Shane waters final presentation

Shane Waters

PROCESS PAINTING: A SPIRITUAL PURSUIT

WINTER LANDSCAPE Li Gongnian Northern Song Dynasty

Unlike Western ideas in painting, the concepts of Chinese Landscape painting focus on process. Painting in Europe were often used as a tool to narrate biblical stories or as a type of photographic record. The primary goal being to capture realism. In Chinese Painting the experience of painting is of great importance. Artists did not strive for perfection but for a spiritual journey.

WINTER LANDSCAPE Li Shan Jin Dynasty (115-1234)

REMINISCENCE OF JIAN RIVER

The ancient Chinese landscape artist paints the landscape in order to achieve a spiritual relationship with the subject. As the Chinese artist paints the mountains he travels through them and climbs to peaks that may be otherwise unreachable.

Dong Qichang Ming Dynasty (1368-1644)

DRUNK IN AUTUMN WOODS

Shitao (Zhu Ruoji) Quing Dynasty (1644-1911)

It is no revolutionary idea that the act of painting can help an artist achieve more than completing an aesthetically pleasing art work. Many cultures in addition to the Chinese use painting as a spiritual or philological tool.

ENCHANTED FOREST

Jackson Pollock 1947

When discussing Jackson Pollock’s work one can easily see relationships to Chinese Landscape paintings. Not only are there similarities when it comes to gesture, color palette and compositional, but the artist’s presence is apparent.

You can visualize the artists hand making brush strokes and marks.

POLLOCK’S “PRAYER”

In attempts to fight his alcoholism, Pollock underwent Jungian psychotherapy which included engaging him through his art. Carl Jung’s theories relied heavily on the idea that the human mind is inherently religious; that in order to maintain mental health religion is necessary. When thinking about the physicality and concentration involved in Pollock’s work, one can see relationships to other cultural methods of prayer or meditation such as Navajo and Tibetan Sand Painting.

Jackson Pollock 1935-1936

“Today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source. They work from within.” –Jackson Pollock

ENCHANTED FOREST

NAVAJO SAND PAINTING

Jackson Pollock studied Navajo Sand Paintings; The similarities are apparent. Navajo Medicine Men create Sand Paintings as a religious rite. The ceremony is performed to strengthen or heal an individual.

Sand is made of ground flower, corn and rocks.

A sick Navajo child takes part in the Sand Painting ceremony.

Two Navajo medicine men create a sand painting

During the ceremony the individual must sit within the painting. Illness is sucked out through this process. Afterwards the sand painting must be destroyed. The idea being that the painting contains the poison. Completed Sand Paintings are not to be preserved physically or through photograph because is would enable evil or sickness to live on.

Three Buddhist monks from the Deprung Loseling Monastery in India working on a sand mandala.

Tibetan sand paintings are created with sand made from precious stones. After the mandala is completed it is destroyed symbolizing the impermanence of material objects.

The mandala serves as a tool for guiding monks to the path to enlightenment. Monks achieve a state of meditation through intense focus ; they visualize the mandala as a three dimensional palace with deities within.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jackson Pollock, jackson-pollock.org

Collective VISION Statesman Photo & Multimedia Blog, photoblog.statesman.com

Hurvitz, Leon. "Tsung Ping's Comments on Landscape Painting." (1970): pages 146-56.

Freer Sackler Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art Website, Asia.si.edu

45. Navajo Sand Paintings, Kenneth E. Foster, Man , Vol. 63, (Mar., 1963), pp. 43-44 Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland http://www.jstor.org/stable/2795972