Work Statements and Bio
Kids
of Lower Utopia - V6 No3
Letters from the Front Lines
(Statement/Synopsis)
In
this, my 8th book, Kids of Lower Utopia: Letters from the Front Lines,
V6 No3, I am drawing, through the lens of Zen Non-dualism, an allegorical
dream in which my heroine; River Scout Finnagain, travels through archetypal
stages of realizations to finally arrive at her Self.
This story couldn't be told better in another medium than the pencil.
Nothing holds more directly the silent life of observation-in-light as
a metaphor undisguised then the pencil. Simple - direct - elemental. My
drawings are spoken in a careful language of conscious vectors summing
into "still-points" where life's attention waits gathering silence.
The pages are a sequence of images in a formal proximity that initiates
a narrative flow which solicits from the viewer intuitive leaps to bridge
the space between pages - leaps through their own non-linear space of
Truth. At first this book was a series of wordless long-jumps, like visual
Zen sutras describing the greatest of the hero's journeys - the one of
Self Realization - but even my most perceptive friends asked for words
to fuel their jumps. So I created the "possible" subtext pages
(like diptychs) that are each a detail from their original page. On these
pages I added one-of-many "possible" subtexts dialogues, along
with a piece of the letter (as an ongoing narrative), that I found in
a lucid dream which was the original impetus for this book. And it is
in essence just a comic book - a story in words and pictures.
Art is a metaphor for being fully conscious, it mimics Self-Realization
by seeing so thoroughly, so seemingly instantaneously "Now"
that the viewer is suspended in "Aesthetic Arrest" and experiences
observation free of thought. This is my Work, ("Or so I feel"
-eec-).
A cultural reference - Zen Non-dualism or what Joseph Campbell and Aldous Huxley called the Perennial Philosophy, is the observation of a universal recurrence of philosophical insight independent of epoch or culture, universal truths on the nature of reality. It recognizes that all things have, and are made of (in their essence); consciousness. A consciousness that is empirically beyond mind and matter, and the direct experience (2) (3) (4) (5) of which is the same to all independent of epoch or culture. It is this experience that my images attempt to be a metaphor of in both my visual language and narrative.
Go to: Kids of Lower Utopia - V6 No3 Letters from the Front Lines
The
Single Songs of Schizotopia -V7No1
An Anthology of Lower Utopia
(Statement/Synopsis)
This book will be volume 7 of The Most Pope Joey. It is made from a collection
of single page comics that in their original format combine digital-ink
and pencil-drawing – all pages measuring 26” x 40”.
A collection of tongue-in-cheek sutras under the influence of humor from
a place in the Heart called Lower Utopia. Lower Utopia is a 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.
This book is about the sweet self mockery of a worker in consciousness
(living in a transitional time when the world is choosing between planetary
annihilation and inner peace). These pages are a series of softly comic
spiritually surreal metaphors that present the juxtaposition of the inner
world in the outer world.
Go
to: The
Single Songs of Schizotopia
- V7 No1
I
Am That - V8 No1 - Animal Ethics of Lower Utopia
(Statement/Synopsis)
Through
the eyes of an animal the scared and realized awareness of Reality watches
and waits. An animal is the perfect answer to its niche - its form is
the very shape of its exact need as sculpted by a million years of evolution.
It is beauty incarnate. Our criteria for beauty was sculpted by the same
principles of that formed that evolution. An animal looks out from the
vast ineffable nature which is our very nature as well. Animals are holy.
Animals live in a state of oneness with that ineffable nature but human
are blocked from experiencing that awareness by the incessant domination
of our ego/mind.
The absence of thought is blissful (blissfulness is not exciting, not
interesting, not attached to desires or its fears, it is not good or bad,
it knows no past and projects no future, it is a subtle ever present self-effulgent
completeness within us all that is synonymous in experience with beauty,
peace, and pure-awareness. It is these realizations that are the essential
statement of our work. We create shrines to these beings we love - for
those who love them as well.
.
Go to: I Am That - V8 No1 - Animal Ethics
Toc's
Bio / Exiles in Lower Utopia - Tricia Cline - Toc Fetch
(Our mutual statement 2008)
I was born in Brooklyn in 1953. Since my father was a painter I grew up
with art, and have been obsessed with making art longer than I can remember,
(or so I'm told).
