“ people should live more spiritually, man “ - Basquiat
If you’ve known me you know I’ve not been a religious follower. But what I’m talking about here isn’t necessarily religious or not. It’s a surrender to the pole of things NOT the mundane, not just me working and the dead stuff I’m working with, not just products and stuff and services transactionally for a facade of dollars.
It’s an intuitive alchemy mixing will for perfection with an active trowel to make it smooth and perfect. The awareness of this process, mixed back in with the vision, subtly refines out “imperfection” through acknowledging the way the material and our energy work together. Surrender to mud being mud.
It can’t be perfect with in the whole space. But wow it seems that way as you smooth over the perfect trowel stroke. Well, not within the whole. Give up. Try again, again, again. The shape you’re making becomes the shape you’re making. Manifest becomes vision. The human doing this sees the process of not being perfect as the mechanism making the waves or patterns organically composing the wall toward life.
It’s a PAYing attention to the twofold nature of something, some stuff, say plaster, and the process of applying it beautifully. It’s Pollock learning how paint drips this and that way, through himself. Its Cy Twombly scribbling his name to find his flow.
A force not his will, his conscious active self. We artists leave a residue of someone who was there, caring. We set our body active and surrender to all that actually is, our passive noticing, of which we’re not quite but coming aware. Plaster is a living rock solid process philosophy slung like mud with care and understanding. It holds, for the time being. I’m talking about making what we have in this moment resonate in all moments, a monument. A gesture pointing to the light.
A universal awareness of the fire, the nothing that is, the human vitality that resonates in the walls of space plastered with intention.