On 10,000 things:
Nick Collerson
interview with PALAS

Nick Coller­son reads from Plato’s Republic.

NC: I’ve been doing some trans­la­tions of chap­ter six from Plato’s Repub­lic (see end­note). They are talk­ing about speak­ing, and what’s hap­pen­ing in speak­ing. Like the whole text, it is full of puns, or dou­ble speech of Greek philo­soph­i­cal writ­ing. For exam­ple, the word ​“chance” is men­tioned, which means Her­mes, and the word for neces­si­ty, ​“Ananke”, also means the God­dess of neces­si­ty. She’s sym­bol­ised with a thim­ble and thread, and she stitch­es the logos togeth­er. The whole logos is string­ing togeth­er con­tra­dic­tions and sounds of words in a row as the prayer of ser­pent or two.

MG: Whilst you were read­ing that to me, you took a few asides and used words like com­plete­ness, inevitabil­i­ty, and neces­si­ty, along­side words like con­juror and dual­i­ty — what do you mean by completeness?

My idea of com­plete­ness comes from med­i­ta­tion… and this is also the rea­son I read Pla­to, Aris­to­tle and any of the Greek philoso­phers dif­fer­ent­ly. I start­ed med­i­tat­ing in my ear­ly 20s, I’m in my 40s now, so it’s been a long time. I treat­ed med­i­ta­tion as a seri­ous sub­ject with a cur­ricu­lum, I read books, met monks, did some retreats, lis­tened to what peo­ple said. I spent a lot of time doing it, very earnest­ly. And cer­tain things hap­pen, cer­tain expe­ri­ences hap­pen. And so that opens up a dif­fer­ent sense of expe­ri­ence, which I guess you’d say, is aes­thet­ic or per­cep­tu­al expe­ri­ence. It opens up a flow state, which is just what hap­pened in my expe­ri­ence. All my sense doors opened up as a flu­id flow. And because it’s joined in a sequence, like a riv­er, the begin­ning of the riv­er is the end of the riv­er. Some­thing changed about per­cep­tion then, and with it the idea of com­plete­ness and what per­cep­tion is, and how it inte­grates with paint­ing and obser­va­tion and even music.

That change hap­pened when I was in Chica­go med­i­tat­ing a lot. I would med­i­tate for maybe eight to ten hours a day, wak­ing up very ear­ly and just going at it. Dur­ing a break I sat down on the couch near an air con­di­tion­er roar­ing loud­ly, then auto­mat­i­cal­ly, acci­den­tal­ly, my sens­es just opened up and the hear­ing was just the sound of the air con­di­tion­er rush­ing with no posi­tion. Hear­ing imme­di­ate­ly fell away in time and arrived again as the same flow­ing sound… it was flu­id, devoid of con­cep­tu­al abstrac­tion break­ing up ​“this moment” from ​“that moment”, and all my sense doors opened.

When did paint­ing start for you?

It’s been a series of ques­tions. How do you draw some­thing? I was drawn to it instinc­tive­ly. My par­ents sup­port­ed me; I’d walk to my paint­ing teacher’s house after school in Bris­bane. His name was Arthur Xavier — half Por­tuguese, half Chi­nese — at his fram­ing work­shop under his house he’d teach the fun­da­men­tals of draw­ing. So I learned about shad­ing and han­dling oil paint and a bit of mix­ing. That pushed the abil­i­ty to engage with look­ing and mak­ing, the idea of mod­el­ling some­thing or shad­ing some­thing… Actu­al­ly, I should phrase it this way, when I learned how to shade and see shade it was like a light went on, the world of light and shad­ow, my see­ing became more atten­tive. And that’s one part of art mak­ing, the per­cep­tu­al aes­thet­ic engage­ment. That is also like the influ­ence of East­ern think­ing on art mak­ing.

After school I went to Queens­land Col­lege of Art but dropped out — it wasn’t right for me. I always made work inde­pen­dent­ly: paint­ing, sculp­ture, music. My prac­tice was self-driven.

You made the deci­sion to leave Queens­land Col­lege of Art — what else was hap­pen­ing then?

