Post Personalism Presentation, October 28, 2017
At Tangletown Studio, Seattle, WA
Christopher Gasper and Patrick Howe presented an overview of Post Personalism, then the floor was open for discussion.
Here are some of the topics that were addressed by Patrick Howe. Additional comments were also added.
Topics discussed on this page:
At Tangletown Studio, Seattle, WA
Christopher Gasper and Patrick Howe presented an overview of Post Personalism, then the floor was open for discussion.
Here are some of the topics that were addressed by Patrick Howe. Additional comments were also added.
Topics discussed on this page:
• What is Post Personalism?
• What is the awakened state?
• A multidisciplinary Art Movement
• What do you say about people who create wonderful, spiritually inspired works of art but you discover that they are jerks when you meet them in person?
• What about landscape painters? How would they make Post Personalism artworks?
• What about your earlier landscape paintings, Patrick? They are beautiful. Are they not Post Personal?
• You say the creative process is always egoless. Please explain.
• Many artists are frustrated with their art making process as they go. And yet they may make good art. What about that?
• Post Personalism as a Brand
• Is Post Personalism a sociopolitical art movement?
• The New Avant Guard
• The One Art Movement
• What is the awakened state?
• A multidisciplinary Art Movement
• What do you say about people who create wonderful, spiritually inspired works of art but you discover that they are jerks when you meet them in person?
• What about landscape painters? How would they make Post Personalism artworks?
• What about your earlier landscape paintings, Patrick? They are beautiful. Are they not Post Personal?
• You say the creative process is always egoless. Please explain.
• Many artists are frustrated with their art making process as they go. And yet they may make good art. What about that?
• Post Personalism as a Brand
• Is Post Personalism a sociopolitical art movement?
• The New Avant Guard
• The One Art Movement
What is Post Personalism?
Basically, you take qualities of the awakened state and make art about them. It’s that simple.
What is the awakened state?
In general, to be awakened or awakening, your primary interest is in oneness with others and the natural world.
A Multidisciplinary Art Movement
Even though the pioneers of Post Personalism are visual artists, it is a movement that is open to all visual, musical, performing and literary arts.
What do you say about people who create wonderful, spiritually inspired works of art but you discover that they are jerks when you meet them in person?
Some people live in the awakened state all the time. Others are in the grip of ego and are therefore largely self-centric. Then there is a third group that is on-again-off-again. On some occasions they are in harmony with others and life. Then at other times they fall back into ego. An artist who creates profound beauty at one time and is a jerk at another is of this category. A Post Personalist artist either seeks to live, or already lives in the awakened state all the time and brings that into their creativity.
What about landscape painters? How would they make Post Personalism artworks?
It should be understood that Post Personalism is not a style or technique. The name refers instead to the state of consciousness of the artist.
If, as a landscape painter you honor and share a deep sense of oneness with nature, and you give nature the gift of your attention—as nature offers to you its beauty, majesty and mystery, it could be called a post personal experience that reflects your state of consciousness. Really though, when you experience it by yourself alone in your studio, there is no reason to label it anything. It is just the flow of life that you are experiencing in that moment.
However if you wanted to communicate that experience to other artists and the world, you might give it a name so they knew what you were talking about. You could call it “Sacred Landscape Painting” or “Hudson River School Painting” (because they spoke of the sacredness of nature). You would have to call it something in order to speak about it. The phrase Post Personalism communicates the same thing as, for example "Sacred Landscape Painting" but puts it into an art historical language and evolutionary context. And it communicates to others a conscious and intentional approach to landscape painting that honors the sacredness of nature.
Some artists may not care for the name Post Personalism, and that's fine. Perhaps they will find a more suitable name that helps them communicate to others their love for the natural world. Nevertheless, the name Post Personalism may find resonance with some visual artists, and also musical, performing and literary artists.
What about your earlier landscape paintings, Patrick? They are beautiful. Are they not Post Personal?
No, because Post Personalism is the formal name of an art movement. So just because a painting is beautiful and may have been created by an awakened artist does not make it post personalist in the formal sense of the word. However it may certainly be post personal in the informal use of the word.
Similarly, when today we refer to Hieronymus Bosch's strange 15th Century paintings as surrealistic, we are really using the word “surrealistic” in the informal sense because Surrealism did not exist then. The formal “Surrealism” art movement did not exist until hundreds of years later.
To make a formal Post Personalist works I must make the work with that conscious intention. I cannot dust of old paintings from under my bed and claim they are formal Post Personalist works just because they are beautiful. Though they may be “post personal” in the informal sense.
You say the creative process is always egoless. Please explain.
Remember, the creative process relates to how things are made. Let us not confuse how things are made with why they are made.
