FRESH WATER, ANCIENT SPRINGS: An Anthology of Small Mysteries The Painting of Michael Onken
Mitchell Museum Main Gallery February 21 - May 1, 2016 Cosponsor: WDML 106.9 FM
FRESH WATER, ANCIENT SPRINGS: An Anthology of Small Mysteries
The Painting of Michael Onken Mitchell Museum Main Gallery February 21 - May 1, 2016 An activity of the John R. and Eleanor R. Mitchell Foundation. This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency. Support for this program has been provided, in part, by the Schweinfurth Foundation.
Copyright Š2016 by Cedarhurst Center for the Arts, Mt. Vernon, Illinois All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing by the publisher. All works of art in this brochure have been reproduced with the permission of the artists.
All photographs by Daniel Overturf, Professor - Photography, Department of Cinema and Photography, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
Cover art work: Michael Onken, Rising Wind with Turf Smoke, 2006, watercolor, gouache, and acrylic.
A pivotal work in ceramics depicting three unique narrative fragments seemingly unrelated. Yet, all three show the animal kingdom in some sort of communion or communication with themselves or humans. A prime example representative of the best work by the artist. Michael Onken, What the Raven Said, 1990, ceramic.
Literary and Allusive: The Painting of Michael Onken by Rusty Freeman, Director of Visual Arts, Cedarhurst INTRODUCTION In long-ago gardens Those bird voices Sing of our loves That never were, Yet deep as life, Yet all that we are.1 This poem excerpt by Kathleen Raine sets the table for discussing the paintings of Michael Onken for in these six lines are some of his key archetypes. Gardens of a distant past, the voices of birds and nature, love songs, things that “never were,” but were nonetheless “deep as life,” and most importantly, all these archetypes may be seen as, “all that we are.” Raine, like Onken, speaks of the collective unconscious; aspirations still longed for; and speaks still to what we may yet achieve. Her poem is a song of hope signaling “all that we are.” Poets and artists like Raine and Onken address the way of the world today. The West has been characterized as rife with materialism, cut off from nature, and exhibiting a profound sense of loss of existential purpose, direction, and meaning. Artists and poets have long been responding to these conditions. To foreground these conditions, one strategy has been suggested by poet and former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams who said, “The first thing is to try and hear what’s not being said and weave that into public discourse.”2 One of the aspects of life the paintings of Michael Onken try to address is the discourse of the unsaid. These paintings by Michael Onken may look terribly out of place in today’s super-hyperbolic, digitized world. What I hope to show is that though these paintings purposively utilize a faux-naive style coupled with subject matter that appears seemingly melodramatic and perhaps even dangerously nostalgic for days of yore, these paintings in fact plumb the depths of the human condition and may yet function as aesthetic catalysts for social progress. Let me first qualify the above sentence. Certainly, we agree that the world, at least the Western world, is thoroughly digitized. But to say that the world is super-hyperbolic is to suggest that exaggeration has become the norm. Select any segment of society today—commerce, advertising, the news media, entertainment, politics, warfare—and it is riddled with hyperbole.
These paintings offer a respite by which to rethink our understandings of the human condition. Throughout history painters have long had the purview of pursuing philosophical themes in their slow, hand-built visual narratives. (Consider that abstract painters are also supported by narrative. Kandinsky’s mature work represents narratives of spirituality or consider the paintings of Agnes Martin). Painting, Onken’s kind of painting, is a signifying practice that is socially symbolic. The paintings make meaning by their very form. To represent a figure visually is to give that figure an identity. Few representations as those that represent people are as important. Painting like Onken’s can be seen as visceral philosophy. Our eye and unconscious may absorb meaning well before we can put it into words. In my numerous discussions with Michael Onken, he makes clear that he subscribes to no agenda regarding either social idealisms or even aesthetic priorities. “Certainly, I have no agenda—social, political, or theoretical—for which to make anyone ‘aware’ and equally I would exclude the personal and autobiographical in so far as one is able.” “What is left is a very untidy collection of images, observations, and enthusiasms viewed through a distancing lens of experience and assembled in some sort of poetic fashion.”3 Onken’s paintings are not “about” myths. For the artist, these paintings are about everyday life, and people going about their lives. Even so, everyday living is filled with reference to the mystical beyond, to the sublime awe of the universe. Still, artistic intentions are paramount in any investigation of a painter’s oeuvre. And yet, intentions, important though they are, are not the final word regarding interpretation and function. I take Onken’s statement at his word and regard the paintings, like him, as having no inherent message. I consider that one of their key strengths. That supposed lack, I think,
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One of the earliest paintings in the exhibit. These paintings, though painted in a faux-naïve style, in fact plumb the depths of the human condition and may yet function as aesthetic catalysts for social progress. Michael Onken, Rough Fishing, Dog Barking in the Distance, 1999, watercolor, gouache, and acrylic.