I was in my ear­ly twen­ties, skate­board­ing a lot, ful­ly immersed in that at the time. But I always thought of myself as being an artist of sorts. I just intu­itive­ly thought that was how I was doing things, how I think about things. It’s not uncom­mon for skate­board­ers to think about them­selves as artists as well. Mark Gon­za­lez is an artist — most skate­board­ers would say he’s pri­mar­i­ly an artis­tic skate­board­er. I also went to India in 1999 with a friend — dri­ven by curios­i­ty — but it was trans­for­ma­tive. The den­si­ty of time there, aeons lay­ered togeth­er, changed how I saw things. That led to yoga and med­i­ta­tion, pri­or to the expe­ri­ence I had in Chicago.

In Bris­bane I began paint­ing urban scenes in my garage, not think­ing at all about hav­ing a gallery or a career, just: what is a paint­ing? I loved Beck­ett — the absur­di­ty of Wait­ing for Godot, the weird­ness of a sin­gle motif, like the tree in Wait­ing for Godot, which is just like a poet­ic mark­er for the actors’ absurd dia­logue and their dance around it… 

I was also work­ing at a Bon­sai tree nurs­ery at the time; I encoun­tered the very rig­or­ous clas­si­fi­ca­tion of the aes­thet­ic forms in bon­sai tree com­po­si­tion. Those expe­ri­ences — com­po­si­tion, absur­di­ty, med­i­ta­tion — merged nat­u­ral­ly. I devel­oped my paint­ing aes­thet­i­cal­ly based on this meet­ing of con­tem­pla­tion and aes­thet­ics. I would do my own research on ear­ly mod­ern painters just to get a sense of how these artists were think­ing. Some of my ear­li­est read­ings into art his­to­ry were on Piet Mon­dri­an. I was­n’t so con­cerned with the analy­sis of his­to­ri­ans. I real­ly want­ed to find evi­dence of what the artist was think­ing about. So Mon­dri­an was inter­est­ing — he was into theos­o­phy. At the time I was like, what’s that? You know, what is that? I had no idea what that was. And then I read Miró’s let­ters and that was extreme­ly eye-open­ing. Juan Miró is some­one I adore as a painter, but see­ing his atti­tude to cul­ture and his atti­tude to his con­tem­po­raries and par­tic­u­lar­ly the French sym­bol­ist poets — that’s the first taste I got of the link between poet­ry and paint­ing in mod­ern art, which just became an all-con­sum­ing sub­ject for me.

Look at Mon­dri­an when he was a very young painter. You look at those ear­ly works and you think, oh, the clunk­i­ness, or the prob­lems with per­spec­tive. These become a com­plete rev­e­la­tion when you know who Mon­dri­an becomes. You said to me ​“instinc­tive­ly, I just knew I was a painter. I was cal­i­brat­ed as a painter”. And when you talk about Mon­dri­an, I see that instinct in the way he treat­ed per­spec­tive with that awk­ward­ness. It became a super­pow­er in a way, or an ear­ly rehearsal for what was to come. After that it’s a mat­ter of find­ing a lan­guage around it.

The thing that was fas­ci­nat­ing about Mon­dri­an is the choice he made in the pur­suit of his abstrac­tions. Why would some­one do this? Why would they paint them­selves into a cor­ner? Why would some­one go to this extreme? It’s like he start­ed play­ing with haiku poems, a lim­it­ed vocab­u­lary. Every time I encounter an artist who does some­thing very par­tic­u­lar with vocab­u­lary, I want to find out what they were think­ing about. Not what the effects were, or how they fit with the com­mon read­ing of Euro­pean paint­ing as begin­ning with imi­ta­tion then to abstrac­tion, and then blah, blah, blah, instal­la­tion or wher­ev­er we are now. But just the spe­cif­ic choic­es of spe­cif­ic painters and what they were con­cerned with. I wasn’t inter­est­ed in Abstraction’s his­tor­i­cal tra­jec­to­ry, but the poet­ic log­ic behind deci­sions. Same with Miró, he’s fas­ci­nat­ing. Why did he make these choic­es? He’s aware of Paul Klee, and he was rip­ping him off a lit­tle bit. And there’s Mar­cel Duchamp, anoth­er one who’s just a ques­tion mark — what the hell is he doing? Why is he doing this? Where’s he from? I don’t try to think about how they should inform what I’m doing for­mal­ly. Like, oh, I should be doing ready­mades. No, I think about the poet­ic game they’re play­ing, it’s a lin­guis­tic thing, and this gets to the point that I want to make about mark mak­ing. It gets back to the ques­tion you’re ask­ing about instinc­tive­ly being a mark mak­er. So my idea of being a painter is not real­ly a mate­r­i­al thing. I think of paint­ing as being poet­ic. It’s an exten­sion of writ­ing. My game isn’t about an inno­va­tion of mate­r­i­al qual­i­ties. So with paint­ing, as an exten­sion of writ­ing, I play with images. Yet it’s more like arche­types of images and a lin­guis­tic move. I do not paint imi­ta­tive inven­to­ries of appear­ances. I’m kind of aim­ing at a psy­cho­log­i­cal space or a con­tem­plat­ed space. So, in that way, it’s more like a poem… 

