Colors of the Past
The Art of Melissa Cowper-Smith
http://www.cowpersmith.com/
With Commentary by Jay McDaniel
Glowing and Forgetting
"I incorporate photographic light to make certain objects glow with the clarity of immediate memory and use simple painterly strokes to express our experience of forgetting." (Melissa Cowper-Smith)
At JJB we like her emphasis on clarity and forgetting. Some people might think that forgetting is always unhealthy, but we think it makes space for healthy creativity. The problem is that we can forget to forget. We find ourselves habituated to the past at the expense of being open to the future.
We think Melissa Cowper-Smith strikes a healthy balance between glowing and forgetting. With her attention to dwelling places, she helps us remember how important domestic interiors are to us: the rooms, the hallways, the beds, the tables, the chairs. She is interested in "our absorption in our home environments."
But with her colors and bold, abstract lines, she reminds us that we are free for novelty, for imagination, for letting the objects of our worlds mean more than can be depicted in representational painting. She uses colors and abstract lines to help make "objects into signs for other objects, rather than depictions of particular things." What do the feathers mean? What does the globe mean? Why do things glow sometimes? What had to be forgotten so that they could glow?
At JJB we like her emphasis on clarity and forgetting. Some people might think that forgetting is always unhealthy, but we think it makes space for healthy creativity. The problem is that we can forget to forget. We find ourselves habituated to the past at the expense of being open to the future.
We think Melissa Cowper-Smith strikes a healthy balance between glowing and forgetting. With her attention to dwelling places, she helps us remember how important domestic interiors are to us: the rooms, the hallways, the beds, the tables, the chairs. She is interested in "our absorption in our home environments."
But with her colors and bold, abstract lines, she reminds us that we are free for novelty, for imagination, for letting the objects of our worlds mean more than can be depicted in representational painting. She uses colors and abstract lines to help make "objects into signs for other objects, rather than depictions of particular things." What do the feathers mean? What does the globe mean? Why do things glow sometimes? What had to be forgotten so that they could glow?
Suchness and Creativity
My work illustrates the constructive nature of memory as arising out of contact with everyday objects in our dwelling places. (Melissa Cowper-Smith)
The past is always present. For example, the past is present in the objects we see on the table and in the shoreline in the background. The bowl and the shoreline bring with them a history of creativity, a history of being made. Their "being made" is not the product of a single agent. They are made by the materials that compose them, by their surroundings, and by their own creativity.
Whitehead thinks that there is a continuous creativity within the very depths of the universe. Accordingly bowls and seashores do not simply sit there. They present themselves, they give themselves, for perception. This giving is part of their aliveness. Buddhists speak of it as the suchness of an entity: the spontaneous happening of an entity as it takes its stand in the network of inter-being, implicitly saying to the world "I am this, not that." If you look closely at the objects in Melissa Cowper-Smith's paintings, you can see their vibrancy, their happening, their suchness, their creativity. The come forward to your eyes, like crouching cats.
The past is always present. For example, the past is present in the objects we see on the table and in the shoreline in the background. The bowl and the shoreline bring with them a history of creativity, a history of being made. Their "being made" is not the product of a single agent. They are made by the materials that compose them, by their surroundings, and by their own creativity.
Whitehead thinks that there is a continuous creativity within the very depths of the universe. Accordingly bowls and seashores do not simply sit there. They present themselves, they give themselves, for perception. This giving is part of their aliveness. Buddhists speak of it as the suchness of an entity: the spontaneous happening of an entity as it takes its stand in the network of inter-being, implicitly saying to the world "I am this, not that." If you look closely at the objects in Melissa Cowper-Smith's paintings, you can see their vibrancy, their happening, their suchness, their creativity. The come forward to your eyes, like crouching cats.
