Wittgenstein: “Don’t think, look!” An Artist’s Reflections and Questions for 2015

2014 was a difficult year for me personally. I lost two close friends suddenly and tragically. One on January 26th, the other on March 31st. The spouses of these men are also close women friends. The kind of friends you are blessed to have in a lifetime and for a lifetime. I spent time sitting in court with the widow of one these friends as hearings, court dates and finally sentencing left a trail of “time out of time” all year long. I listened to the pain of my other friend as she wondered if, after 35 years of marriage she would ever find her way again. I held crippling grief and did not even realize how it became my constant companion of heavy shadow until I stepped into the early spring country side of The Vermont Studio Center in May. In the raw space of a two-week artist residency I could only paint images of grief mixed with tears and exhaustion. I was also gifted with the presence of a sister artist, Jenny Long and a week of daily studio conversations with my mentor and friend; Enrique Martinez Celaya. These two people re-awakened the awareness that I paint and in my commitment to that I would heal. These events knit themselves into the cellular fabric of the artist that I am.

One of the lines quoted to me by Enrique during a studio conversation one rainy Vermont evening was from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: “Don’t think, look!” It became the haunting mantra of studio practice this past year. I knew of the last line Wittgenstein wrote in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” but I also knew from more recent in-depth reading of private conversations and correspondence, he believed those things about which we have to be silent to be the most important. So where does my work as an artist intersect with all this? 2014 came to a close with the pervasive memories of laughter and conversations of my friends ever present and the questions and reflections of the studio steadily flickering before me. I decided 2015 would be a year of deeper and more focused attention to the questions that form themselves in silence. It is this attention that I bring with me to my studio practice.