It looks to me at first that I have nothing to say. Then it comes to me that the balance is important. It is like a very complicated collection of so many different shapes and colors, and it all has to be in balance.
What do I mean by balance?
I mean that when you look at it you get a sense that in spite of its complexity, there is a guiding wisdom at work in it. Some deep knowing is involved.
The impression (For me) is that all the shapes live in peace with each other and with everything that is in the picture. Every shape belongs to some group, based on sameness of color, shape, size, or other attributes, and it may belongs to more than one group at the same time. Yet everything works together without conflicts. All the shapes and the groups do what they do within the same space. The may even overlap and mix. But they do not block each other.
There is an exercise that I used a lot in art therapy. Two people work together on the same artwork. They work in turns. Every one of them, instead of trying to support the other, makes sure of only one thing: That he or she keeps loyal to his/her own sense of beauty. When people work in this way, they come from a deeper place within themselves and they give their best contributions to the shared artwork. It is possible to live this way too.
Every individual truth (represented by one shape in the picture) is acted out with wholeness, and no individual truth is in contradiction to another inner truth.
This is possible only because the art-making is wordless. In our life as human beings there are oppositions indeed. These oppositions are only due to the stories that we tell, which are the way we interpret what happens to us. If you take the stories away from what happens, like lifting a blanket of words from something that lives a wordless life underneath, you discover a world of harmony.
So what is more real: The world of stories, or the world of experiences with no interpretation?
And which of these do you want to be in?
There is no right answer.
intuitiveflow 
I sensed so much from this work. What came through was the power of experiences. Stories are the experiences in filters. Are experiences – yes.
I could feel the weaving work of Constellations playing into the field of this piece the blanket of words..perhaps the blanket of space shifting into a harmonic pattern linking to the flow of what moves through us, each other and our collective spaces where we are at that moment in time.
Thank you Giora
Thank you too, Yvonne.
Yvonne, yes, I reread this and realized I felt something very similar.
Giora,
I find what you say in this post truly amazing!!!
To test myself, I showed your post to Tikva, my wife, who is generally
much more open to views like yours on life than I am. Her impression was
very close to mine!
Here is what I perceived in the drawing of this post, indeed a beautiful drawing. If I had to summarize my impression in two words, I would say:
salient aggression!
I certainly agree that there is a balance in the drawing, but an ominous one.
I see, indeed, two families of abstract entities in the drawing. The one is
the colored surfaces, and the other – the lines.
But the general process, of which the drawing can be conceived as an
instantaneous snapshot, is that the lines are fiercely attacking the surfaces,
having already partially succeeded in capturing the surfaces, like
in the case of the green one on the lower left part.
The image is like a swarm of abstract insects attacking the surfaces.
This feeling is an intensification of my impression expressed in response
to the previous drawing, where one surface “escaped” the predator lines.
I certainly consider the depiction of this ominous scene as balanced,
of high aesthetic value,
but far from the harmonious tranquility you seem to perceive in it.
Let me note that, obviously, both interpretation, and many others,
may be possible. Indeed, you start your post by expressing the harmony
as a subjective impression by you, which is fine.
However, starting with “This is only possible …”, you are jumping to
conclusions about verbal interpretations as if your interpretation of the drawing was a solid, objective fact!
If someone’s child sadly dies, or if someone is oppressed by an
occupation, it is not the “story” that causes suffering – it is the situation itself.
And no “story” can bring, I think, real comfort in such situations.
As I see it, life experiences themselves have effects, whether good ones
or bad ones, and stripping away verbal description avoids nothing.
Nissim
Thank you so much, Nissim.
This is good. In order to write this you (and Tikva) had to look carefully and feel and care. I don’t want to go against any of this as it is beautiful in my view. So instead I’ll accept your interpretation, as you wrote it. It is very well expressed in my view. I accept that it is more convincing than my interpretation for some, maybe even most of the people. And I leave the choice of interpretation up to every reader.
What is left is the blanket of words and the harmony under it, if indeed this is a possible way to understand our life here.
Questions that arise for me:
1.Is it possible at all to have a life here, on earth, without words, language and thinking?