I think there’s a musi­cal tone to your paint­ing as well. I remem­ber first see­ing your paint­ings near­ly 20 years ago now. I felt that then. I did­n’t know what the score was that under­pinned or ran through those works, but I felt that they were both lyri­cal and musi­cal. You said dithyra­m­bic poet­ry is like a spir­i­tu­al opera. They are com­mu­nal and choral. The works you’ve made over the past few years feel more oper­at­ic — char­ac­ters, tonal­i­ty, drama.

Yeah. I cer­tain­ly think the last two shows we’ve done togeth­er have been more focussed in their play of mean­ing. Pre­vi­ous­ly I was hap­py to work in a way that’s very chaot­ic, like, not even know­ing how it’s gonna hit. I trust the process that much. It’s not to say I show every­thing, but I’m hap­py I have done shows with a very kalei­do­scop­ic and absurd qual­i­ty. I don’t mind it being a whirl­wind like a storm com­ing through. I mean, that’s part of the dithyra­mb too. That’s the storm’s breath smash­ing a tree. This is the metaphor of the body, the body of nature, or the body of our real­i­ty we per­ceive as being appar­ent­ly scat­tered and that we have to make sense of, com­plete it in some way when we’re in this life faced with so many things, where am I, who am I? That’s the puz­zle or the mystery. 

So com­plete­ness con­sists of both mul­ti­plic­i­ties and sequences of singularities?

Well, mul­ti­plic­i­ty or sin­gu­lar­i­ty comes down to the idea of dual­ism and non-dual­ism. There’s a great line from the bril­liant 13^th cen­tu­ry Japan­ese monk Dogen. He said, ​“to study the self is to for­get the self, to for­get the self is to be enlight­ened by the 10,000 things”. In Bud­dhism the phrase ​“10,000 things” stands for myr­i­ad things. It’s mul­ti­plic­i­ty com­ing to bear on expe­ri­ence which in turn affirms the wis­dom of one­ness, not as quan­tifi­able dis­cur­sive thought, but as the same accent in all dif­fer­ent thoughts and feel­ings, even in an appar­ent­ly wrong word or contradiction.

Would you say con­tra­dic­tion isn’t just accept­able, but a necessity?

Yes, and it’s not a prob­lem. Philoso­phers have ways of talk­ing about it — from Her­a­cli­tus through to the play­wrights, who were artis­tic philoso­phers, they’re real­ly writ­ing dithyra­mbs as plays. Pla­to wrote dithyra­mbs as dia­logues. Aris­to­tle wrote prose poems with a dithyra­m­bic qual­i­ty influ­enced by his own under­stand­ing. All the dithyra­m­bic poets write in the same spir­it, just as Bud­dhist writ­ers are influ­enced by Sun­y­a­ta. Dithyra­mbs unite things togeth­er, like in Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias, usu­al­ly trans­lat­ed as On Inter­pre­ta­tion. Peri means ​“around”, inter­pre­ta­tion means ​“Her­mes”. It’s the uni­fy­ing dithyra­m­bic rit­u­al of the dance cir­cling around the idea of the Her­mes stone. He describes words twist­ing togeth­er like twine as the ​“dual vipers” on Her­mes’ wand, and he binds con­tra­dic­tion, nega­tion and affir­ma­tion to one anoth­er, touch­ing in a line like the ​“staff”.

