Being Instruments of Freedom.
I remember the simple joy of staring at clouds as a child. I'd watch as a dragon chased a rabbit carrying a bird surrounded by dancers all watched by a bearded face. It was fun to find the patterns, compare what I saw with my friends, watch the whole tableau move and shift and dissolve into one fanciful image after another.
...
Seems so long ago now. As an adult, I look up and see just clouds. I look to judge the quality of the day, the amount of overcast, signs of rain. There's no time for imagination any more, no reason to let fantasy turn the sky into anything but sky. How did seeing ever get so boring?
So it is with great surprise that I find myself again viewing fanciful images emerging from form. The freedom of impression, to make something meaningful out of a group of colors and lines and shadow and strokes, is a gift I'd almost forgotten I had. It's the gift Danny is using his time on earth to convey.
"There's nothing there." Danny would remind me, as I described a painting as a flock of birds erupting from a still pond at sunrise. "Your mind is eating the light." He'd giggle when I'd talk about multi-colored narrow canyons and ribbons of rivers. "Hmm, I thought it was Einstein kissing a peacock." He'd suggest, as I described the lizard building a nest of wildflowers that was so clearly visible to me.
I was amused at first, then shocked, and now find delight in the fact that this art actually reveals our need to apply meaning to the world, to all things in the world, whether that meaning is really there or not.
How do they do this? I believe it is the purity of pattern, the sacrifice of self, the elimination of desire, the absence of implication in the making of it that generates this quality. Free from the desire of the maker to add meaning, the pieces become a rich and compelling canvas onto which we are free to paint our own impressions.
The fact that we cannot help but put meaning onto vision has given me a new sense of freedom. I sort of understand it at a rational level. There's plenty of articles and ideas and even inkblot tests related to this fact. But to directly experience my own self being compelled to apply meaning, and to realize I do this to all things at all moments, has made me more aware of how absolute this drive is. I now feel a little more responsible in how I levy judgement, or how fixated I become on one particular view of the world. It is this quality, this revelation of such an intrinsic and powerful perceptual drive, that keeps me returning to Danny's little place again and again – to keep my mind open so that my eyes may learn to see.
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