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06/16/2006: "Waiting"

All is quiet on the art centre front and I’m at the studio, waiting. A good deal of time goes by waiting: waiting for the acrylics to dry on paintings that lie scattered about the studio; waiting for the next move to emerge in my mind’s eye from the dialogue I hold with them; waiting for the moment when the peak is reached inside me – the one that rescues me from my fear of destroying everything I’ve done up to now and execute the gesture I had a preview of and practiced in my head while I waited.

Quite often, irrelevant ideas pop up in my mind in those apparently idle moments. Mundane worries calling for a solution and inclusion in my schedule, echoes of a conversation with friends and the ensuing mental dialogue of things imagined and left unsaid. Here at the studio most everything gets solved and nothing is left unsaid, while I wait.




You may not know this but most of you have been here. I bring you here on those days when the blogs and comments you post make me want to tug you along to continue the debate. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, therefore, if I tell you that our ‘inner conversations’ sometimes lead me to the solution I was looking for in a painting. Our acquaintance may be ethereal but you become very real and present in my head in those moments while I wait.

Sometimes the waiting settles in for a longer spell - the path ceases to be clear, fear keeps me from taking the next step forward [It is always forward even if it feels backward, but I can’t experience it as such because the path suddenly goes fuzzy. It is only in hindsight, mostly while I’m waiting, that I understand that the mistakes I made moved me forward, never when I’m right in the middle of it.] This is usually the case – the longer spells of waiting - when a theme is worn-out and no new direction has opened up through some fortunate mistake. I’ve still a long way to get there.

But when it does happen I let the pressure ease off. I go for a walk through the narrow streets of Lisbon, visit a museum, get things done on the computer, read and comment on the odd blog, go out for a coffee with a good book and my writing pad… or, if the previous years have been good years, I give-in to my wanderlust and go somewhere far. The aborigines call it to ‘go walkabout’ but I doubt my wanderings could ever carry me that ‘deep’, we’ve lost the access to our songlines – over millennia we have wilfully neglected them in exchange for the knowledge that allows us to fly to the moon or meet on this screen.

But I sometimes like to fool myself into believing that I’ve come close to some measure of depth and, perhaps not surprisingly, such moments almost always come about when I least expect them… while I’m waiting.

I remember one such occasion, eleven years ago [before the earthquake in 2001], I happened to be in Bhuj, killing time before moving north to the Himalayas. The series of paintings I had been working on was selling well but the prospect of completing more had started to leave me with a feeling of nausea and so I had taken myself to India one last time [at least for the time being] in the hope that it would trigger something new. But the thrill of getting there aside, Bhuj itself failed to live up to the tales fellow travellers had told me about and the main thing that had driven me there, the Great Rann of Kutch had been declared off limits to travellers because of the tension with Pakistan. I found nothing I could ‘feed’ on. I had exploited the colour and the vibrancy of my previous trips way beyond what I felt reasonable and I was looking for something more subdued yet powerful at the same time. The highlight of the day was roaming around the train and bus stations in the hope of getting out sooner by any possible means – the first available ride to Ahmedabad was in five days. There was no option but to wait.

I had grown weary of colour [never thought this to be possible] and for some time had seriously been contemplating attempting my own series of white paintings as therapy. But I needed a reason, a context [a crutch? an alibi?], and Bhuj looked like the last place on earth where I would find it. With three days to go my heart was no longer there and my mind had long since taken the road to the mountains, when suddenly events took that unexpected turn you can never make happen from your own side.

The bus was travelling north, further and further from things white, past scattered villages of mud huts, deeper into the expanses of a desert that is home to the tribes that are at the source of a migration we still know very little about despite their presence in Europe as far back as the 9th century – the Gypsies, or Roma as they call themselves. Obediently, I sat on the right-hand side like the man at the station told me: the police at the road-blocks rarely checked the buses from the traffic side of the road and I was ‘looking very Indian’, or so he said.

My plan was to travel to Khavda and return the same day. Nothing beats a long trip across unknown expanses, imagining what might be going on in the places in between where time seems to have stopped while mine whizzes past. But I was never to make it there and two hours later I was standing on the side of the road, smack in the middle of the Great Rann of Kutch, watching the bus disappear in the horizon while I felt time coming to a halt. The check-points were far behind me but I hadn’t counted on not getting past my travel companion.