In the text, you can see the struc­ture, like it’s a draw­ing, like a paint­ing writ­ten in words. So that’s how con­tra­dic­tion is han­dled in phi­los­o­phy, all argu­men­ta­tion and polarised opin­ions mere­ly sym­bol­ise con­jec­tures held onto, com­pet­ing con­jec­tures car­ried by Her­mes, who is the move­ment of mind accom­pa­ny­ing all posi­tions. Inso­far as you think any­thing, your mind moves, Her­met­ic activ­i­ty is hap­pen­ing. So Sun­y­a­ta is the Pla­ton­ic Idea Her­mes, the form­less­ness of expe­ri­ence that is truer than opin­ions. See, even if I lie to you, if I say some­thing to you like ​“the world is flat”. Well, you know it’s incor­rect. But it’s true that you heard some­thing, so the move­ment of mind is true, it is always truer than information. 

Com­plete­ness isn’t didac­tic. It’s not about a quan­tifi­able con­cept, mean­ing or per­suad­ing some­one of a sto­ry. Her­met­ic work doesn’t tell you a par­tic­u­lar thing, it engen­ders an experience.

That’s what hap­pens in Euro­pean poet­ics too. Shake­speare writes, ​“One thing express­ing, leaves out dif­fer­ence. Fair, kind and true is all my argu­ment; fair, kind and true, vary­ing to oth­er words, and then this change is my inven­tion spent.” That change itself engen­ders the ​“fair, kind, and true”. Noth­ing ever real­ly miss­es the tar­get. Aris­to­tle writes, “…​move­ments of every kind are hit­ting mark on the same objects of con­tem­pla­tion, they are always hit­ting the mark on these here just like a few just now are cut­ting things into pieces [aka. Diony­sus]: and tru­ly just as they say many would throw a strik­ing hit, at anoth­er time you will throw anoth­er sort, and he is com­ing togeth­er in agree­ment upon the sur­face of these here.”

Remov­ing the ele­ment of failure?

I mean that is get­ting into more of an idio­syn­crat­ic or prag­mat­ic think­ing about the process of paint­ing. I like court­ing fail­ure, try­ing dif­fi­cult things to see how far I can go. I’ve used vari­a­tions and rep­e­ti­tions… Peo­ple might see rep­e­ti­tion in my work now (the recur­ring side­walk motif) but that’s delib­er­ate. It’s a path that con­tin­ues while every­thing else varies.

For years I paint­ed any­thing as a sub­ject; abstract, fig­u­ra­tive, por­traits, what­ev­er. I had this phrase for myself, ​‘paint­ing, paint­ing’ — a cir­cu­lar idea. That idea pre­dates my Greek stud­ies. In Bud­dhism, philo­soph­i­cal insight comes through ​“the ten thou­sand things”. I thought, paint­ing isn’t of some­thing — the uni­verse itself is paint­ing. Like the myth of Shiva’s dance of the cos­mos. For a dancer, it’s dance; for a musi­cian, it’s music; for a painter, the uni­verse is paint, unfold­ing pig­ment before our eyes. Paint­ing is not a mate­r­i­al object, it’s a process of inter­pre­ta­tion. That is an intel­lec­tu­al event. I didn’t want a par­tic­u­lar style. It was con­tem­pla­tion. Over time inquiry led to pat­a­physics and the tra­di­tion it is part of — a trail of breadcrumbs.

You could take that trail back end­less­ly, but in regard to your own prac­tice, when I saw your paint­ing Kora, you said to me that it is also your paint­ing Diony­sus, and Dance. It is the same paint­ing. Is that revis­it­ing or a metamorphosis?


Both. I’m unashamed­ly using motifs from tra­di­tion. Mod­ernism is often thought of as a break from tra­di­tion to gen­er­ate new­ness, new­ness, new­ness. I don’t think it’s exclu­sive­ly that because you can see the use of the old­er motifs in the sur­re­al­ist, Max Ernst and Duchamp, Dali, Hil­da Doolit­tle. — they refer to mytho­log­i­cal ideas and used them astute­ly. I like to pay homage to that, so I’m putting out bread crumbs so peo­ple can make connections.

Kora con­nects to Poe’s The Fall of the House of Ush­er. The name Madeleine — from the Ger­man ​“girl”, is kora, maid­en in Greek. Kora is Perse­phone, queen of the under­world, equiv­a­lent to Kali. Poe’s title itself — the fall of the begin­ning — is cir­cu­lar, an ouroboros, the cycle of Persephone’s mur­der­ous­ly fer­tile life.