2. If this is possible, what will it be good for?
3. What does it have to do with the composition of the painting?
I’ll have to answer from my personal experience and perspective. We live the way we live because of words, language and thinking. We don’t even know a state in which words are not the basis for knowing and understanding everything. So it seems.
In my life I have been in a wordless state many times. Sometimes for a short time, like a few minutes or an hour. Sometimes I stayed in an almost wordless state for a day. Then I stayed for one week at a time, many times. And finally, I was in a state that was not entirely wordless, but quite close to it for something like five years. Nowadays I get into a wordless state several times a day, and in the rest of the time I experience thoughts.
When I speak about being without words, it is not only that thoughts do not arise in my mind. It is a state in which experiencing, knowing and understanding my life and my world do not happen through language.
In this state oppression does not exist. Attacking does not exist. Good things and bad things are not there. It is not a change in understanding that happens within the same system of understanding, using the same vehicles of understanding and knowing, that we used for the previous way in which we understood. It is a state in which the content and the method of knowing cease being the same as they were. It is a big change. I can still use the old vehicles, but they are not as convincing to me as they used to be.
The body continues to be here but it is seen differently.
In this state there is an experience of wellbeing, in every possible way, which is unbreakable.
I don’t mean to say that suffering, injustice, oppression are not real or are not experienced. I am against oppression, for example. I choose sides.
I am not without pain. I suffer constant strong pain in my feet. It prevents me from sleeping for big parts of every night, and for the whole night two or three times a week. Many times I can’t do any of what I want to do during the days, because of this pain.
But when I enter this deep meditative state, I don’t experience the pain. And yet I am here. You can talk to me and I’ll answer. I can walk through a door without bumping into the wall. Thinking happens on different layers of being, and the thoughts that are necessary for moving through the door happen somewhere, like programs in a computer. But the understanding of everything is different. It is independent of thoughts.
I know it is strange, looked at from the point of view that we normally have.
This last point is the biggest impediment when I try to tell about my experience.
When the movements of the mind, which are used for understanding the world, cease, what is left is this other way of experiencing.
There is nothing wrong with choosing to ignore this state. But we all have access to it, if we choose to seek it.
When I wrote my post, I wrote it from this deeper point of view. Attacking and conquering do not exist in this state. The whole framework of our way of understanding, which includes predators and victims, isn’t there. This is why this state is very peaceful. The noise of our thoughts is asleep.
And I believe that in order to create a balanced composition the knowing that creates the artwork has to come from this deeper level. It is not out of reach. All the artists drink from this well, with more or less awareness of it. You too, I believe, drink from this well when you are creative in all that you do. The only way to bring to our reality something that was not there before is to drink from that well.
That’s what I meant. A bit hard to explain, isn’t it?
From this point of view it does not matter what interpretation we choose, because in the state of drinking from that well, all interpretations do not exist.
So what is there?
And the question about where do you prefer to be is real to me. There is no right answer to this.
I did not want to enlarge “Polak’s dot” again. This is how I see the world. It is not theoretical for me, or for the sake of the argument.
I am late to read this and comment, but I was very moved by your post, Giora.
Letting words and stories fall away, when making art alone or together.
And wonderfully and interestingly, a truly great description of what I feel happens.
No contradiction in this moment between story and image either–
Perhaps why ekphrastic poetry so interests me–to reach that place where both image and story exist in their truth without contradiction.
And also interesting to me, the lines are tenderly contacting the shapes and sometimes determinedly reaching out, reaching out to another dimension.
Yes, there is a story I’m telling in this post and in what I see and it’s a dreaming space, a energetic creating flow that I’m living out, which I do only by what is exchanging/exchangeable, so that I see it’s my storying, a borrowing and a gifting, within a collective dreaming process (imaging held by a web of sharing, who we are and what we participate in).
Also feel a bit–yikes, what’d I say? But let it stand, a blind reaching out.
This Yikes is what I feel every time I post something new. I sometimes I think that if I don’t feel it, maybe it is not worth posting…
It means that you are at your edge, on the imagined border where you end, based on old perceptions, and everything that is still there to grow into starts.We are lucky indeed as there is no end to the yet unknown.
Welcome, new dear friend.