I cannot recall his name, just as I’m sure he doesn’t remember mine - names were irrelevant to the friendship we struck back then – but I still feel the repercussion of that encounter to this day. He was an artist, a painter, travelling from Bombay to visit friends; he had tired of colour and was doing research for a series of white paintings!

I was speechless.

As soon as he heard my side of the story he started talking me out of going on to Khavda; there were things he wanted to show me, things that would set my imagination on a good track. We got off the bus in the middle of nowhere; the only distinguishable sign was a grouping of shrubs that interrupted the flow of tarmac towards nothingness. I usually trust the feeling I get in the gut and this looked like it mattered a lot to him, but I had to make an effort to suspend my disbelief and trust my guide as we walked deeper into a maze of shrubs and low-lying trees towards a small gathering of mud huts that emerged half an hour later.

We were greeted first by the children, and then we saw the women of the village going about their daily chores or sitting in the shade of their houses, all dressed in colourful embroidered outfits and wearing an array of bracelets and artefacts as if this were a special day. Their faces lit up when we approached, shining out against the greyish-brown mesh of huts and vegetation. As hard as I try I fail to find traces of white in those memories before events took an unexpected turn; the moment when my chaperone arranged for me to visit the inside of those immaculately clean huts and I felt as if lightning had struck.


From this moment on whatever words I write to describe what I saw and felt risk sounding redundant and so I prefer to leave you with an image – an example of what I found on the inside. [I looked the picture up on the internet to give you a clue. I took no photographs inside their homes, some things and situations are beyond a ‘click’ and I refuse to debase the moment; I prefer to register them in my mind – the images and experience are still vivid there, in a place I can easily access while I wait.]


[instalation view:
the towers of endless silence - acrylic on canvas 1996]

Replies: 8 Comments

on Sunday, June 18th, andrew said

The idea of meeting a stranger, who somehow has a very strong connection to where you happen to be in a moment, is an experience many of us seem to have had. Almost as if fate throws them into your path to make you see something you would have missed otherwise. It has happened to me, though usually when I'm very far gone from myself, in an insulin daze in a foreign country or something like that. In moments like that, I see those things I would have missed, and because of the circumstances, believe that I have the capacity within myself at all times, it's just that the muddle of repetative, every day thoughts prevents me from accessing it. Sometimes we need the intervention of another person, perhaps colored by our own states, to open a sort of third eye. Or maybe just the separation from ourselves does it.

on Saturday, June 17th, jose said

Yes, I tend to use things I bring from the places I visit and incorporate them. Sometimes a woodblock I've used for prints for a certain time will be glued/stapled/or tied on to the surface of one last piece. Interesting that you should mention the paper making, some of the textures I included in these white pieces were of pulp I produced in the studio. What I did bury in the sand were leaves I had collected from the bodhi tree in Bodhgaya on a trip in 91. I wasn't quite sure how to keep them supple until I returned home. While I was on the beach in Goa - a sentimental visit before the flight home – I’d take the leaves swimming with me and placed them under the sand to dry... people looked at me as if I was a weirdo who'd had too many hash cookies the night before. The leaves are still intact and flexible.

on Saturday, June 17th, Hyacinthe said

Jose I think sharing the deepest experiences that motivate our art are the ones worth exposing and give the most insight into process.
It almost sounds as if your work is integrally tied to place, both as inspiration and as display.As if when you are creating the works you envision them not in random space as artists do but in specific locations. Memories recalled? Guided visualization. Who knows. But certainly of the utmost interest.
I was wondering if you have visited Pondicherry, specifically Auroville.
Technique is of course of the utmost importance to free the imagination to express. What interests me is how sensory perceptions influence our forms of self expression.
A collage artist I know made her own paper. Part of it was burying the paper in the soil of a particular location, i.e. Israel and so on.
She would commit to making a certain number of collages of different shapes and oxidations of each edition and would pre sell the pieces before her trip in order to finance it. Naturally the works were named for their specific place of creation. Naturally a piece would be donated to the local museum, or arrangements made for gallery display.
The process itself was left to whatever guided and inspired her creations.

on Saturday, June 17th, jose said

Hyacinthe, forgive me. The two figures are not a painting, it’s a photograph I took and put through photoshop. I do this often with travel shots, break them down on the computer to get a different feel and perspective of the colour scheme and see if, from there, it triggers something back at the studio. I never use the actual composition as a theme.

