Just Listening
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Just Listening: Contemplative Practice through the Lens of Art is out today, in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle.
I want to tell you a little about how it came together, what’s in it, and then just give you two chapters, so you can feel what it’s like before you decide anything.
How it started
I’ve been painting since Ohio University, ‘86 to ‘91. I started sitting zazen in 2003. For a long time I thought those were two different things I did. Painting was the work. Sitting was the practice.
Somewhere along the way they turned into the same thing. What I learn in the studio, I apply to life. What I learn in life, I bring back into the studio. It goes back and forth like that, every day. Life and art are one in the same.
People kept asking me about it. Collectors, other artists, people at dinners. How do you know when a painting’s done? What does meditation have to do with it? Why ash? Why denim? And I’d tell the stories, and they’d say, you should write that down.
So I did. I talked it through, painting by painting, story by story, and we shaped it into a book. It’s in my words. If you’ve ever been in the studio with me, it’ll sound pretty familiar.
What’s in it
The book moves in five parts. That’s how a painting goes, and honestly, that’s how pretty much everything goes.
See. Learning to look at what’s actually in front of you. The years I spent bound up in what other people expected. Walking into a zendo for the first time. Training the eye by sitting still.
Receive. The materials that found me. Volcanic ash in Guatemala, a few months before Fuego erupted. Denim from the back of a textile shop. Nylon pita from the hardware store, fading in the sun. The search pieces, which came from internet so slow the images never loaded.
Release. The grip. The weather in the studio, the frustration and the boredom and the ugly middle of a painting. How to watch it pass.
Complete. When a painting’s done, it’s done. And what lies beneath every finished thing, like the 2012 t-shirts buried inside “Battle for Water.”
Align. Purpose, commissions, teaching, and why I think creativity is the most elevated act a person can do.
Then there’s an interlude called The Time Is Now, the seven paintings I’m working on right now, and the language of marks running through them. Ladders, ships, rain, hands, wheels.
And through all of it, one line from the Third Chinese Patriarch of Zen: “The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.” I come back to that every day.
The art
There are more than sixty works in the book, all in full color. Paintings, Samu pieces, ash on canvas, Pita Plastica, the Regenerate series, and photos from the studio. Every chapter opens with a full-page detail of one painting, so you can get right up close to the surface.
Two chapters
Here are two whole chapters, straight from the book. One from Receive, one from Release.
Chapter 7 · The Back of the Shop: Denim
We moved to Guatemala in June of 2014 with a baby and two backpacks. That was it. That was everything.
And I decided I was going to start working. But I couldn’t find any materials. All the art supplies were way out in the city, two and a half hours away, probably longer, on an incredibly insane bus ride. It wasn’t like I could just hop out there and come back. So I just found what I could.
I went into the back of this textile shop. Not like a textile shop you’d go to in the States. It had everything, all kinds of fabrics and textiles, all mishmashed together. And they had this canvas, and it was really affordable. So I said, give me the whole roll. Fifty yards.
My plan was, I’ll get the canvas first, then I’ll find paints, then I’ll start painting. But I never really found any paints I connected with. And I don’t know what inspired me. I think I’d done it before. But I just started cutting into the canvas. In different patterns. Seeing what came.
About four years later, after we’d moved to Antigua, I was at an event in the city and I met the guy who actually manufactured that exact canvas. The New Denim Project. It’s upcycled denim, and it’s what I use for every Samu piece.
Samu
In Zen monasteries there’s a practice called “samu”. It means work practice. Sweeping, cooking, cleaning, working in the garden. And the monks do it with the same attention they bring to sitting. The work is the meditation.
I love doing those pieces. I created that work to replicate a monastic type of situation. It’s like doing the chores in a monastery. The classic is chop wood, carry water. Sweeping, cooking. The monastic setting is built around creating an environment where the absolute minimal amount of thinking is required. You’re not there to solve problems and come up with tons of new ideas. You’re there to live creatively. And your life becomes a creative act through the monotony of the work.
So with the cut pieces, I could get into that kind of energy. I’ll meditate anywhere from fifteen to thirty minutes, sitting in front of the prepared canvas. All the materials are ready. And then, right out of the meditation, I go right into it. Cutting. And I try to breathe through each cut, so each cut becomes one breath.
It doesn’t always work out perfectly like that. But it forces me to stay in the moment. Because there’s no fixing it. If my mind wanders and the knife goes the wrong direction, if I overcut or undercut something, it’s permanent. Then I have to start all over again. Restretch the canvas, re-prep it, everything.
So it’s a very, very directed, mindful practice. And when it’s finished, the pieces have a certain energy, because of the positive and negative space and how the two intermingle. It has a yin-yang kind of feel, for me at least.
What denim carries
Denim’s a working fabric. It’s been on bodies, on knees, in fields. Every pair of jeans has a life in it. Somebody wore those.
So when I cut into that and put it on canvas, I’m working with all those lives. I don’t know their stories. But the fabric kind of does. The fading knows where the knees bent.
I like that the material shows up already full. My job’s just to listen to what it’s already saying.
Made once
Samu pieces get made on demand, and I don’t keep an inventory of them. Each one exists because a moment called for it. That matters to me. It’s more like a conversation than a factory.
Your days are like that too, if you let them be. Each one, one sitting. You can’t do today over again tomorrow.
Chapter 11 · The Grip
You can feel it in your hand.
When I start trying to control a painting, my grip on the brush tightens up. My shoulders come up. My breath gets short. And the line I put down just dies. You can see it. A controlled line has no life in it. It looks careful. It looks scared.
Mostly it’s getting hung up on what’s already there and trying to make it into something. All of a sudden it’s, oh, I like this part, I want to keep that part. And that part might be really good on its own, but it might not work within the whole painting. So sometimes it just has to be wiped out.
I call it pinching the energy. Energy wants to move. It wants to come through you and out into the work. When you grip, you pinch it off. Like stepping on a hose.
Same grip, everywhere
And it’s the same grip everywhere.
It’s your jaw in a meeting when you need it to go your way. It’s your hand on your phone waiting for somebody to text back. It’s holding onto a kid who’s trying to walk off into their own life. Holding onto money, reputation, being right.
Same body. Same tightness. Same dead line.
The open hand
Practice teaches you the open hand.
When I’m sitting, I notice the grip. I don’t fight it, because fighting it is just another grip. I notice it, I breathe, and usually it lets go a little on its own.
In the studio it’s the same thing. I notice my hand’s tight. I put the brush down. I breathe. Then I pick it back up a little looser.
You can hold a brush firmly enough to paint and loosely enough to let it move. You can hold a life the same way.
“But some things need control”
Sure. You need control to stretch a canvas square. You need control to run a business, pay your taxes, drive a car.
Control’s a tool. The grip is something else. The grip is control that’s gone past what the job needs and turned into fear. It’s holding on after holding on stopped helping.
So the question’s pretty simple. Is this helping the work, or am I just scared?
Who it’s for
I wrote it for the people who live with the work. Collectors who want to know what’s going on underneath the paintings on their walls. Artists looking for a way to keep going for a lifetime. And anybody who wants to treat their life as a creative act, because it already is.
Your kitchen is a studio. Your job is a studio. Your relationships are a studio. The only question is whether you’re listening.
Get the book
Just Listening is out today.
If you read it, I’d love to hear what lands for you. And if it means something to you, a review on Amazon helps more than you’d think.
Thank you for living with the work, for reading, and for listening.
Enjoy.
Kurt