2023Rainer Diana Hamilton

1. LOOKING INSIDE

Learning, like loving, is a matter of paying attention.

1.a. To pay attention is sometimes, counterintuitively, to stop noticing.

Imagine, for example, that you went to an exhibition of moon paintings—say, Ann Craven’s Twelve Moons at the SCAD Museum of Art—and decided to observe only the show’s organization. You tested everything you noticed against this principled focus. If you thought, “These paintings seem to be grouped by color,” you could keep going, consulting the gallery guide for confirmation, where you’d find, instead, that they are hung chronologically. You could stick with this line of thought, committing to snubbing whatever was unrelated to order: “This is a year of moons, and the year is itself a palette. What’s the color of June, in that case?” Taking notes on the way the pink light of a painted Strawberry Moon reveals an aperture in a tree, turning it into a kind of camera, you’d find that the same moon’s appearance as a muted-yellow crescent, five months earlier, did not offer enough light to reveal that element of the tree’s shape, giving it, instead, a round belly. Then, despite your focus on order, you’d be dealing with the potential of a tree’s pregnancy—elsewhere of its injury, too—and of branches as framing devices, and so on.

But you would not let yourself be distracted by questions that arose about composition, or location, or association—“How does one paint in the open air in Maine, in January?” or “Is there a tree like this up the hill, near my apartment?”—though, like an anxious person new to meditation, you could acknowledge that your attention had wandered without following it. This might lead you to see a painting of bold, diagonal stripes—Diptych (Stripe, 12 Moons), 2022 (2022), the only nonrepresentational work in the show, on the reverse of the wall holding July’s moons—as a compositional guidebook. The first full stripes, those that make it from the bottom of the canvas to its top, are the yellow and black of January, you’d be sure, followed by February’s pink eyeliner on the quarter moon’s blue iris, then the black stripe, which would help you find the bird hiding in the night’s branches of Moon (Glamorous Tree, Yellow January Crescent, Cushing), 2022 (2022)—and so on, round the gallery, this palette becoming a map. Your attention would be so stubborn that you’d overlook the exceptions: with the great pleasure of confirmation bias, you’d miss the fact that your organizational theory is already disproven by March.

This is scholarly attention: the focusing of research topics.

1.b. In other cases, to pay attention is to stop overlooking.

Imagine, for example, you entered the SCAD Museum of Art dozens of times. Unless you had consciously decided to ask yourself questions like, “From what material is the building’s exterior made?” or “How does the curator work around the structurally necessary columns, which interfere with certain lines of sight in the gallery?” or “Why am I so excited to see this playful, simple, sketchbook-style star in the corner of this painting?” you would not notice any of the details that permit you to wonder about them, let alone answer their attendant questions. If you turned this attention on, you would pace back and forth, looking for anything you might have missed, as would the paranoiac, or the detective, or the jealous lover.

Without this attention, as you approached the exhibition’s entrance, you would have found the brick entryway framing a quiet moon—Harvest Moon (Quiet, Cushing), 2022 (2022)—unbothered by any visual noise of branches or wind, fully illuminated by the peach light of the absent sun that, come to think of it, must have been pointed the same direction you were, standing there, while the moon then cast that light back into the water’s blue, barely divisible from the sky. By this method, though, the squared archway of bricks would not frame just the artist’s name, the show’s title, and the singular moon. It would have framed, too, a conversation between the depicted planetary body of Cushing, Maine, and the moons of 1853 that oversaw the building’s construction, if one inaudible from your position.

This maddening commitment to noticing everything possible might briefly seem like the true path, but it cannot go on long: attention needs to wander or fixate. If you weren’t careful, you could find yourself dreaming that two Boston Terrier sisters, Magic and Moonlight, were with you in Savannah’s Fragrant Garden, designed for those, like Moonlight, who might want to experience flowers by some organ other than the eyes. As you turned to the right, to the crazy orange moon, hanging over the Hudson River, produced by last fall’s total lunar eclipse—Beaver Moon (Blood Eclipse, Yellow Light, Louise’s Stars, NYC) 2022 (2022)—you would have asked what gave her permission to add in the non-realist star. You do not need to have seen Louise Nevelson’s work in the Farnsworth Art Museum to recognize the pleasure in this slanted, five-point figure. In freeing yourself to pay attention to everything, you get to participate, briefly, in the artist’s sense of freedom, in the certainty of departure. The permission you noticed, I mean, extends to you: it is an act of grace.

This is childish attention: the open mind.

The scholar, the child, and the artist all have a lot to learn.

1.c. In still other cases, to pay attention is to go on.

Imagine, for example, that you paint the moon. You are faithful to it. You meet it, regularly and in person, over many formative years. When you paint other things—birds, say, or a church—some people (who might not know how to pay attention) are relieved, believing that you have moved on.  They want you to move, it seems, from the strict focus of the scholar to the playful mania of the child, because they do not know that you’ve been neither. Perhaps you return to the moon to avoid the kind of fixed attention that risks flattening, simplifying, or obscuring the object of observation, or the scientific attention that cannot suppress its longing for the “experiment” to repeat with the same outcome, or the promiscuous attention that converts all observation into collage. By painting the moon at 11:10 pm and 1:05 am, you maintain, rigorously and emotionally, the difference between the details observed in those moments of attention, and, by capturing the moment that has just passed, you also store, in the painting, the various acts of living and feeling that overlapped with the moment.