Priceless Imagination
In our material culture, objects become expendable commodities; however, some belongings become priceless through our engagement with them. (Melissa Cowper-Smith)
Of course this creativity is in us, too. The world in which we live is both objective and subjective. It consists of the objects that are given for our perception, and it consists of our memories of those objects, including the meanings they have for us. The memories themselves are not internal photographs of the objects; they are acts of imagination in their own right. In Whiteheadian philosophy imagination involves prehensions of the past actual world and an exploration of possibilities which may or may not have been actualized in that world.
Imagine that the book on the table is a diary. It is indeed priceless. Diaries not only tell about what happened, they tell about what we felt about what happened, cognizant that things could have been otherwise. This awareness that things could have been otherwise is, for Whitehead, a kind of imaginative activity in its own right, and it is quite revelatory of the way thing truly are. Nothing has to be. Everything is contingent. Without imagination we would not know this. But this activity is but one kind of imagination, of which there are countless others. Humans cannot live by material objects alone; they also need wonder.
Of course this creativity is in us, too. The world in which we live is both objective and subjective. It consists of the objects that are given for our perception, and it consists of our memories of those objects, including the meanings they have for us. The memories themselves are not internal photographs of the objects; they are acts of imagination in their own right. In Whiteheadian philosophy imagination involves prehensions of the past actual world and an exploration of possibilities which may or may not have been actualized in that world.
Imagine that the book on the table is a diary. It is indeed priceless. Diaries not only tell about what happened, they tell about what we felt about what happened, cognizant that things could have been otherwise. This awareness that things could have been otherwise is, for Whitehead, a kind of imaginative activity in its own right, and it is quite revelatory of the way thing truly are. Nothing has to be. Everything is contingent. Without imagination we would not know this. But this activity is but one kind of imagination, of which there are countless others. Humans cannot live by material objects alone; they also need wonder.
Floating: A Sense of the Whole
Architectural experience often involves moving in between grasping an entire room at once and seeing single objects standing in place. (Melissa Cowper-Smith)
As we interact with our home enviroments, the objects in our environments are together in our experience of them. Ultimately, says Whitehead, no things are "together" except as they are together in the experience of some subject.
In Whitehead's philosophy there is a reality which is everywhere at once and thus, in a certain sense, Floating. Whitehead speaks of this reality as "The Adventure of the Universe as One." We might also simply call it the Deep Togetherness. Can the Togetherness be addressed in prayer? Some people feel comfortable saying Yes and others No and still others I Don't Know. At JJB we understand and appreciate all three responses. In Process and Reality Whitehead lent support to the Yes. He envisioned the Deep Togetherness as the consciousness of the universe and proposed that this consciousness perpetualls feels of all living beings: their hopes and memories, their sufferings and joys. As his saw things, this consciousness also feels the colors. In Whitehead's philosophy colors are what feelings look like. All the energies in the material world are, for Whitehead, filled with something like feeling, which can be expressed as colors. The Deep Togetherness, then, is the unity of the universe as gathering together, and thus composed of, the colors and sounds, the flesh and blood, the ideas and feelings, of the universe. The universe is God's body.
But we are acts of togethering, too. Whitehead names this process of coming together concrescence. Always, as we dwell in our domestic spaces, we are concrescing: sensing and creating the togetherness. This togetherness is multi-faceted, and part of this lies in what Melissa Cowper-Smith calls architectural experience. When we enter a room, we have a sense of the whole of it, almost as if we were witnessing it from a bird's eye view in an out-of-body experience. Almost as if we were floating. We are reminded of Tai Ji, where your arms swim in the air while your feet listen to the ground. When we enter a room and sense its wholeness, our consciousness is swimming if not also floating, even as we stand right where we are, in the hallway. We enter a whole and we sense the whole that we enter. We partake of the Deep Togetherness.
As we interact with our home enviroments, the objects in our environments are together in our experience of them. Ultimately, says Whitehead, no things are "together" except as they are together in the experience of some subject.
