FIRST LIGHT PAINTINGS (continued)

startled and ceases talking to itself, our "big mind" sees the world the other way around, too, at the same time—and then space is luminously full, matter is sweetly empty, and nothing ever changes.

That is why the Lankavatara Sutra says, “Things are not as they seem. Nor are they otherwise.”

Emptiness and luminosity

And so the First Light paintings invert the order of things while being also merely what they seem, romantic landscapes of the dawn.

By hovering in both states at the same time, they are half-intentionless in themselves (as is George in making them) and so can serve not just as representations, but as actual visceral experiences, of life’s emptiness and luminosity—Mandelbrot dreamspaces in preposterous colors, unfurling on the luscious edge of chaos.

What does space tell us?

In 1983 the photographer and critic Robert Adams wrote about the early pioneers of photography who worked in the American West in the years after the Civil War. Adams spoke, too, of space, saying the vast emptiness these photos portrayed—new to non-Asian art—was not simple or merely empty. On the contrary, it stood in revealing contrast to the gathering noise, speed and darkness of the modern era.

Of silence

“Among the most compelling truths in some of the early photographs,” Adams wrote, “is their implication of silence, a fact suggested metaphorically by the picture’s visual stillness (a matter both of their subject and composition).”

Of motionlessness

Space also resists speed. In the old photos, Adams noted, with their pin-sharp views and long time exposures, space looks nearly unmoving. This reflects the photographer’s slow-paced intimacy and patience with the time required to shape biological and geological space.

“If we consider the difference between [the old-time photographer] packing his cameras by mule and the person stepping for a moment from his car to take a picture with an Instamatic,” Adams said, “it becomes clear how some of our space has vanished; if the time it takes to cross space is a way by which we define it, then to arrive at a view of space ‘in no time’ is to have denied its reality (there are in fact few good snapshots of space).”

He added that Walt Whitman might have enjoyed driving a car—at first—to see and assemble his long catalogs, but that his love of space would probably have brought him back to walking soon, since only at that speed is America the size he believed it to be.

Of light

A third subtlety of space that Adams saw in the photographs is the animating role played by light. “The intensity of the sunlight in the West sets the region apart,” he wrote, reminding us of “the opening verses in Genesis about light’s part in giving shape to the void.”

In a broader context

Thanks to Adams, then, George came to ffelthat these same three qualities—silence, resistance to speed, and revelation by light—can also be imputed to the space portrayed in his First Light series and, more important, to the boundless everyday space in which we find our being.

As for silence, the early light of day that George portrays is precisely a time of hushed and mysterious quiet—“that expectant moment,” George says, “before the gulls begin to cry, when the wind and water are at their most reflective, as if the mind were holding its breath.”

As for speed, it happens that George draws and paints very quickly. But in these paintings, he says, he is in fact depicting the same space over and over, a certain consciousness or balance-point of concentrated presence that he wishes to “dis-cover” and enter, tangling cause and effect, in the very act of trying to depict it. That is why the pictures are motionless, hovering, as he suggests, in simultaneous states. “Like many artists,” George adds, “I find I have to have been working for an extended time, to have slowed the mind’s movement, to be essentially a still center, before the space eases and opens its arms to me, and I am shown the way into satisfactory work.”

And as for light, George says he is not really painting much of anything except light, as far as he can see, its texture, its heart-filling presence, its luminous heft. After all, his representations of sky, sea and land are, as he emphasizes, not offered chiefly as representations. Like fingers pointing at the moon, they are not moonlight itself, nor even pictures of moonlight. They are two things, yes, but also one.

Backpedaling

In the end, however, George says, the truth is simpler than all of this: Like most artists—like most people in fact—George is not alone. When he works on a good day he works a deux, as if dancing secretly with the process, or possibly the daemon, of his work. Then, as is well known, painting flows through, not merely from, the painter—and he has no more than a half-idea of what he is doing, gazing at whatever materializes in the moment, at least half as surprised as the next person.

“So my remarks are just a guess,” George concludes, “a passerby’s guess about what is passing by—and I hope you will forgive me and simply look at the paintings for yourself.”

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