So Kora, Diony­sus’ body form­ing, and Dance — they’re part of the same pan­theon, mor­ph­ing in time and contemplation.

Impro­vi­sa­tion seems essen­tial too. I don’t just know you as a painter but a read­er, writer, and then there are oth­er phys­i­cal ele­ments of you as a drum­mer, also you as a skate­board­er. These last two offer a phys­i­cal act of inter­pre­ta­tion. Does that give you freedom?

Yeah. I love the inter­pre­tive process. Play­ing drums is open­ing to the unfold­ing of lis­ten­ing, pay­ing atten­tion. Impro­vi­sa­tion isn’t wil­ful chaos, it’s con­cen­tra­tion and instinc­tive response.

Skateboarding’s beau­ti­ful — an open-source code of tricks that peo­ple con­tribute to and inter­pret dif­fer­ent­ly. It is cre­ative­ly mov­ing through the envi­ron­ment. The eas­i­er you move through some­thing dif­fi­cult, the more it looks like noth­ing hap­pened. That’s how they describe some­one as hav­ing a flowy style.

I like to paint that way — as if nothing’s hap­pen­ing. Maybe it doesn’t seem so sophis­ti­cat­ed, but maybe there is more there than meets the eye.

It’s informed by more than it reveals.

Yes. West­ern cul­ture often treats art as infor­ma­tion to decode. There is not as much atten­tion to the innate parts of our­selves. We think it’s about some­thing we must ​“get,” read­ing the wall text, categorising.

But the strength of art — music, dance, paint­ing — is par­tic­i­pa­tion. Theo­ria in Greek means being a spec­ta­tor and con­tem­pla­tor; it also meant send­ing an envoy to an ora­cle. It’s con­tem­pla­tion as experience.

Paint­ings open slow­ly. There’s no bur­den to think any­thing pro­found. If you under­stand red for exam­ple, that’s enough.

I nev­er feel book­end­ed by your paint­ings. I feel that it (the paint­ing) has kept enough from me, or out of sight, to con­vince me there’s a rever­ber­a­tion of that paint­ing that might come back in a dif­fer­ent way. It has the poten­tial to resur­face or come through in anoth­er paint­ing. So I nev­er feel like a paint­ing is being closed off.

Yes. Dithyra­m­bic texts are incom­plete, com­ple­tion is with the spec­ta­tor. A paint­ing should grow in the view­er. The incom­plete­ness is instinc­tive, like per­cep­tion flow­ing freely. Aristotle’s writ­ings were said to be incom­plete until the intel­lec­tu­al organ of the read­er sharp­ens itself. That’s what I want, paint­ings that keep think­ing. Aris­to­tle, the peri­patet­ic philoso­pher, was said to have writ­ten with rhythm, not verse; mean­ing unfolds in rhythm.

And rhythm can be fast or slow. We were talk­ing in your stu­dio one day about your paint­ing El Diti­ram­bo. That paint­ing came quick­ly. It was char­coal, it was paint­ed over and fin­ished, then three or four days lat­er you came back and added a tuft of grass, but that was it. The for­mu­la­tion of that was instinc­tive. I like that in con­trast to paint­ings that have ges­tat­ed for years and that you’ve cho­sen to go back in. You haven’t wiped them clean but rather van­ished part of them before mov­ing back in.

I’m hap­py to work in every way, a paint­ing that’s very quick or a paint­ing that takes years. That paint­ing did come very quick­ly, oth­ers take time.

And time — Chronos in the mak­ing of work?

Yes, Sat­urn appears often, I place those sym­bols delib­er­ate­ly because I feel it is impor­tant to make the tra­di­tion visible.

I see those sym­bols as your work­ing notes. You’ve put them into the paint­ing to solve a rid­dle rather than putting a rid­dle into a paint­ing. I feel there is a gen­eros­i­ty in that. You are shar­ing your work­ing notes with­in the painting.

