The Long Statement

Kids of Lower Utopia Vol. 6 No3 Letters from the Front Lines

In this book I am drawing a sequential 56 page story. Each page measures 30" x 50", and all are done primarily with a .3 mec-pencil on paper.
In this, my eighth book, I am describing a life's experience through the lens of non-dualism as an allegorical dream in which the heroine, River Scout Finnagain, travels through a mythology of realizations to finally arrive at a place where her Gods wait. Her Gods are, for the Now, a Wolf and a Boy.
(Comics . . . right?)
This story cannot be told better in another medium than the simple pencil; nothing holds the silent life of observation-in-light as a metaphor better. It is a form of minimalism that is conducive to careful Presence work - my work. My images are "still-points," exacting places of realization where attention waits gathering silence carefully in vectors.
In all of my Work the smallest form of notation is a vector. All language, all communication, and all Art is a vector. Just as each thought has energy and direction, taking the individual's attention from one point of awareness to another, everything perceived outside oneself points the attention to itself. And ultimately, everything points towards The Self, reminding us towards our Self.
All that we perceive has life, and life is movement. Everything comes into existence, into being, as movement (the universe, the body, thoughts, time itself), what the Vedic Poetry of India spoke of as Jyothi-Jyothova (Being-becoming). If you look for It (through the direct observation of drawing), you become accustomed to seeing It, recognizing It (re - cognizing It) everywhere and as everything.
My story is a sequence of images (in a formal proximity) that initiates a narrative experience, an inductive/deductive flow of Awareness. The viewer of the story closes the gap between the images with their own Heart's natural ability to leap. The very personal pacing of visual narrative, stirs the intuition into non-linear leaping, very much like poetry in the tradition of Neruda, Rumi, Issa, and the Vedic Kashyapa.
In this story I am presenting stages of the Heroine's pilgrimage into the Self. Certainly, all stories, by virtue of being a story, are metaphors of the inner life. Metaphors and Allegories are a sign-language of the Self. The Self by way of the subconscious speaks in the language of images, dreams, feelings and inspirations. And some metaphors come and live with you for so long that they begin to share in your happiness -- independently. Then they are your Familiars or Gods.
What I call Lower Utopia is the name for the place that is the most inward edge of the Image-Nation within (of which the last and farthest city on the frontier of the Total-Unknown-Universe is called Schizotopia -- because There - everyone is You). In the country of Lower Utopia and in the city of Schizotopia where all the art in the world is made, the people live in love with Love and practice Love on everything. The deeper you go into Lower Utopia the closer all the different stories become. Closer to being the One story about recognizing the Sacred within until It is without (double-entendre intended).
My story then is a metaphor for the pilgrimage inward; and therefore more real than who-killed-who in the world today. My work, as I feel it instinctually, is to offer all that reaffirms life, all that makes this hell-of-a-world a heaven. My story is the age old story of the Hero.
To me all formalized intended art is essentially a relative object hinting at -- "pointing" at - an absolute. Being relative and therefore subject to time, all art carries a trajectory of story in a gestalt of clues, in an inductive/deductive narrative flow. (Even Malevich's works live in a story of cultural context, in that "desert of feeling").
Art is a metaphor about being fully conscious, seeing through to the Real. Art mimics Self-Realization in that it sees its subject so thoroughly, and yet presents it as so instantaneous, so completely in the "Now" that the viewer is suspended in the very Awareness of the work (the actual object of the work is just a glass for the water of perception) - the viewer is suspended without question - without desire - without fear, Aesthetic Arrest (says Steven Dedalus by way of James Joyce). The art work presents a language of perception in which every utterance is as close as possible to being absolutely necessary. The result is (hopefully) experienced as an effortless Direct-Observation, in which all things within its frame of reference are intelligent with life as if made of love.

Toc's Bio:

Toc Fetch was born in Brooklyn New York in 1953. His father was an artist and a painter, and so Toc caught his father's obsession with art and began THE WORK very young.

Toc's real training in art began in Switzerland in 1973 when he began studying Advaita to make subtle the first tool of the work: Awareness. Now Toc is at the very beginning of a new breed of very serious, fine art book makers.

"I am articulating the presence of consciousness as the subtext of light."

Toc came to the attention of New York gallery owner, Roger Ricco, through local shows in Woodstock, New York, where he has lived since 1990. Toc had his first one man show at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery in 2001, and has been showing in group shows at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery since.

In this series of images, Toc is drawing a sequential 56 page story for a show scheduled for Spring of `06 at Ricco/Maresca. Each page measures 30" x 50", and all are done primarily with a .3 mec-pencil on 150# paper.

In this, his eighth book, Toc is describing a life's experience through the lens of non-dualism as an allegorical dream in which the heroine, River Scout Finnagain, travels through a personal mythology of realizations to finally arrive at a place where her Gods wait. Her Gods are, for the now, a Wolf and a Boy.