puts all the more emphasis back onto the painting’s very visceral painted scenes. Viewers determine what the figures and animals represent without reference to an easy explanation. The paintings explode with vitality and significance. If the viewers choose to do so. When artists make art, they put into play dynamic forms and patterns of intention that prompt viewers to engage with the artist’s personal and social values often meeting halfway with their own sets of personal beliefs and social values. The proof is always already in the pudding. One of the functions of these paintings, I believe, is to act as a stop sign at the crossroads of today’s hyperbolic world. These paintings give a momentary pause to our hectic world and ask consideration for 1) our relationships with nature and 2) our shared human condition, and 3) most importantly, to consider
the mysteries that permeate our lives no matter how hard we try to quell them. These paintings are so beguiling and so charming aesthetically to say nothing of their subject matter, that I think it is valuable to examine their catalytic potential a little more fully. These paintings seek the fundamentals of life in a modern world that separates us from the fundamentals of our “true” nature(s). (Written with the understanding that ideals like “truth,” “true,” and “our natures” are provisional and different for each of us. What is true for one is not necessarily so for others. My examination is not a quest for essences, but for the reminder that we are all born of this planet and by that fact share many, many important similarities.) We are more alike than different, different though we are, and those differences remain of a supreme significance. Difference makes us who we are. These paintings offer just a bit of insight, if not outright wisdom, into our similarities; and most importantly, with nature itself.
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The Raine poem excerpt contains key references to the archetypes found in the paintings of Onken. Here, “those bird voices, sing of our loves” reminding us of our deep connections to nature. The contents found in the “collective unconscious” are “archetypes.” The gannets are threatened with extinction. Michael Onken, The Gannets of St. Kilda, 2015, revisited from Catterline 2011, watercolor, gouache, and acrylic.
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THE POWER OF NARRATIVE Storytelling, or narratives, is so ubiquitous as to be above mentioning. But narratives are a powerful form of representation, and as such establishes identity, significance, and meaning. We order the world though our stories. Consider the recent book by historian Yuval Noah Harari who described how the narratives we use to motivate ourselves and others is one of the defining reasons humans were able to work together in large-scale cooperation and thus rule the planet.4 The paintings of Michael Onken are narrative, or at least narrative fragments. They are like a single frame taken out of context from a film. They imply a story. Yet, the “story” is not always, or even often, evident. What makes these narrative fragments so intriguing is their familiarity. We seem to recognize the story, even though we cannot place it. The paintings are like seemingly familiar stories from our unconscious. Onken’s narrative fragments from “long-ago” suggest paths reconnecting us to nature and ourselves.
What we call holy in the world—a person, a place, a set of words or pictures—is so because it is a transitional place, a borderland, where the completely foreign is brought together with the familiar. Here is somewhere that looks as if it belongs within the world we are at home in, but in fact leads directly into strangeness.5 Onken’s methodology does not paint from any known story or myth. He typically starts with a visual image or idea from his imagination and builds up from there. His paintings do not “illustrate.” Northrup Frye (1912-1991) was highly-regarded worldwide as a literary theorist who studied archetypes and their influence on world narratives. Frye posited a useful compendium for organizing stories used around the world.
Northrup Frye in 1957 published his survey of world mythologies which he organized into primordial stories. Here, we see an allegory for birth, creation, or revival. However, Onken is clear that his paintings are not direct interpretations. That is their strength. Michael Onken, Annunciation, 2011, watercolor, gouache, and acrylic.
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A complete work in itself, the drawing juxtaposes a human protagonist with an antagonist from the animal world. The curlew is considered to be extinct. Michael Onken, Enter the Curlew, 2015, graphite on handmade paper.
