Endlesness. watercolor on paper 35X50 cm

art as a proccess.

The art of the West views the artwork as a product. It is a painting hung on a wall or in a church for contemplation. It has a purpose, serves a message, and is expected to be a three-dimensional illusion. This is how we were all taught about art. You are judged by the final result, the finished painting commissioned and paid for by the church or a wealthy family that funded it. The client is not interested in the process; they paid for the result. But in painting, there is a process, and there are artists and cultures that emphasize the act of painting as a spiritual activity no less important than the outcome. In Chinese and Japanese cultures, the spiritual act inherent in painting was no less significant than the final goal—the painting itself. In the West, this idea emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. Artists abandoned realistic, illusionistic oil paintings and created more abstract, two-dimensional works that expressed the needs of the soul. Artists emphasized the spiritual process rather than objects like human figures, chairs, buildings, or the brushstroke whose sole purpose and movement was to express the finality of things, where the material creating the painted objects provided an explanation for the world’s finitude. They tried, through a personal perspective, the expression of emotion, colors, and non-objective forms like splotches, to convey an experiential emotional world detached from reality. The painting is an entity, and the world it seeks to depict is something finite for us—a chair, a car, or a mountain. Humans are addicted to objects, to finite entities. They have form, function, and location; they are mostly stable and show us permanence, not the flowing, transient, and illusory nature of the world. Humans love permanence; it grants them security and stability. When your house burns down or an object is stolen, you may feel insecurity and loss. And we, as humans, have such a long history of unbearable losses. The monk in the Chinese monastery did not need time as an experience of permanence. He lived in the day, trained spiritually to live in the present, and the act of creating art with pigments and ink on rice paper was meant to achieve spiritual gain, not for sale or display in a gallery. Detaching the painter from the objective world and from the artwork as a final product is like detaching an addict from their source of addiction. When Joan Mitchell painted, she was not interested in the final result. She was interested in the process. The objective material world primarily provides us with objects for viewing—this is a feature of the three-dimensional world visible to optical eyes. But abstract art opens the way to other qualities through the use of colors, splotches, and lines. Without outlines, without the boundaries of objects, and without depicting things. Nothing on the canvas or paper represents something else; it only shows what the act produced on the surface of the canvas. The abstract language, which describes worlds more akin to the material properties of water and gas rather than solid matter—an ever-moving world of unlimited possibilities of particles without clear rules—is difficult for the human eye. Difficult, but not impossible. Turning painting into a process that is spiritually significant is no less important than the result hanging on the wall. Our culture is neither Japanese nor Chinese. Our spiritual foundations are different. But they are not fixed in place, and that, too, is a process in itself.