|
The Fertility of Mexico
Mexico has played a
considerable role in my life as a painter,
as it has done for many artists.
During my first prolonged stay there, in
1959-60 I began to notice that in Mexico
color seems to have a different meaning,
which is to say that color has a meaning,
rather than just being an unremarkable part
of the environment. I was not
ready then to use color in my painting as I
did later. Nor did I have any
exposure to peyote, as I did during my
second sojourn in Mexico in 1966.
The effects of peyote are
many and varied. The first time
I took peyote and felt its power I was
impressed by the sensation that everything
was right, even though nothing looked the
same, or sounded the same, or tasted the
same, or smelled the same. It was
right, in spite of being all
wrong. This led me to believe I
was being given a glimpse into a future form
of consciousness. On subsequent
occasions I came to think of peyote as a
learning experience, and not something to be
taken lightly.
It was not that I had
been converted to believing in a world
according to peyote, it was that peyote had
revealed things to me about color, things
that had been fomenting in my subconscious
and trying to clarify
themselves. I did not want to
paint drug-induced hallucinations, but I did
want to understand the meaning of color, and
I felt that peyote was leading me in that
direction. Little did I realize
then that color would eventually become a
kind of religion for me. Whether
this was a long-delayed result of my peyote
visions or something else I don't know, but
I do feel certain that peyote was the
starting point in a process that led me to
become a champion and lover of color, not
perhaps in the strictly religious sense, but
in the same way one may love language or
mathematics or astronomy or gardening, and
find in them something to adore and believe
in with all one's heart and
soul. Color had spoken to me
through the medium of peyote, and I was
listening with every ounce of attention I
could muster.
It was then I began to
think of color as a
language. Those luminous
vibrating colors were most definitely trying
to communicate something mysterious and
unknown, even though they were obviously not
hiding anything. The idea of
color being a language with almost unlimited
meaning and nuance became a clear
calling. Peyote had revealed to me
what I would never forget, that the use of
color in painting is like the use of
language in poetry. It is also
visual music which, combined with its
poetry, can make color sing.
As the years passed, the
more I painted the more my colors emerged as
the colors of my long past peyote
experiences. In other words, it was a
slow process, and one in which I was never
conscious in the intentional sense, of my
colors becoming more vibrant and
musical. Nevertheless, I was
aware that I was regarding color as a
language, and that the application of it was
very similar in many ways to the composition
of a stanza of poetry.
During a stay of two
months in San Blas, in the state of Nayarit,
I became familiar with Huichol yarn
painting, the bright and vibrant colors of
this medium. The Huichol artists
I came to know had been influenced more than
I by their experiences with
peyote. Their use of color
remained a vision to me, and later, in San
Francisco when I was just beginning to
understand myself as an artist, a renowned
Huichol yarn painter came to the City and
gave demonstrations at the de Young
Museum. These two occurrences had
an effect on me that continued and developed
over the years.
When I was living in
Veracruz for a while in the late 1960s, I
became friends with a resident of that city
who was a fire sculptor. He would
invite a few friends to the beach and begin
looking around for driftwood and other
flammable things. When it got
dark enough he would set his collection of
debris aflame, and the result was always an
amazing sculpture made of fire.
"Everything can become art," he would say,
"because that is what everything wants to
be." It has been said that art is
to Mexico as literature is to
Ireland. It's in the blood, in
other words. Whether that is the
case or not, I would strongly recommend a
lengthy sojourn in that country for any
aspiring artist. Peyote or no peyote.
|
