Joseph L. Kagle, Jr. Peace Essays

There are many crossroads in a life. One road leads to destructive conflict and the other to constructive, creative conflict. In both pursuits, there is conflict. It is the sweet juice that make living each day worth the effort. Sometimes, you run across important people who open new roads, who see peace as a creative act of inventing something that was only a dream. That was true the night that I first heard John Cage and David Tudor play on their prepared pianos. When the evening started, there were over two hundred in attendance; near the end, there were only twenty to thirty left. The music was like no other that we had ever heard, the experience was like nothing we had encountered. But it changed lives that night. No one forgot the lessons learned. Silence is a sound. We can be the music. When the player and the music are in synch, there can be moments of peace.       

        Woman:       “Is your interesting communication an intention?”

       John Cage:   “No.”

       Woman:       “But what if someone else feels exactly as you did when you created it?”

       John Cage:  “That is coincidence!”

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     All a painting need say is color. I love its moods, its contrasts, its intensity, its ability to subdue, and most of all, its wonder.

       All a painting need say is COLOR and that secret something called self.

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      No one thing exists alone. Yet all things are individual. This is the paradox of painting  life. All great painters added these three elements together: the thing (a color, a shape, a figure, a finger, a leaf, a mother, etc.), a universe of interrelated things (the vibration of a single self into a universal self-sometimes called composition or the work) and the artist. It is hard to say whether he is a catalyst without entering into the final event, the finished work, or an arranger of the real in time and space, the finished work. In one, the painter is a tool; the other, a creator. Like most cases where one sets up extremes, truth, if there is such a thing in painting, lies between or outside the two.

   An object, a line, a color, shapes its environment and in turn is shaped by it. Take a force- the circle; take another repercussion within it-a smaller circle as the final stroke.  Let the circle have a life-vibration of the curve. See how it shapes the next movement, is shaped by another opposite curve or force. Bring it full circle.

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Essay on drawing:

     Drawing is the extension of man’s individual self and his collective self through the ages.  Man, in his individual works from childhood through adulthood, somewhat records the history of all men, but only ‘somewhat’.  Mankind is like a great tree. If one were to cut across the layers of growth, one possibly would find the image of a child at the center.  It is important though to remember that the child is only one aspect of the adult, his beginning. Mature man may have the simplicity of the child but must arrive at it through the complexity of life. Simply, the adult is not the child and the child can never be the adult. The child's view of the world is man's beginning view but not his total seeing.

     A child's drawing begins with 1)aimless scribbles where the child is just beginning to acquire motor control, 2) directional scribbles (longitudinal and circular where motor action is more controlled), 3) limiting the scribble to a prescribed space, 4) naming the scribble (the first emergence of concepts), 5) giving the name a tangible form, such as a round sun and moon, a box house, biomorphic clouds, large-headed people, etc. (the beginnings of perceptual seeing), 6) a true conceptual image where a story is intended and finally,7) a perceptual seeing where the images are seen as pure elements to be arranged and meaningfully used. This last stage is only for a few children; in fact, only for a few mature adult artists.

     Man's art begins with a tangible form that is then analyzed, broken down, decorated to add splendor and reverts back to its tangible form through the talented hands of a creator. The child grasps for communication through his first cries just as the caveman did through his first tries upon the walls of his cave. The cave drawings at Lasceux, France (as in the depiction of the Bison) have to do with only the object, no background, no sense of space, because the caveman is concerned only with the object itself as it has to do with the necessities of his life- with myth,-religion, food, survival and procreation. He does not have the background, the learning process of centuries, and the schooled ability to create a complex picture or form. It is similar to the child when he begins to scribble. He has no artistic insight: that is, he has no background of knowledge before him to gauge his creative endeavors or rules by which he can create images or rules by which he can transcend to a higher plane of expression.

     Renaissance drawings, such as the figures by Leonardo da Vinci, the sensuous line paintings of Botticelli (especially The Birth of Venus) and Michelangelo's anatomical drawings for sculpture, begin to show a round-form carved by chiaroscuro, especially in the human figure and a limitation to forms and direction through linear and aerial perspective. It is just as a child does when he begins to direct and limit his scribbles. The comparison is slight and the contrast greater, but there is a slight comparison for the use of an individual inquiring mind. The child then names his creation, giving it the character­istics of form and making it something identifiable. The Renaissance was the rebirth of man's interest in his world, himself and his fellow man. It is comparable to the child's awakening view of his universe. Everything was new again.

    So it is too with modern man. His sophisticated images (that are misleadingly compared directly to the child's work) find that the world around him is an exciting place to view. The modern styles, with their multiplicity, show in how many directions man is searching out his world. The analytical processes are used in Cubism, non-representational images are arranged through passion and the intellect by Mondrian, abstraction is explored deeply by Kandinsky and other new-plastic artists, realism (of a new, yet old kind) appears with 'Pop Art', the subconscious is examined by the Surrealists, Dadaists and Neo-Dadaists, and the heights and depths of emotion are sounded by Van Gogh, the Fauves and the Abstract Expressionists. All of life is a Pandora box to be explored like a small child searching out the world, but now it is through the eyes of the adult.

     Man's artistic history can be seen as a blindfolded man in a forest of visual wonders who steals sights of the world just before a new night sets in. His progress,

in what he has been able to see, is stupendous but compared to what is left to see infinitesimal. He is a child and an adult at the same time- and the paradox is fun.

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Comment: "If I cannot find beauty in the tinseled world of 'God's Own Junkyard',            

                 America, then somewhere I have missed the point of my art."

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To create something where there was only an idea is to be part of something that is greater than oneself. The work is not the art. The art is both inside and outside the work. To create Peace in the modern world, it will take a chorus of creators to blend their sound with silence and arrive at a place where all who hear the work feels at peace.