Ode to Gaudi: Seizing the Concept of Growth

          A feature I share with Nature is that she is continuously evolving, in a state of flux, growing, and changing.  Rosenberg said "Neither in nature nor in art nor in the self is there to be found a point of completion....all forms, past and present, float together in a sea of potentiality."*  So an artist is not likely to be able to "achieve more than parts." 
          But an artist can suspend this incompleteness for a moment by fixing a state of mind on the canvas in the same way a tree suspends its growth for a moment by offering its fruit.  The artist can complete part of himself on the painting even though as a person he may be changing as he paints.

          Art captures growth by suspending it for a moment, capturing it out of the sea of potentiality.  An art style based on motion and change may not have the same result.  But an art based on growth can pluck an idea out of the mind fixing it on the canvas in a form that might be called the fruit of contemplation.
           Such art arrests evolution and change for a moment, offering to the viewer of art one of the visible means of contemplating another person's thoughts.
          Or, as Greenberg said: "art ennobles raw matter to the point where (it can) function as art." ** Art can then make matter as relevant as ideas by creating physical refreshment - seizing the tangible out of the intangible meanderings of the mind, gripping it out of the sea of change.

          While it was my ancestors that instilled me with affection toward the soil, it was Gaudi who gave me the means of grasping the concept of growth.  His comprehension of the abstract features of growth was complete; he assimilated and urbanized the concept of the organic.  He merged the aesthetics of Nature with the aesthetic features of the fine art tradition.
          He grew an urban space, expressing the completeness of his gratitude for Nature by molding her raw material offerings into forms inspired by her spaces.  He did not forget her when the time came to consider the more abstract features of a particular design or project.
          I can imagine him asking himself "What would Nature do if she were growing this structure?"  And conversely, not asking himself what his human colleges were doing and thereby relinquishing his synthesizing gifts to the architectural standards of the day.
          He devised a different standard, a different visual method, giving us tangible examples of structures embodying those unique standards.  Seizing the concept of growth was one of the methods he used.

          One of the many things I do share with artists of the past such as Gaudi is the compelling need to respond to Nature.  The advances and contributions of my fellows teaches me new ways of responding to her that releases new thoughts and insights previously unavailable to the human mind.  While new thoughts are immaterial by themselves, depicting them in paint makes them material.  Rather than submitting to the separation between the organic and inorganic, art can merge them, bringing them into a new relationship not otherwise possible.  It is this very separation, learned from Nature herself, which artists can attempt to bridge.



*Rosenberg, Harold.  Artworks and Packages, pg. 48-9.  University of Chicago Press, 1986
**Greenberg, Clement.  The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume II, pg. 233.  University of Chicago Press, 1986.