After serving a year in RISD in 1973, I knew that what I needed was not
more academics, what I needed was to understand my self - the primary
tool of the work. So in 1973 I entered a work/study program in Switzerland
to learn the practice and disciplines of Non-dualism for 10 years (while
continuing my art).
Then in 1989 while living in Hawaii, the toxic nature of oil painting
led to a year of cancer. During that year I came close to death and studied
life from that perspective. That time away from the world opened up a
grand circus pantheon of interior personas and revelations. Also epiphanies
about the wonderfully proletariat nature of comic books and the virtually
untapped possibilities inherent in that medium as art. In 1990 I moved
back to New York (after 10 years of moving around the country) and began
making art comics.
At this time I met Tricia Cline, and together we began to do what we call
Direct-Observation work. Direct-Observation of an inspiration is a careful
love of it without mental interpretation. This approach was greatly influenced
by the writings of psychologist James Hillman from whom we learned a great
deal about the life of imagery. He describes in his book Blue Fire,
a dream, where suddenly a great black snake shows up, if the dreamer,
upon awakening, decides to interpret the meaning of the snake, he kills
it. And thereby the relationship with the image is lost, because the vast
Unknown has been limited to only what is Known. The image is a transcendent
guest coming through you into form. But through interpretation you cut
off its link to that transcendent Reality.
In the true work every iota of its space deserves total care and attention.
Attention equals love. This approach towards detail is a kind of deliberate,
very present meditation and allows a transcendent quality to enter through
you.
Tricia Cline and I make (for lack of a more succinct label) a kind of
tribal art - we don't really own anything - much less that which arrives
from the transcendent. People have forgotten the transcendent power of
art. Here in the west art has been glorified as a product of the ego,
as personal revelation, this couldn't be less true, art comes from beyond
the personal, from the transcendent whisper that is ever present to everyone
(and every thing), and therefore there is really nothing personal about
it. So the images that come to us are not based on ideas out of mind,
the images that come are transcendent guests - friends - that we develop
ongoing relationships with. The image is a friend that has come to teach
you its life through the direct (non-interpretive) observation of it,
to then be possessive of it is to "kill the snake." It is through
respect that the relationships open outward into beauty, respect that
allows the image to be who it is and not just a thing in relation to us.
Exiles
in Lower Utopia - Tricia Cline - Toc Fetch
(Our mutual statement 2006)
We
are telling the story of the Hero’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 kind of sign-language of the deep subconscious
or what we term: the Self. The Self speaks to us in the language of images,
dreams, feelings, inspirations, metaphors, and the extended metaphor of
allegory.
We work only in the most elemental of materials - simple graphite and
clay, anything more is nonessential to a Direct Observation – the
simplest direct experience. We solicit the most precise voice of these
elemental materials in order to articulate consciousness as it echoes
through the metaphor that is Form, and all this as the subtext of the
Real (our direct observation of the Real). Our images come out of a mutual
allegory in which the emphasis is on what is inwardly Real.
Our story then is a metaphor for the pilgrimage inward. Our work, as we
feel it instinctually, is to offer all that reaffirms life, feeds life,
all that makes this hell-of-a-world a heaven. It is the Hero’s story
because there is nothing harder in this world then to become your Self.
It is the simplest thing and the hardest. And, once you realize the sublime
existence of the Self you become an Exile from this world searching for
your way home. The way home is Inward.
Utopia is another metaphor for the Self. The word Utopia, means ‘not-a-place’
or ‘no-place,’ Utopia only exists within the timeless no-place
of the Self. And Lower Utopia is its border lands.
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.
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, that the viewer is suspended
in the very Awareness of the work, which is their own Awareness, (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, in the very Now - Aesthetic Arrest (as Steven Dedalus defined it
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 experienced as an effortless Direct-Observation, in which
all things within its frame of reference are intelligent with life.
We work until we feel the transcendent awake and sentient in the Image.
That is the work. The story then comes out of the works as feelings of
realizations strung together by time in which there is no Real set beginning
or end, only these epiphanies in which all of life is heroic.