The white piece with the four ‘satelites’ is one of the pieces that came out of this trip and was the central piece of the exhibition ‘The Bridges of Utopia’ in 1997. This in itself would fit in another blog. The white pieces took almost two years to complete and only really took off when I discovered the gallery where I wanted to put them in [and which was willing to accept my crazy project offering prospects of very few sales]: a small basement gallery in the old part of Lisbon with walls of raw, unpolished pink marble, with barely enough space for 10 white paintings. Galeria 65A.

There were two areas, one was like an altar – a square room that felt like a shaft that could take you higher if you entered it. The sound of ‘towers of silence’ kept ringing in my head since passing through Bombay on that same trip [the towers where the Parsis lay their dead to be taken by vultures, a concept similar to the sky burials of the Tibetans]. In this room I placed the painting you see here and an improvised tibetan chörten [or stupa] on the ground, as you see them in auspicious places when wandering in Tibet, and when I saw it completed and needed to find a title for the price list and catalogue I went for ‘The Towers of Endless Silence’.

on Saturday, June 17th, jose said

Walt, I had figured we had similar MO’s from the first accounts I read when you were posting your blogs from the South West. I guess it’s something we cannot help. I sometimes, jokingly, call this wanderlust of mine an affliction, and ask myself if by doing so I’m not trying to break away from reality and the solutions I would find just by sticking to the studio… if these travels of mine and the ideas I get aren’t really an alibi that helps me sell my work?

Hyacinthe, no, I didn’t get there by foot. I took a bus out into the restricted area of the Rann and then walked to the village which was not visible from the road. These structures I saw inside the mud huts were storage spaces. This one is open and we can see the family’s cooking utensils. Most of the ones I saw were closed, vault-like things where the family kept other, more private, belongings, and the objects for daily use would have been kept on ledges or other places in the house. It varied from house to house. But what struck me was the contrast between the overall greyish-brownness of the place, inside and out, and then theses pieces, glowing white, in immaculately clean abodes – one more pre-conceived idea I was made to rid myself of. The patterns are made into the fresh mud with the fingers and inlaid with little bits of mirror and stones, and finally whitewashed. I can’t begin to say how magnificent these patterns were and how their ingenious complexity moved me, how the moment satiated my hunger, appeased my mind, and set the tone for the last leg of my journey.

Getting back to Bhuj in the late afternoon was a different matter. I found my way back to the point where the bus had dropped me off and waited for over an hour for another one to come by in the opposite direction. Two days later I started making my way to the hill station of McLeod Ganj where I have many friends and where I remained for the last month of that last trip. But I’m not keen on talking about these trips to India unless they bear any direct relevance to a topic that might be meaningful to all the readers. Apart from the superficial things any tourist can see – architecture, monuments, visible aspects and manifestations of culture, etc. –, and which I don’t really care to talk about, the other types of experiences and encounters that affected my perception of things and later my art only rarely had a direct link to our craft and I feel don’t belong here. I almost regret having let this one out.

on Saturday, June 17th, walt said

Jose, I have two modes of working...no, no three. One is when everything is confused and I am arguing with myself and everyone else in my head; one is when everything is settled and I'm moving forward smoothly; and one is when I can't paint but I do anyway; In all three modes, if I stick with it I get paintings done.
Then there are those times when I simply leave and go somewhere else.

on Friday, June 16th, Hyacinthe Baron said

Fascinating. Can you clarify with more description of the objects and their meaning and interpret the piece? Is the image of the women a photo or a painting?
You found yourself on foot in this remote village? Where did you go afterwardon your journey and how did you continue your travels?

on Friday, June 16th, jose said

those two last images should be the other way around: the first is one of the pieces i came up with, the last image is what i found, in different shapes and forms, on the inside of the huts.