Americans are an energetic bunch. Even though we claim to value our downtime, we want things to be happening. Really being at rest isn’t something we’re comfortable with. We’re trained to think that time at rest is time wasted. “Why aren’t you doing something productive?” Protracted silences, rather than being thought of as rejuvenating or as an invitation to ponder, tend to make most of us ill at ease. We’re people of action, not contemplation. As a culture we’d rather not think.
This shows up in our art, too. We prefer scenes that show something happening: a painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware; a farmer with his shoulder to the plow; a larger-than-life sculpture of the Marines and a sailor raising the flag over Iwo Jima. We’re bored after two or three still-life’s. But even when it comes to abstraction—which we aren’t really too sure about—we tend to prefer Jackson Pollack, heroically working out his anxiety or whatever on a big canvas laid out on the floor. So American was he, that in the years after World War II Life magazine crowned him the country’s best painter.
But there’s another kind of painting, notable for its complete lack of recognizable objects. Some call it “contemplative painting,” and its purpose is to put the viewer into a particular frame of mind. Done well, it can be quite powerful.
One of the foremost artists currently working in this style is Makoto Fujimura, a Boston-born painter of Japanese descent. Fujimura’s fields of luminescent color can seem initially less welcoming. There are few things in his paintings on which we can fix our attention. They invite our contemplation rather than convey information.
Fujimura writes that “art is a building block of civilization” and that “artistic expressions help us to understand ourselves.” Contemplation, likewise, is a building block of understanding. Central to how he works is a determination to proceed slowly. He relies on a slow process “that fights against efficiency” he said, to prepare and apply his materials.
Slowly letting ourselves open up, simply to being thoughtful, without some sort of concrete object on which to focus, is nothing less than a powerful antidote to the hectic pace of life that afflicts almost all of us. Some artists can show us this. And when we learn it, we can slow down as well.
