Training to be a Visual Athlete

    "The main thing is freedom...a freedom which insists on its right to be just as inventive as nature in her grandeur is inventive."  Paul Klee*

          For my own part, I receive Nature.  What I want from her is what I receive.  So in that sense, I am thinking like a primitive.  When Klee talks about wanting to paint like the first man I think he means he wants to think and see like the first man, thinking through the present into the depths of raw pre-history, looking with both the eyes and mind of a primitive and a native. 
       
          The first man thinks without language, he cannot think with words.  He is a man so primitive he can only think visually and yet does so with all the intellect of an Einstein.
          This sort of seeing provides a first fresh glance.  It is the looking of a conscious man-child adept at thinking past words - defusing words, scrambling them, forcing them out of focus in the mind and opening a specialized domain of virgin seeing.  One can develop dexterity in fluctuating in and out of wordless seeing with as much ease as a photographer adjusting the focus of a camera lens.

          But there is an athletic requirement to this - it is an activity that needs exercising and nurturing.  As a visual athlete, there are specialized muscles one needs to exercise in the mind that would otherwise atrophy.
          The mind must inhabit a non-word playing field.  The more rigidly structured one's thoughts become, the more difficult it is to experience a "seeing" mental environment - for new experiences come marching into a judgmental chamber in the mind, are then pelted with relative values, surrounded by biases, and assaulted with prejudices.  New concepts and ideas emerge when the affect of these biases are held at bay for a moment allowing an insight to break through and present itself - offering a new sight from inside the mind.


           For me the Pacific coast is a fertile playing field for exercising a form of primal seeing.  Each beach is a book of visual pages I walk through.  The totality of the coast's raw environment allows me to become a primitive, a native, refreshing my sense of awe through pure sight.  It protects me from being overwhelmed or consumed by structured modes of thinking which can enclose and constrict my mind.

          The seasons of the mind are so fragile - there are areas in it which need protecting, need to be set aside and monitored by an internal benevolent ranger who is assigned to preserve its fragile ecosystem against predators.  Envy and greed are mind predators.


          To a visual athlete, words can become a form of claustrophobia imposing on the clarity of sight.  Words can become an obstruction in the same way lack of wind is an obstruction to a kite-flier, or rocks in the path of a bicycler, or lack of thread to a seamstress.

          Raw Nature enables me to swim in the ocean of vision.  She stimulates me visually, teaching me about organic forms and the features of natural composition.  She teaches me volumes about depth, shadow, diversity, light, movement, growth - informing me about the character and personality of organic forms, and the pleasure of asymmetry.
          Reading a book doesn't teach me that.  Driving down a freeway doesn't teach me that.  All that is left for my eyes to feast on then is the sky, and I endanger my life if I surrender them to the movement of the clouds.
          I consider Nature at least, if not more than, an equal tutor to all of art history.


 *Rosenberg, Harold.  Artworks and Packages, pg. 46-9.  University of Chicago Press, 1969.