In Whitehead's philosophy there is a reality which is everywhere at once and thus, in a certain sense, Floating. Whitehead speaks of this reality as "The Adventure of the Universe as One." We might also simply call it the Deep Togetherness. Can the Togetherness be addressed in prayer? Some people feel comfortable saying Yes and others No and still others I Don't Know. At JJB we understand and appreciate all three responses. In Process and Reality Whitehead lent support to the Yes. He envisioned the Deep Togetherness as the consciousness of the universe and proposed that this consciousness perpetualls feels of all living beings: their hopes and memories, their sufferings and joys. As his saw things, this consciousness also feels the colors. In Whitehead's philosophy colors are what feelings look like. All the energies in the material world are, for Whitehead, filled with something like feeling, which can be expressed as colors. The Deep Togetherness, then, is the unity of the universe as gathering together, and thus composed of, the colors and sounds, the flesh and blood, the ideas and feelings, of the universe. The universe is God's body.
But we are acts of togethering, too. Whitehead names this process of coming together concrescence. Always, as we dwell in our domestic spaces, we are concrescing: sensing and creating the togetherness. This togetherness is multi-faceted, and part of this lies in what Melissa Cowper-Smith calls architectural experience. When we enter a room, we have a sense of the whole of it, almost as if we were witnessing it from a bird's eye view in an out-of-body experience. Almost as if we were floating. We are reminded of Tai Ji, where your arms swim in the air while your feet listen to the ground. When we enter a room and sense its wholeness, our consciousness is swimming if not also floating, even as we stand right where we are, in the hallway. We enter a whole and we sense the whole that we enter. We partake of the Deep Togetherness.
Seeing the World from This Corner
At the same time that we grasp the whole of room, we do so from a particular vantage point. If we are a child who is three feet tall, our sense of the room as a whole will be from one perspective; if we are six feet tall it will be from another. As long as we have bodies in space, there is no privileged perspective which is the real whole.
This means that our experience of wholes is always partial, always fragmentary, never complete. We swim in the air and we touch the ground, neither to the exclusion of the other. Our own consciousness seems to have two senses of place simultaneously: the place from which the whole and the place of the flesh. Are these the same place? Probably so. There's no reason why consciousness can't be in several places at once. Even as we enter a room, we may also be thinking about a friend two thousand miles away. That friend is as close to us as legs with which we walk. We are there with the friend even as we are here with our bodies. Every here includes lots of there's.
But somehow our here never includes the whole of the there's. If we see the front of a chair, we do not see the back. Insofar as our experience of a room is bounded by our flesh, there are vantage points that are unavailable to us in that moment. There are things that transcend us.
And so it is with the past, says Whitehead. We know part the past from our perspective, from where we stand, but not from the perspective of others. The past is always more than our experience of the past. But we ourselves are also more than the past which transcends us. In the immediacy of each moment, say the Buddhists, there is a place of freedom, of creativity, which is not quite contained by the past or even by the rooms in which we dwell. This place is part of our consciousness, too. Let's call it play.
This means that our experience of wholes is always partial, always fragmentary, never complete. We swim in the air and we touch the ground, neither to the exclusion of the other. Our own consciousness seems to have two senses of place simultaneously: the place from which the whole and the place of the flesh. Are these the same place? Probably so. There's no reason why consciousness can't be in several places at once. Even as we enter a room, we may also be thinking about a friend two thousand miles away. That friend is as close to us as legs with which we walk. We are there with the friend even as we are here with our bodies. Every here includes lots of there's.
But somehow our here never includes the whole of the there's. If we see the front of a chair, we do not see the back. Insofar as our experience of a room is bounded by our flesh, there are vantage points that are unavailable to us in that moment. There are things that transcend us.
And so it is with the past, says Whitehead. We know part the past from our perspective, from where we stand, but not from the perspective of others. The past is always more than our experience of the past. But we ourselves are also more than the past which transcends us. In the immediacy of each moment, say the Buddhists, there is a place of freedom, of creativity, which is not quite contained by the past or even by the rooms in which we dwell. This place is part of our consciousness, too. Let's call it play.
