Principles
Art
Caught between two traditions
There are many ways to interact with other people. I was speaking to
Margaret, my ex-wife from many years ago, about an artist who had been a star
early as a student of the American artist Fairfield Porter, who then went on to
do Zen painting, and finally became an alcoholic. I knew from my
experience that Fairfield Porter had carried his vein of tradition as far as he
could. His work was figurative with flat color values. The student
had absorbed all of what his teacher had offered and mastered it. The
trouble with this inherited tradition is that it was narrow and left no place to
go. Stuck, he switched gears, embraced eastern thought where art was less
an external appreciation of the world than an assistant to inward
awareness. He probably explored various meditative states and created art
from it, but again reached a dead end. Here too an early mastery was
required as a base to evolve from. He was caught between two ways of doing art,
one from too narrow an inherited tradition, the other from too deep a
tradition.