Strange, but Wonderfully Fertile
on unnameable beginnings
Naming beginnings is hard. And by hard I mean solid, firm, an act of making something rigid. To name a beginning is to conceive of the world as still, divisible into parts. To name a beginning is to conceive of time as linear, ahistorical, without roots or ancestry, without ghosts returning to disrupt the perceived solidity of things and make the present waver.
I could say that the practice I call Drawing on the Senses began when the world shut down, in March of 2020. Or, I could say it began after I wrote my MFA thesis on the cultural history of the senses, an act of writing a context for myself that might explain what I was doing with sound in a visual art program. I could journey back through teenage years and a childhood of feeling myself as undefined sensation carried through the day by provisional narratives always on the verge of softening back into shapelessness. I could say it is a practice that began when my baby fists first released their clench to make tiny handprints on the window, or before that, when I was a cluster of cells and synapses lighting up neurons in pleasing patterns of newfound joy.
Beginnings are often named when those experiences we consider to be internal make contact with those experiences we consider to be external, aka other people. Drawing on the Senses was collectively birthed as a nameable thing in the world when it was joined by a group of adventurous others up for exploring sense perception and drawing with me in those strange early pandemic months out of time.
One of those others was Mark DiBattista. In his bio written for his upcoming show titled “Uncommon Denominators” at Sunny’s Bar, Mark describes his own beginnings:
By training I am not an artist. I am a mathematician with a doctorate in Applied Mathematics and a few academic papers in geophysical fluid dynamics, mostly covering statistical mechanical models of features observed in atmospheric/oceanographic flow.
My artistic training started modestly about 20 years ago, with two six-week classes in botanical drawing offered by the continuing education annex of the New York Botanical Gardens. And there it ended, as, armed with a lead holder, rotary sharpener and 2mm graphite leads with hardness spanning the range 2H – 2B, I ignored all instructional directives and set about reproducing exactly the stillest of life on the smallest possible spatial scales that the materials would allow.
Until the pandemic arrived. A friend invited me to participate via Zoom in a newly created art class with Krista Dragomer, an artist whose studio we had visited the month before the world shut down. It seemed a diverting offer – perhaps I’d learn watercolors, since, clearly, I had no need for instruction in the use of a pencil! So, you could say, it has been a long climb on a steep rockface, with growing comprehension of marks, materials and composition – the basic stuff of artistic creation – gained through the deepest of redpointing! The works in this show spring from prompts and objectives given in the final two years of classes, and evidence, hopefully, a broadened notion of value in artistic ends other than exact reproduction.
Mark’s show opens this Friday, February 9, 5-7pm at Sunny’s Bar, 253 Conover Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Here is Mark’s statement for his show:
These works might be viewed as end states of material substances put under physical stress – the aggravated clarity of pencil applied in quick, jointed bursts without memory or visual guidance, the diffusive glow of graphite dust rubbed into, and out of, and into a textured paper, the spectral remains of an image partially erased and partially reapplied
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Or as curated, limiting realizations of advective, diffusive and evaporative processes that direct the evolution of darkening/coloring agents suspended in liquids, – miscible liquids antagonistic to each other’s suspension – poured on nonabsorbent paper, forced by surface tension and electric repulsion, inertia and gravity, and fixed through adsorption…
But if exact reproduction is a flat declaration, space is cleared here for other claims that suppose and importune, dare and pretend, translate sidelong into the dream domains ruled by night and candy colors.
The soil beneath the vinculum, grounds for an acorn, is strange, but wonderfully fertile.
When did you start drawing is a commonly asked question at shows like Mark’s. It is a measuring question: how far did you have to travel? How far will I? It is a question that assumes the externalization of skills, that they are located elsewhere; at the top of a mountain or the fingertip of God.
There’s nothing wrong with seeking skills. There is magic to be found in losing oneself in the dizzying details of botanical rendering. My questioning of these approaches to creative practice doesn’t come from a denial of skillfulness and discernment, but of the narratives that frame our perception of these pursuits. Neither the gifted artist nor the seeker journeying up the mountain are figures that acknowledge that, from the microbes in our bodies to the weather shaping our days, we are never really making anything alone. How might we experience the development of skill if we saw ourselves as constituted by interdependence, if we could draw a tree by listening to the dendrites in our bodies conversing with the mycorrhizal networks of our arboreal relations?
Rather than think about Mark’s work and show as a success story, I’d like to think, together, about the fertile conditions of failure. Mark’s artistic exploration fails to stick to the path, to accumulate knowledge, perfection, or mastery. It fails to cohere, to be defined by difference (that was a realistic drawing, this is an abstract work). It fails to have one beginning that progresses to a singular conclusion. And in that failure, his process becomes messy, uncertain, and delightfully alive.
So, I invite you all to celebrate your yet unnamed beginnings and fruitful failures. Come, let us encounter each other in the world of names and fail together.
If you are interested in exploring Drawing on the Senses with me, the next 6 week online group class will begin on Saturday, February 23rd.