This is artistic attention: sticking with what is observed so long that observation becomes, in its focus, generative.

2. WRITING OUTSIDE

The sun heats up the rain, which is diverted by the live oak trees’ Spanish moss, preventing it from falling on me where I sit in Forsyth Park, making a list of everything I already know about the moon. I want to imitate Craven’s process, a red notebook functioning as a smaller-scale canvas on which I first record the elements of the larger composition, before walking the northwesterly mile that will take me to the paintings I’ve so far only seen by way of screens. For this to work, though, I would need to get to know the tree, the thickness of the paper, the town, the pen’s nib, the features of my own handwriting I can rely on to reoccur, and the places my mind might stray if I took from it, unkindly, this gift of attention. The trees of Savannah are too new to me—I find myself missing the elm with the thirty-eight-inch trunk in Sunset Park, the tree I know best—whereas Craven’s trees are family friends.

There are non-creative ways of paying attention to the moon, and not just by sticking too long with academic or immature attention (worshiping it, for example, or focusing too narrowly on aesthetic representations of its craters, or staring blankly at it). I wonder whether most people pay it any real mind when they look. Nam June Paik, in the work that gave Amanda Kim the title for her recent biopic, says the “Moon is the Oldest TV,” a sentiment echoed by Judy Radul: “By saying ‘television’ I mean, more or less, that we should talk about the moon. Before the 1930s . . . what people across the earth watched together was the moon. Around the globe, every night, we see, more or less, the same moon.”1 For both Paik and Radul, the moon landing made the moon-television connection canonical, the whole world looking, at once, at both. Radul suggests that television introduced to artists this fantasy of becoming moonlike, of making work that everyone looks at together, at the same time. But moon- and TV-watching are, at least now, distracted, multitasking, half-turned-away forms of viewing, the opposite of Craven’s gaze.

In a letter to Federico Garcia Lorca (written twenty years after his death), the poet Jack Spicer wrote of his hopes for the written moon:

The lemon to be a lemon that the reader could cut or squeeze or taste—a real lemon like a newspaper in a collage is a real newspaper. I would like the moon in my poems to be a real moon, one which could be suddenly covered with a cloud that has nothing to do with the poem—a moon utterly independent of images.2

Craven’s most common subjects—birds and moons—happen to be those that phone cameras are worst at capturing. Lunatics and ornithophiles hoping to document their objects of fascination beyond the limits of their phones have a few options: they can pay a grand for a Nikon point-and-shoot that comes equipped with a built-in “moon mode,” say, or, for double that, purchase a pair of Swarovski binoculars that, by uploading images directly to a bird identification app on a phone sharing the same Wi-Fi network, keep track of any birds your eyes have seen. To help lay photographers and would-be hunters of the moon, those confused Dianas, phone camera designers have turned to AI: Samsung’s recent models controversially add visual information by digitally “enhancing” the blurry halos of light that we produce when, looking up at a particularly incredible night sky, we forget once again that memory might be a better site for the image than the pocket computer. By adding detail that wasn’t “there,” though, they caused a revolt. People are longing to record what they saw themselves—a ghost of Spicer’s longing for reality—not a composite image produced by those who took better shots.

This is what makes Craven an expert in the art of iPhone moon pics, which she documents on Instagram. She disables the phone’s attempt to overcompensate for darkness, which tends to turn light sources into ambiguous halos, and restores the image to the closest it can get to what one saw without supplementary visual information. In maintaining distortion, she also reminds you to go outside: attention starts en plein air, amplified by oil on canvas rather than a photograph (which now functions as a substitute for noticing, a bookmark promising oneself to return to the image from the privacy of home). In Twelve Moons, there’s a corner where the wild yellow stars of November—when the totally eclipsed moon rose, for Craven, over the West Side Highway—wrap around into the almost-grayscale of December in Maine. That final wall (chronologically) of the exhibition starts with two small squares, one from each month: Beaver Moon (Blood Red Eclipse, Louise’s Stars, NYC, 11-8-22, 5:30 AM), 2022 (2022) and Cold Moon (Glamorous Tree, Cushing, 12-7-22, 7:30 PM), 2022 (2022). They contrast startlingly, giving the impression that the penultimate used up so much color that nothing was left for the final full moon of the year. No longer boldly denuded of both tree canopy and sunlight, this cold moon (painted almost a full month later, on the eve of the Immaculate Conception) tucks itself into winter branches of the tree Craven named for its glamor.

3. PERMITTING SCREENS

In Craven’s Twelve Moons, I find a year of exemplary attention, the kind that demonstrates fidelity to what it observes not by representing every crater, feather, or twig of its subject, but by representing the devotion of attention itself. I love her subjects’ familiarity: peonies and irises transplanted from her grandmother’s garden, or birds from a single catalogue, repeated often, such that the ornithology book transforms, over time, into memoir. As these paintings become the literal backdrop for new works, it is as if she is writing in the margins of an ongoing diary, creating a process that becomes, via attention, a way of life. By repeating palettes, subject matter, process, location, the “Birds We Know” rather than birds we don’t, it’s not that she draws on some auratic magic of personal memory—familiarity is the source of technical mastery, gestural comfort, knowledge of the brushstrokes that will comprise the 1 am reflection of moonlight on a lake under a given combination of emotional, atmospheric, and climatic conditions that must be marked, each time, as an entirely new meeting.

 

1 Judy Radul, “Marquee Moon,” Glänta 4 (2013), Eurozine.

2 Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 133.