Yeah. Like Jung’s Red Book, they’re med­i­ta­tions. Not that I’m nec­es­sar­i­ly Jun­gian, but I appre­ci­ate he’s done some­thing pret­ty spe­cial in his artis­tic and poet­ic con­tem­pla­tive pur­suit. But yeah, these are my own notes. But I’m in two minds, because on one side they are per­son­al, I’m think­ing through mak­ing, and feel like I’ve lived my life cor­rect­ly if I’ve made a paint­ing. That’s just the irra­tional part of being a painter, irre­spec­tive of whether a paint­ing is seen or sells or not. Then the oth­er part is that I like to share an over­looked part of the tra­di­tion of art. I’m as much a spec­ta­tor as a mak­er. Some­times I spend more time look­ing — as I did with Bud­dhism, Chi­nese poet­ry and paint­ing. Now it’s the dithyra­m­bic poet­ry of Pla­to, Aris­to­tle and oth­ers. But the irony of dithyra­mbs is that though they over­flow with words, they are in fact a long lacon­ic pun or epi­thet — it is very play­ful, I can’t help but share it.

So it cir­cles back to play.

Yes, always play. The Greek word apo­r­ia means ​“no pas­sage”, but in a dithyra­mb it is not blocked, but end­less. You can enter but you can’t pass through because it’s nev­er end­ing. So it goes on and on.

You can’t enter with the expec­ta­tion of com­ing out the oth­er side.

Not being able to pass through means it isn’t a race, wis­dom shouldn’t be com­pet­i­tive. I think there’s a kind­ness that comes through in ancient philo­soph­i­cal writ­ings. After all phi­los­o­phy is about the love of wis­dom, so love and kind­ness should be cen­tral. Encoun­ter­ing an apo­r­ia can be help­ful. Many years ago (just after leav­ing the Col­lege of Art) I remem­ber sit­ting on a bal­cony paint­ing out­doors and sud­den­ly ask­ing myself, what am I paint­ing? What is the sub­ject? That ques­tion stopped me. I began turn­ing inward, think­ing about per­cep­tion itself. Pay­ing atten­tion became the sub­ject. I think that’s when I real­ly noticed emp­ty spaces, a set of stairs, a pair of kid’s shoes in a hall­way, or a chair — mun­dane things.

They are authen­tic moments — the lack of stim­u­la­tion in those noth­ing spaces lets you enjoy the mun­dane or the ordinary.

Exact­ly. Any object can be a cat­a­lyst for atten­tion — like Van Gogh’s peas­ant shoes. To real­ly look is peace. The ear­li­est relief carv­ings of the Bud­dha were of two things: the bot­tom of his feet, mean­ing to walk the path, and the sec­ond was an emp­ty seat. Just an emp­ty seat, no icon. It is beau­ti­ful­ly poet­ic that an emp­ty seat stood for the Bud­dha. When I paint some­thing with emp­ty space, it’s a space for some­one else as well. It is like open­ing a door.

Open­ness can be lack­ing in the West. There is a pre­sump­tion of know­ing the whole nar­ra­tive. This leads to trau­ma that clos­es peo­ple off to each oth­er and them­selves; fight-or-flight respons­es make us defen­sive. Col­lec­tive trau­ma shuts down openness.

Art can open it again. It has a divine or con­tem­pla­tive qual­i­ty — not reli­gious, but human. Pla­to and Aris­to­tle call the divine that is shared by all ​“com­mon”, an epi­thet of Hermes.

Do those divine things require us to sus­pend our­selves — to realise there are things that oper­ate out­side of what we can com­pre­hend neatly?

It’s not about sus­pen­sion, because it’s not voli­tion­al. Her­mes con­stant form­less­ness accom­pa­nies thought and lan­guage. It isn’t about relin­quish­ing our human­ness, it’s real­iz­ing that we are held by what we share in common.

In this infor­ma­tion age we are lost in the sea of vying posi­tions and argu­ments. The West has its ide­olo­gies, which are about infor­ma­tion, about dis­crim­i­na­tion, about which creed or which ide­ol­o­gy you want to iden­ti­fy your­self with. What’s sup­pressed is Her­met­ic think­ing — not a posi­tion, some amount of infor­ma­tion, but an accent of the expe­ri­ence of all thought, an idea with infi­nite names.

I’m using this as a metaphor for the Greek philoso­phers again, but a Bud­dhist mas­ter hears the form­less­ness in any­thing. Their wis­dom is unre­lent­ing, and so it is for philoso­phers too.

The expe­ri­ence of being alive is walk­ing down the street, or walk­ing in the ago­ra, which is the place of assembly.

The side­walk?