Things can be made for egoic reasons but things cannot be made by the ego, at least not very well. In the creative process you cannot simultaneously create and hate the tools, mediums and techniques you are using. If you try, you will find that it is terribly uncomfortable. You cannot build a house and simultaneously tear it down.
Or to put it this way, the ego becomes very uncomfortable, even fearful when faced with the prospect of letting go to the creative flow.
Or, let's put it this way: when a bad guy throws a pot on the potter’s wheel he is using the same creative process that a good guy must use to throw a pot. However, regardless of their intended use of their pots, if either of them fight the clay and potters wheel and hates what he is making, then it will be the other guy who gets his pot made for however he intends to use it. (By saying "good" and "bad" guys I am making an analogy. I don't really use those terms to describe people)
The ego is never kind. So be kind to the creative process, otherwise you will make it unkind to you.
Many artists are frustrated with their art-making process as they go. And yet they may make good art. What about that?
The creative process is inherently very challenging. Far more so than non-creative processes like driving to the store to buy groceries. The artistic creative process is challenging for the simple reason that the artist is making something that has never been made before. Every work is an unprecedented, original prototype for which there is no blueprint and no path to follow. So if you like facing continual challenges, then be a creative person!
But here is the point: It is one thing to face a challenge and accept it for what it is—a circumstance, and deal with it. It is another thing to insist that the challenge shouldn’t exist when in fact it does exist. That insistence and demand that a challenging circumstance be different than it is, is the cause of frustration, not the challenging circumstance itself. The creative process, in other words, is never the source of anyone’s frustration. So when an artist thinks that their creativity is born out of frustration, I would say it was born in spite of their frustration.
Frustration happens when the artist unknowingly accuses the naturally challenging conditions of creativity as being uncooperative. And when they are not cooperative, the artist gets upset and frustrated. Then he unknowingly projects his self-created frustration onto the creative process and then blames the creative process for being frustrating, which is nonsense. So, instead of blaming the process, look at yourself.
Post Personalism as a Brand in the Art World
You see, Post Personalism is a way of branding the concept of art without ego. Many creative people have expressed from an egoless state, and artists have been doing so for centuries. However, that egoless action is happening through them mostly unconsciously, and it is rarely discussed among artists. Very few have ever stood up to say that creating from the egoless state is something critically important to artists, society and humanity. It is impossible to imaging what an entire culture of artists creating out of universal oneness would create. But I'm guessing it would be nothing like what we have today. Post Personalism plants a flag and says “Creating out of universal love, compassion and oneness is important and that’s what we stand for.”
A person could argue and say, Yes, but many artists already create out of egoless creativity anyway, so who needs something like Post Personalism? And I would say, Yes, they might be doing it already, and that is wonderful. But are they standing up for it? If they stand up for it they would be standing up for the very thing that would transform the world in a positive way. If they don’t stand up for it, it remains only their personal experience, and that may be ok for some artists. However, if artists do stand up for it together in a public way then the power of egoless creative action can have conscious meaning and effect on the larger collectively level.
Is Post Personalism a sociopolitical art movement?
My experience of Post Personalism to date is that it is not about making art that attacks the problems of the world. It is about showing the solution to human insanity. Artists for centuries have used their creativity to bring attention to social problems and to fight injustices, and that is a worthy intension. So perhaps other Post Personalist artists will create sociopolitical artwork, Though I imagine if they did, it would be quite different than most sociopolitical art today that mocks, caricaturizes and spews vitriol at the "bad people”, the 'others'. The question for Post Personalist artists would be: How do you create Post Personalist sociopolitical art that has real social impact without compromising the reality of universal love and compassion that you know? It is an interesting question to consider.
Presently I am focused on the deeper solution. The surface solution to a problem is to put a bandaid on it. If there is racial discrimination in our society, then we make a law forbidding it, which does not eliminate racism one iota, it only suppresses it—but it is better suppressed than expressed.
Personally, however, I am naturally drawn to creating and participating in art events that focus on unconditional love and other awakened qualities. Like transcendence, harmony, union, universality, being, dissolution of the ego, non-duality, awakened consciousness, and others. Those qualities confront the root cause, which is the egoic mind. All other sociopolitical inequities and injustices spawn out of that one root cause.
The New Avant Guard
The avant guard in any sphere of human endeavor are the most forward thinking individuals. However, by any definition, the deepest meaning of avant guard applies to those who live on the leading edge of the evolution of human consciousness. The new avant guard in art are those artists who know universal oneness at a deeper level than mental conception can grasp, and they create from that knowing. That is because universal oneness—when understood beyond naive new age notions, is the leading edge of the evolution of human awareness. That is the space that Post Personalism works in.
Who are the influences of Post Personalism?
