Painting on Birch Bark

I gather the birch bark from the woods. Then I sit looking until I see an image in it. Might take half hour, perhaps all day. Kind of like how Michelangelo did with bare rock. He said that he released the sculpture that was already in the rock, rather than impose rigid ideas on the raw material. I do the same with birch bark, I just try to see what’s waiting to be painted. In this case the knot strongly resembled a rock I know in the woods, and the dark vertical lines spoke of trees...

...so I retrieved a photo of the rock that I took last winter and used it as a reference to make the painting.

The final images of the painting can be seen below.

I’ve started using birch bark, and moving to all natural paints, after reading the work of the Jewish-German philosopher Theodore Adorno. He famously said that after Auschwitz all poetry is barbaric. He meant many things with this idea, the most basic being, in my opinion, if the Nazis used certain language and images in service of their evil, how can the modern artist use those same materials and expect for people to think they’re any different to the Nazis?

It’s a conundrum, yet as relevant today as ever. What was once described as an Orwellian nightmare - where those in power twisted words until so much meant nothing at all - has become our everyday reality. For instance, if we protest an Israeli murdering an innocent Palestinian we are labelled anti-Semitic. This is clearly an abuse of language, and meaning. With this in mind, how can one use the phrase 'anti-Semitism' again in the service of protecting Jews without being perceived - and received - as the sort of violent white supremacist who abuses the terminology so much these days? It's up to the writer or poet to work it out. The same goes for those of us who work with images. Can we even use the same conventional materials as those who work in service of our corrupt governments without being somehow a little bit too much like them?

Perhaps there's no escaping it in these complicated, manic, confusing, times when 'doublethink' seems terrifyingly near (for more on 'doublethink', see below). But I like to try to think things out, and in these times where I feel helpless as the rulers of Israel, USA, UK, and their allies are murdering thousands of civilians each day around the world it gives me something else to focus on that seems that it may help, in time. At the very least, with this art and discussion I bring attention to this widespread abuse of language, meaning, and people, and attempt to use my creativity to help rebuild the common ground on which we might meet and understand each other.

I try to take in new knowledge and work with it, and my way of making a forward step in this case is putting aside the canvas and the toxic, Western, paints that have been so used and promoted by oppressive forces, and instead I’m creating more naturally using materials from the woods. More about the paints later, there are a few really decent companies making all natural paints. For now, here's how the birch bark painting turned out.

Almost finished, just need some more blue and magenta, and flow, in the snow.

* Doublethink

According to Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, doublethink is:
"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself - that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word -doublethink - involved the use of doublethink."

Confused? So am I. But that's exactly what they want for us to be. Confused into inaction so they're free to control, oppress, and extract. Resist.