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6 | THE PAINTING OF MICHAEL ONKEN Frye studied the archetypes identified by psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) and was influenced by Jung’s formulation of the “collective unconscious.” Jung studied world stories and identified the pervasive and recurring influence of what he termed “archetypes”: birth, rebirth, death, magic, the hero, the trickster, God, the demon, the wise old man, the Earth mother, the giant, trees, the sun, the moon, wind, rivers, fire, animals, some manmade objects such as rings and weapons.6 Frye theorized his own and original complete study of myth into four phases. He regarded the archetypal significance of myth as its central social value. In Frye’s own words, his four phases of myth: 1. The dawn, spring and birth phase. Myths of the birth of the hero, of revival and resurrection, of creation and (because the four phases are a cycle) of the defeat of the powers of darkness, winter and death. The archetype of romance and poetry. 2. The zenith, summer, and marriage or triumph phase. Myths of apotheosis, of the sacred marriage, and of entering into Paradise. The archetype of comedy, pastoral and idyll. 3. The sunset, autumn and death phase. Myths of fall, of the dying god, of violent death and sacrifice and of the isolation of the hero. The archetype of tragedy and elegy. 4. The darkness, winter and dissolution phase. Myths of the triumph of these powers; myths of floods and the return of chaos, of the defeat of the hero, and Göterdãmmerrung (the twilight of the gods) myths. The archetype of satire.7
A pivotal painting. So much of Onken’s work is about crossing thresholds or borders.The adventure and precariousness of crossing is tantamount to the risk of reaching a new realm. Michael Onken, Crossing, 2010, watercolor, gouache, and acrylic.
Frye’s myth phases follow the rhythms of nature. Frye’s framework and Jung’s archetypes provide benchmarks by which we may gauge the breadth and depth of Onken’s paintings. Onken’s vision is profoundly in sync with nature. My next three subjects: Mise-en-abyme, Melodrama, and Mythology are my frameworks for reading narratives and by extension the paintings. Mise-en-abyme, Melodrama, and Mythology are ways of storytelling. Mise-en-abyme is like a smaller badge or sign representing the larger story. Melodrama is much more than its commonly accepted meaning. Melodrama is related to Tragedy and a foundational form of storytelling. Mythology is the most important. All cultures throughout history have told stories that try to explain the way things are.
MISE-EN-ABYME A fair number of paintings feature someone performing a puppet play or using marionettes or playing with toys (which remain children’s purview for creating their own stories). There is a certain symbolism when one depicts a story within a story; this is called mise-en-abyme. The term refers to any aesthetic device which reflects in micro, the macro. This doubled transcoding draws our attention to the act of storytelling itself. Mise-en-abyme is a fundamental operation of the text and synonymous with textuality or play of meaning within signs and sign structures. It highlights the way a sign is staged within a text and signals meaning and importance. Aesthetic examples of mise-en-abyme in everyday life include: the Golden Rectangle, any spiral, a mirror, an onion, a song’s repeating chorus, a Mandelbrot set (clouds and mountains are fractals and echo themselves at either large or small scales), Chinese boxes, Russian Babushka dolls, a painting-within-a painting, a theatrical play-within-a play, or a film-within-a film.
CEDARHURST CENTER FOR THE ARTS | 7 Other examples include sports team insignias which reiterate identity on their uniforms, a certain kind of redundancy. To wear a name label on your person or a photo ID around one’s neck is the same sort of operation. The doubling signals importance, attention, and meaning. The value of the mise-en-abyme is as a strategy of self-awareness. For an artwork to quote itself in full within its own representation is a rhetorical operation which refocuses our attention on what is intended for discussion. So, what does it mean when the artist brings or highlights selfawareness to the painting? It creates a meta-narrative function. In these paintings, the mise-en-abyme highlights the implied significance of the stories told. These paintings tell stories about our manifold relationships with nature and our relations with each other, while never losing sight of the mysteries swirling around us. This doubling and making evident perhaps notes our own role in an ongoing narrative not of our making.
One of the very few works in which Onken works from an existing story. Here, Samuel Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 1798. A tale of redemption. The painting is important for its multiple use of mise-en-abyme. Michael Onken, The Play of the Ancient Mariner, 2015, watercolor, gouache, and acrylic.
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Good example of Onken’s strong use of creative juxtapositions. The women and the mysterious and unexplained iconography of sea, boat, flowers, and rope suggest strongly a narrative. Michael Onken, Might Be Gone for Ages, Maybe Seven Years, 2015, watercolor, gouache, and acrylic.