Deep Play
"I depict objects and dwellings with bright colors— privileging painterly qualities and a strong playful palette over realistic hues...I play with the relationships between the rigid composition of interior decoration and the organic patterns arising in natural settings."
There is a lot of play in Melissa Cowper-Smith's art. This is one reason those of us influenced in the JJB community like it so much. We like the way she plays with the relationships between rigid composition and organic patterns: straight lines and curves. We like the way she combines media in surprising ways: photography and painting. We like the way she surprises us with shapes and forms, in her collages, that don't "fit" our expectations and that therefore "fit" our delight in surprise. One of the mysteries of collage is that is puts things together and does not explain the connections. There is a togetherness in this: a connection of non-connection. And there's a freedom.
From Whitehead's perspective freedom is the very heart of the here-and-now. We are not completely determined by the past. To be sure, we are partly created by the past. We are haunted and blessed by our memories. But we also create ourselves in the moment, as we receive its influence and respond emotionally, intellectually, and bodily. In this response we add something to the past. As Whitehead puts it: "The many become one and are increased by one." One form of creative response is play.
We decorate a room; we reminesce about the past; we wonder about the future; we enter into a liminal space between past and future where we play with ideas, some of which we may even paint onto a canvas. Play is serious business. Too serious to be too serious about it. Indeed play is a kind of love: a love of freshness and novelty. Could it be that the Deep Togetherness is also a Deep Play? Wouldn't that be nice?
There is a lot of play in Melissa Cowper-Smith's art. This is one reason those of us influenced in the JJB community like it so much. We like the way she plays with the relationships between rigid composition and organic patterns: straight lines and curves. We like the way she combines media in surprising ways: photography and painting. We like the way she surprises us with shapes and forms, in her collages, that don't "fit" our expectations and that therefore "fit" our delight in surprise. One of the mysteries of collage is that is puts things together and does not explain the connections. There is a togetherness in this: a connection of non-connection. And there's a freedom.
From Whitehead's perspective freedom is the very heart of the here-and-now. We are not completely determined by the past. To be sure, we are partly created by the past. We are haunted and blessed by our memories. But we also create ourselves in the moment, as we receive its influence and respond emotionally, intellectually, and bodily. In this response we add something to the past. As Whitehead puts it: "The many become one and are increased by one." One form of creative response is play.
We decorate a room; we reminesce about the past; we wonder about the future; we enter into a liminal space between past and future where we play with ideas, some of which we may even paint onto a canvas. Play is serious business. Too serious to be too serious about it. Indeed play is a kind of love: a love of freshness and novelty. Could it be that the Deep Togetherness is also a Deep Play? Wouldn't that be nice?
Creative Forgetting
...painterly strokes to express our experience of forgetting. (Melissa Cowper-Smith)
How the domestic interiors and natural landscapes of our lives are together depends, not only on where they are configured with each other spatially, but in how we interact with them, how we remember the interactions, and the stories we tell about those interactions. Rarely do we tell stories that tell the whole story. We highlight certain aspect of the past, which become luminous to us, and simultaneously neglect others. This neglect can be benign. Not all details are as important -- as light-worthy - as others. And we would be terribly confused, incapable of acting, if we rememembered everything. In the language of Whitehead, we must negatively prehend some things, in order to positively prehend others.
Forgetting can be a creative activity, too, and not only in relation to interior spaces. Buddhists emphasize that we can forget the stereotypes by which we find ourselves and others, allowing the uniqueness of other people to shine forth with luminosity.
How the domestic interiors and natural landscapes of our lives are together depends, not only on where they are configured with each other spatially, but in how we interact with them, how we remember the interactions, and the stories we tell about those interactions. Rarely do we tell stories that tell the whole story. We highlight certain aspect of the past, which become luminous to us, and simultaneously neglect others. This neglect can be benign. Not all details are as important -- as light-worthy - as others. And we would be terribly confused, incapable of acting, if we rememembered everything. In the language of Whitehead, we must negatively prehend some things, in order to positively prehend others.
