trump (and speaking with no authority on the subject other than a childhood spent around exclusive rich white narcissists who were motivated by the acquisition and promotion of wealth) there is truly nothing else there.

But my old friend has not adhered to one system or structure outside of herself for her identity, and I do not either. So our intermittent engagement with each other has been one of slow-motion discovery, as if we were binary stars rotating around a shared past experience but not really interacting with it or each other, and so never seeing the full surface at any time. She is both lovely and strange, and I realize now that her self-perception scares me too. Perhaps it always did, but I had not created enough of myself yet, way back then, to recognize that.