To name a few artists there are Constantine Brancusi, George Inness and Morris Graves. However, while their works are extraordinary, it is not their physical works of art that are the primary inspiration. It is their common philosophical premise which explores the essence of life as it relates to creativity.
Although, the greatest influences on Post Personalism are the writings and teachings of Joseph Campbell, Eckhart Tolle and Alan Watts. Each speaks to the evolution of human consciousness in their unique way. Their inspiration is a sea that is deep and wide.
The One Art Movement
Some people think Picasso's artwork is an expression of a big ego. Others think it is divinely inspired. This merely indicates that we perceive art subjectively. However, whether or not works of art express ego or divinity, they are all part of The One Art Movement, which includes all artists and works of art created throughout human history. All creativity, however it is judged, is part of the greater totality. It is all included in the evolution of human consciousness. That is what The One Art Movement communicates. Click here to see a diagram.
"Isn’t it the desire of all human beings to perceive an order that surpasses us, yet is within us, and to participate in that order?" —Paul Klee
Basically, you take qualities of the awakened state and make art about them. It’s that simple.
What is the awakened state?
In general, to be awakened or awakening, your primary interest is in oneness with others and the natural world.
A Multidisciplinary Art Movement
Even though the pioneers of Post Personalism are visual artists, it is a movement that is open to all visual, musical, performing and literary arts.
What do you say about people who create wonderful, spiritually inspired works of art but you discover that they are jerks when you meet them in person?
Some people live in the awakened state all the time. Others are in the grip of ego and are therefore largely self-centric. Then there is a third group that is on-again-off-again. On some occasions they are in harmony with others and life. Then at other times they fall back into ego. An artist who creates profound beauty at one time and is a jerk at another is of this category. A Post Personalist artist either seeks to live, or already lives in the awakened state all the time and brings that into their creativity.
What about landscape painters? How would they make Post Personalism artworks?
It should be understood that Post Personalism is not a style or technique. The name refers instead to the state of consciousness of the artist.
If, as a landscape painter you honor and share a deep sense of oneness with nature, and you give nature the gift of your attention—as nature offers to you its beauty, majesty and mystery, it could be called a post personal experience that reflects your state of consciousness. Really though, when you experience it by yourself alone in your studio, there is no reason to label it anything. It is just the flow of life that you are experiencing in that moment.
However if you wanted to communicate that experience to other artists and the world, you might give it a name so they knew what you were talking about. You could call it “Sacred Landscape Painting” or “Hudson River School Painting” (because they spoke of the sacredness of nature). You would have to call it something in order to speak about it. The phrase Post Personalism communicates the same thing as, for example "Sacred Landscape Painting" but puts it into an art historical language and evolutionary context. And it communicates to others a conscious and intentional approach to landscape painting that honors the sacredness of nature.
Some artists may not care for the name Post Personalism, and that's fine. Perhaps they will find a more suitable name that helps them communicate to others their love for the natural world. Nevertheless, the name Post Personalism may find resonance with some visual artists, and also musical, performing and literary artists.
What about your earlier landscape paintings, Patrick? They are beautiful. Are they not Post Personal?
No, because Post Personalism is the formal name of an art movement. So just because a painting is beautiful and may have been created by an awakened artist does not make it post personalist in the formal sense of the word. However it may certainly be post personal in the informal use of the word.
Similarly, when today we refer to Hieronymus Bosch's strange 15th Century paintings as surrealistic, we are really using the word “surrealistic” in the informal sense because Surrealism did not exist then. The formal “Surrealism” art movement did not exist until hundreds of years later.
To make a formal Post Personalist works I must make the work with that conscious intention. I cannot dust of old paintings from under my bed and claim they are formal Post Personalist works just because they are beautiful. Though they may be “post personal” in the informal sense.
You say the creative process is always egoless. Please explain.
Remember, the creative process relates to how things are made. Let us not confuse how things are made with why they are made.
Things can be made for egoic reasons but things cannot be made by the ego, at least not very well. In the creative process you cannot simultaneously create and hate the tools, mediums and techniques you are using. If you try, you will find that it is terribly uncomfortable. You cannot build a house and simultaneously tear it down.
Or to put it this way, the ego becomes very uncomfortable, even fearful when faced with the prospect of letting go to the creative flow.
Or, let's put it this way: when a bad guy throws a pot on the potter’s wheel he is using the same creative process that a good guy must use to throw a pot. However, regardless of their intended use of their pots, if either of them fight the clay and potters wheel and hates what he is making, then it will be the other guy who gets his pot made for however he intends to use it. (By saying "good" and "bad" guys I am making an analogy. I don't really use those terms to describe people)
The ego is never kind. So be kind to the creative process, otherwise you will make it unkind to you.
Many artists are frustrated with their art-making process as they go. And yet they may make good art. What about that?