The side­walk motif in my paint­ings came nat­u­ral­ly. Some are in the light and some in the shad­ows. That’s also an authen­tic, emo­tion­al thing. I’m not try­ing to be clever, it’s actu­al­ly how I feel. Sad­ness, or what­ev­er feel­ing it might be, should be free to be car­ried into the paint­ing. The dithyra­mb is the genre that includes all gen­res. Tragedy, com­e­dy, the epic, which is the hero­ic or epic tale of our life. Tragedy and com­e­dy and puerile sex jokes which char­ac­ter­ize the satir­ic verse. It is all these, even fart jokes, every­thing, blah blah blah, the dithyra­mb has every­thing. I mean, the sex jokes are ridicu­lous. I won’t go into that, it’s wild.

That’s the chal­lenge. To keep every­thing and any­thing open, and not to shut off the pos­si­bil­i­ty of in your painting.

Yeah, that’s like Dogen, the idea of the 10,000 things — every­thing as the uni­verse. The dithyra­mb par­o­dies sep­a­ra­tion. Even oppo­si­tion con­tributes to one­ness. My posi­tion is every­thing is one, it’s all the uni­verse. But then some­one might say, ​“ha ha, but what about this?” I’m like, what? Did you mirac­u­lous­ly step out­side the uni­verse some­how to make that point? No, you’re a part of it too. That is the irony of dithyra­m­bic poet­ry, every­body is in this song.

I like that. If you can’t step out­side of the uni­verse and look at it objec­tive­ly, you can’t cre­ate the hier­ar­chy your­self, right?

Yes. In Greek, hen (ἕν) means One, but also flow and speech — the ​‘One’ frac­tures into mul­ti­plic­i­ty yet express­es a uni­ty of flow­ing speech. That is very dif­fer­ent from our under­stand­ing of One in Eng­lish. The word ​“rhetoric’s” root means flow of water; and is also relat­ed to the root word εἴρω, mean­ing ​“to speak” and also ​“to stitch togeth­er in a row”. Aris­to­tle opens On Inter­pre­ta­tion with the middle/​passive voice of εἴρω, Eri­tai (εἴρηται) — mean­ing ​“it is said,” but as a poet­ic pun in the mid­dle sub­junc­tive voice it is self-ref­er­en­tial demand­ing speech, so it means — ​“he demands to speak of him­self-string­ing togeth­er in a row”. This pun is appro­pri­ate for a non-dial­is­tic text on the Her­met­ic real­i­ty of speech and thought called logos. Indeed the word ​“inter­pre­ta­tion” in the title is ety­mo­log­i­cal­ly from Her­mes the flow­ing-inter­preter archetype.

I think of the water that flows through the drains and the side­walks of your paint­ings. The action of watch­ing some­thing flow is that it’s con­stant, but it’s also reac­tive and deviant. It moves around and through things and it dou­bles back on itself. Flow does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean that it’s with­out resis­tance, it just means that it con­tin­ues to move.

Yes. In change there’s con­stan­cy if every­thing is shift­ing. Her­a­cli­tus’ para­dox — ​“chang­ing is at rest…” there­fore always the same. Philoso­phers sus­pend dis­crim­i­na­tive think­ing by col­lag­ing all thought togeth­er, like a sph­ynx, to reveal anoth­er idea — a ​“com­mon” emblem of the flow of thought. This is non-nego­tiable. This is the check­mate of the flow­ing Her­met­ic accent of philo­soph­i­cal thought. Like Bud­dhism it is not an argu­ment, it’s engen­der­ing a com­mon experience.

West­ern thought prizes argu­ment and per­sua­sion. We’re forced to iden­ti­fy some­thing, sep­a­rate out, argue it, and build a wall around it, and be upset if some­one dis­agrees with us. Her­met­ic thought invites the expe­ri­ence of dif­fer­ing inter­pre­ta­tions, like musi­cal vari­a­tions in jazz music. Aris­to­tle wrote, ​“it is nec­es­sary when­ev­er any name is con­tra­dict­ing any­thing seem­ing to be an omen, to med­i­tate [ἐπισκοπεῖν] upon how many ways this omen could have been giv­en by that which has been spo­ken-string­ing togeth­er in a row [εἰρημένῳ]… The omen is real­i­ty itself — the flow of the logos. The logos is not a verb, it is a noun, or a ver­bal-noun, mean­ing speech, gath­er­ing, reck­on­ing… You can’t deny it, yet even if you do, there it is.