Striving and Letting Go
The Hero's Journey in Art
The Bend, 50 x 60 inches, oil on canvas, 2026.
In art school, I latched on to ideas about art.
One idea was to not compare myself to my fellow students, but to compare myself to the masters. I was encouraged, as an art student, to think of myself as standing on the shoulders of the giants who achieved great things well before I came along. Titian and Rembrandt and Thomas Eakins whispered in my ear as I painted. This is an academic approach to art that emphasizes intergenerational learning and tradition.
Robert Henri, who wrote the book The Art Spirit more than 100 years ago, offered different advice. He encouraged students not to imitate, but to find their own styles. This non-academic approach emphasizes individual discovery and self-recognition. So, I let de Kooning and Pollock and Rothko whisper into my other ear, yet I did not know where they were taking me.
Somewhere along the way I latched on to another idea, that the highest goal of an artist is to encompass everything that came before and extend that into something new. This created its own tension as the academic tradition in art bumped up against the somewhat
nihilistic current of anti-art that flowed through the 20th century. If Titian led to Rembrandt and Rembrandt led to de Kooning, what did de Kooning lead to?
These ideas were sometimes helpful guideposts as I pushed through painting after painting in search of a voice. But like all tightly held ideas, they became tethers. I found that the more I tried to push a painting into existence, the more likely it was that it would stiffen, and then collapse.
But when I let go of my striving, and just painted, my paintings worked better. So, after art school, I went through a long period of letting go and seeing where that led. But instead of achieving bliss, my paintings began to take me in a direction that I did not want to go. Unintentionally, I was caught in a minimalist swirl. Everything I thought I had learned about the ideas of painting went down the drain. Instead of beautiful landscapes, I was painting paintings of nothing. This loss of aim in my own paintings was very disturbing, but also very necessary.
For much of my life, I’ve been sorting and sifting this group of ideas and finding where they reinforce each other, where they contradict each other.
That is the hero’s journey in painting, following the path of Dante, down through agonizing hell, into endless slogging purgatory, before emerging into a new and better space.
Homer, The Buddha, Black Elk, Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung and many, many others have described this journey. It is universal. If we look, we can see the path everywhere. Western art should not try to escape it. If we try to avoid our Jungian shadows, we risk spending our careers painting pretty and meaningless paintings.
After art school, the ideas, tools and processes that served me in school dropped away, leaving me with nothing more than paint and canvas and no usable rule book. It was an ego-starving journey that lasted years and reset my path in life. I was freed to grow and approach painting differently. I moved away from painting as an act of capturing an image or effect, and toward painting as a search for something real, beyond artistic sleight of hand.
Mark Rothko’s color field paintings invite that type of encounter. His canvases are not about things; they are an experience of awe and presence that he is inviting us to share. His ability to hold that experience open for us is truly inspiring. Maybe that was his real gift.
One of the great lessons of Rothko’s artistry is the power of simplicity. Instead of stuffing more and more shining objects into a painting, he refined a small set of techniques into a highly effective visual experience. Further, he removed what was unessential, so that the viewer had fewer and fewer barriers to their experience of awe. Rothko removed the obscurations and opened up the experience.
His late paintings are monochromatic expanses, sometimes described as bleak moonscapes. I find them to be very challenging and uncomforting. There is no warmth and, despite the depth of the field, no obvious way forward. But rather than signposts of doom, I see them as the view at night, when nothing is clear, searching in the dark before something answers.
In painting these images, Rothko held that uncomfortable experience open. I don’t think of his final paintings as the bleak end of a troubled life. I see them as a transition point. He made the gateway and held it open for us but could not pass through himself.
Some of my teachers dismissed the Abstract Expressionists as a dead-end movement. But I think the movement also had genuine searchers who may not have had the artistic vocabulary to tell us exactly what they were searching for.
They still have real pull for me. I can’t dismiss them. I think that the real problem is that the Abstract Expressionists took us to a place where ideas no longer work. They explored art as feeling, until the impatient audience didn’t want to feel any longer. Then it moved on to the familiar comforts of Pop banality.
The movement waned without giving us a sense of direction. Like Rothko’s last paintings, Jackson Pollock’s final paintings leave me flat, wondering where he would have gone if he had thirty more years to paint. De Kooning lasted the longest of the three, but his last paintings lost energy as his abilities deteriorated.
The strength of their work still points to a place beyond ideas of right and wrong and beyond the excavation and expression of feelings … beyond all elaboration, where there is no more striving and no more letting go.
As Rumi said centuries ago, “There is a field. I’ll meet you there.” *
*Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks and John Moyne, The Essential Rumi (HarperCollins, 1995).
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