The creative process is inherently very challenging. Far more so than non-creative processes like driving to the store to buy groceries. The artistic creative process is challenging for the simple reason that the artist is making something that has never been made before. Every work is an unprecedented, original prototype for which there is no blueprint and no path to follow. So if you like facing continual challenges, then be a creative person!
But here is the point: It is one thing to face a challenge and accept it for what it is—a circumstance, and deal with it. It is another thing to insist that the challenge shouldn’t exist when in fact it does exist. That insistence and demand that a challenging circumstance be different than it is, is the cause of frustration, not the challenging circumstance itself. The creative process, in other words, is never the source of anyone’s frustration. So when an artist thinks that their creativity is born out of frustration, I would say it was born in spite of their frustration.
Frustration happens when the artist unknowingly accuses the naturally challenging conditions of creativity as being uncooperative. And when they are not cooperative, the artist gets upset and frustrated. Then he unknowingly projects his self-created frustration onto the creative process and then blames the creative process for being frustrating, which is nonsense. So, instead of blaming the process, look at yourself.
Post Personalism as a Brand in the Art World
You see, Post Personalism is a way of branding the concept of art without ego. Many creative people have expressed from an egoless state, and artists have been doing so for centuries. However, that egoless action is happening through them mostly unconsciously, and it is rarely discussed among artists. Very few have ever stood up to say that creating from the egoless state is something critically important to artists, society and humanity. It is impossible to imaging what an entire culture of artists creating out of universal oneness would create. But I'm guessing it would be nothing like what we have today. Post Personalism plants a flag and says “Creating out of universal love, compassion and oneness is important and that’s what we stand for.”
A person could argue and say, Yes, but many artists already create out of egoless creativity anyway, so who needs something like Post Personalism? And I would say, Yes, they might be doing it already, and that is wonderful. But are they standing up for it? If they stand up for it they would be standing up for the very thing that would transform the world in a positive way. If they don’t stand up for it, it remains only their personal experience, and that may be ok for some artists. However, if artists do stand up for it together in a public way then the power of egoless creative action can have conscious meaning and effect on the larger collectively level.
Is Post Personalism a sociopolitical art movement?
My experience of Post Personalism to date is that it is not about making art that attacks the problems of the world. It is about showing the solution to human insanity. Artists for centuries have used their creativity to bring attention to social problems and to fight injustices, and that is a worthy intension. So perhaps other Post Personalist artists will create sociopolitical artwork, Though I imagine if they did, it would be quite different than most sociopolitical art today that mocks, caricaturizes and spews vitriol at the "bad people”, the 'others'. The question for Post Personalist artists would be: How do you create Post Personalist sociopolitical art that has real social impact without compromising the reality of universal love and compassion that you know? It is an interesting question to consider.
Presently I am focused on the deeper solution. The surface solution to a problem is to put a bandaid on it. If there is racial discrimination in our society, then we make a law forbidding it, which does not eliminate racism one iota, it only suppresses it—but it is better suppressed than expressed.
Personally, however, I am naturally drawn to creating and participating in art events that focus on unconditional love and other awakened qualities. Like transcendence, harmony, union, universality, being, dissolution of the ego, non-duality, awakened consciousness, and others. Those qualities confront the root cause, which is the egoic mind. All other sociopolitical inequities and injustices spawn out of that one root cause.
The New Avant Guard
The avant guard in any sphere of human endeavor are the most forward thinking individuals. However, by any definition, the deepest meaning of avant guard applies to those who live on the leading edge of the evolution of human consciousness. The new avant guard in art are those artists who know universal oneness at a deeper level than mental conception can grasp, and they create from that knowing. That is because universal oneness—when understood beyond naive new age notions, is the leading edge of the evolution of human awareness. That is the space that Post Personalism works in.
Who are the influences of Post Personalism?
To name a few artists there are Constantine Brancusi, George Inness and Morris Graves. However, while their works are extraordinary, it is not their physical works of art that are the primary inspiration. It is their common philosophical premise which explores the essence of life as it relates to creativity.
Although, the greatest influences on Post Personalism are the writings and teachings of Joseph Campbell, Eckhart Tolle and Alan Watts. Each speaks to the evolution of human consciousness in their unique way. Their inspiration is a sea that is deep and wide.
The One Art Movement
Some people think Picasso's artwork is an expression of a big ego. Others think it is divinely inspired. This merely indicates that we perceive art subjectively. However, whether or not works of art express ego or divinity, they are all part of The One Art Movement, which includes all artists and works of art created throughout human history. All creativity, however it is judged, is part of the greater totality. It is all included in the evolution of human consciousness. That is what The One Art Movement communicates. Click here to see a diagram.
"Isn’t it the desire of all human beings to perceive an order that surpasses us, yet is within us, and to participate in that order?" —Paul Klee
