Painting the Dao

43 Vision in art is the capacity of the creative personality to see what others cannot; to see phenomenal and psychological realms not only at the conventional level, but at a tangent to them. The creative personality has authentic conviction that it matters, and authentic commitment to express it. In any aesthetic communication creative personality interprets the mys- terious essence of existence in order to plumb its depths of meaning. In any field of endeavour only a small fraction of those involved are significant innovators who become respected leaders. In a fully mature aesthetic culture respect for its most creative members parallels that for shamans, prophets and other intermediaries in cultures governed by religion. The artist must first have authenticity of purpose. There is a major dif- ference between efficiently reaching for the ultimate goal of art and simply producing propaganda for lower-level concerns. The most efficient route to the power of high art is to have authentic purpose to begin with. Then there is vision. Visionary artists are marked by their ability to reach beyond looking at surface levels of reality to seeing . Recognising the inner patterns of nature, invisible to casual attention, is paramount. The great value of our artists has always been to see beyond normal perception. 10 Once I began to take painting seriously I found myself seeing the world differently. I once looked at trees in broad categories: ancient, gnarled, beautiful, convoluted. I was intrigued up to a point, but bounced off the surface of reality. Now I see the inner patterns of trees in order to paint them as they are beneath the surface. It is a cliché, but in order to paint their essence one becomes trees psychologically and the only way to do that is to commune with them so deeply that the distinction between trees and self dissolves. Free of intellectual constraints and the barrier between perception and interpretation, the artist becomes creator as much as recorder. Process aesthetics leads to syncretism of mind, bypassing the barrier between artist and audience, so that the artist’s first audience is the self. Artists who don’t intrigue themselves are less likely to intrigue an audience. If an artist is merely repeating the vision of others, whether acknowledged or not, that will reduce visionary and expressive weight. Borrowed vision may retain some level of its originality in interpretation but be diminished in meaning. In a fully mature culture an inauthentic art object can carry some level of relative authenticity in its process. We see this in the ink- painting tradition of China, 11 where the focus shifted from the art object’s surface meaning to its inner meaning, from the messenger to the message, making it possible for authentic meaning to be conveyed through an in- authentic messenger.