Forgetting can be a creative activity, too, and not only in relation to interior spaces. Buddhists emphasize that we can forget the stereotypes by which we find ourselves and others, allowing the uniqueness of other people to shine forth with luminosity.
Organic Patterns
I play with the relationships between the rigid composition of interior decoration and the organic patterns arising in natural settings. (Melissa Cowper-Smith)
What is natural and what us decorative? What is organic and what is artificial? Where does nature end and human life begin? Whiteheadians think the answer is "nowhere." The Chinese traditions speak of the universe as a vast web of interconnected events within which human beings dwell, and among which they -- we - are events as well. We are happenings with the Happening of wan wu (萬物): the Ten Thousand Things.
This does not mean that we cannot harm the more-than-human aspects of wan wu. We do all the time. But the solution to this harm is, as the Chinese would say, to dwell in harmony with the rest of the web. Straight lines are organic, too, albeit in a straight kind of way. Nothing is really outside wan wu. The furniture is within wan wu; the shell is within wan wu; the floor is within wan wu; and we ourselves are within wan wu. And if, as Whitehead proposes, there's a kind of creativity everywhere, there's a kind of organicism everywhere. It's not surprising that he called his philosophy "the Philosophy of Organism."
What is clear to us, though, is that a person need not read Whitehead, or know the first thing about Chinese philosophy, in order to feel the organicism. A better way might simply be to enjoy the art of Melissa Cowper-Smith and live into the feelings she evokes. We encourage you to visit her website. Here, by way of conclusion, is her artist's statement.
What is natural and what us decorative? What is organic and what is artificial? Where does nature end and human life begin? Whiteheadians think the answer is "nowhere." The Chinese traditions speak of the universe as a vast web of interconnected events within which human beings dwell, and among which they -- we - are events as well. We are happenings with the Happening of wan wu (萬物): the Ten Thousand Things.
This does not mean that we cannot harm the more-than-human aspects of wan wu. We do all the time. But the solution to this harm is, as the Chinese would say, to dwell in harmony with the rest of the web. Straight lines are organic, too, albeit in a straight kind of way. Nothing is really outside wan wu. The furniture is within wan wu; the shell is within wan wu; the floor is within wan wu; and we ourselves are within wan wu. And if, as Whitehead proposes, there's a kind of creativity everywhere, there's a kind of organicism everywhere. It's not surprising that he called his philosophy "the Philosophy of Organism."
What is clear to us, though, is that a person need not read Whitehead, or know the first thing about Chinese philosophy, in order to feel the organicism. A better way might simply be to enjoy the art of Melissa Cowper-Smith and live into the feelings she evokes. We encourage you to visit her website. Here, by way of conclusion, is her artist's statement.
Artist's Statement
My paintings, collages, drawings and digital prints depict domestic interiors and natural landscapes. In our material culture, objects become expendable commodities; however, some belongings become priceless through our engagement with them. I depict objects and dwellings with bright colors— privileging painterly qualities and a strong playful palette over realistic hues. I use drawerly outlining to represent objects as symbols; lines abstract from abundant visual information, making objects into signs for other objects, rather than depictions of particular things. My work blends transitional points of view and atmospheric panes, illustrating how memory affects our perception of space, interior and exterior. I express our absorption in our home environments. Architectural experience often involves moving in between grasping an entire room at once and seeing single objects standing in place. I incorporate photographic light to make certain objects glow with the clarity of immediate memory and use simple painterly strokes to express our experience of forgetting. I play with the relationships between the rigid composition of interior decoration and the organic patterns arising in natural settings. My work illustrates the constructive nature of memory as arising out of contact with everyday objects in our dwelling places.