MELODRAMA In these paintings—a couple’s tender embrace; a young man offering flowers to his betrothed; a businessman in suit with briefcase asleep in a cemetery; a woman caressing a beached whale; numerous scenes of singing, music, and dancing; and many, many scenes showing humans with animals—may all be read as examples of melodrama. Melodramas were first found guilty of being “mechanisms of emotional solicitation.” As Christine Gledhill wrote, From the turn of the century though the 60s melodrama had been conceived in predominantly pejorative terms. As drama it represented debased or failed tragedy.8 My touchstones for how we view melodrama are found in film and television. From its first identification as a genre, melodrama has been derided as stories only for women. I think this long tradition is yet to be broken and we still regard certain stories as pandering to plodding taste. Serious criticism, that which creates original scholarship, began looking into melodrama in the 1970s. These investigations critiqued the categorization as narrow, and redefined melodrama as a resolute and enduring means of storytelling.
Peter Brooks showed “that melodrama itself was of the utmost pertinence” and vital “to an understanding of such authors as Balzac, Dickens, Victor Hugo, Dostoevsky, Conrad, James—indeed, to an understanding of an important and abiding mode in the modern imagination.”9 In today’s social contexts, these scenes in a contemporary painting by Onken may be mistakenly, I believe, read as retrograde or quixotic. The advanced art world seems to demand that paintings be of such an order that it does not in any way seem to be in harmony with popular culture. It is a mistake, I think, to read these paintings as pandering or maudlin. (Not that anyone may have done so, but they have the look of such.) My desire is to unpack the artwork’s un-academic style of painting and to examine further its subject matter which traffics in couples hugging and children playing amongst the birds and animals, hardly the stuff found in today’s contemporary galleries.
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MYTHOLOGY “Mythology is the song.”10 Mythologist Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) authored many books on world mythology and taught extensively on the continuing influence of ancient mythologies in our lives today. Campbell taught at Sarah Lawrence College for 38 years and spent much of that time showing the students the everyday relevance of myth. Campbell outlined four functions of Myth: 1. Mystical Wonder and Awe- to show the joy of the world and universe. 2. Cosmological- to show that all form has a mystical dimension. 3. Sociological- to show how ethical law gives social order. 4. Pedagogical- how to live life under any circumstance.
Campbell said in his celebrated 1988 PBS interview with Bill Moyers that “ the ultimate mystery of being is beyond all categories of thought.” Those inexplicable qualities of life are what myth is ultimately for—to be “ that field of reference to what is absolutely transcendent.”11 Perhaps Campbell’s most telling statement on the function of myth is: “I think what we are looking for is a way of experiencing the world that will open to us the transcendent.”12 Moyers asked Campbell: “You say that mythology is the study of mankind’s one great story. What is that one great story?” Campbell: “To be in accord with the grand symphony that this world is, to put the harmony of our own body in accord with that harmony.”13 “The ancient myths were designed to harmonize the mind and body.”14 “I would say that is the basic theme of all mythology—that there is an invisible plane supporting the visible one.”15 Moyers: “Who interprets the divinity inherent in nature for us today? Who are our shamans? Who interprets unseen things for us?” Campbell: “It is the function of the artist to do this. The artist is the one who communicates myth for today. But he has to be an artist who understands mythology and humanity and isn’t simply a sociologist with a program for you.”16 It would be too much a burden to suggest that the paintings of Michael Onken would perform that function. Onken knows what art can do, its potentials, and its limits. Onken pushes his art as far as it will, and no farther. But, I do think, that the realms Onken explores, his talent for “setting the table” with scenes that convey mood and a bit of mystery, are a fine way to stand at the gateway (or transitional place or border crossing) leading to the abyss.
“The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished product. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life.” - Carl Jung, “On the Relation of Analytic Psychology to Poetry,” 1922. Michael Onken, Genealogy, 2012, watercolor, gouache, and acrylic.
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DAVID JONES and KATHLEEN RAINE The art of Anglo-Welsh artist-poet David Jones (1895-1974), like the poetry of Kathleen Raine, is one among the many influences on Michael Onken’s aesthetics. Kathleen Raine (1908-2003), the British poet, critic, scholar, “who believed in the sacred nature of all life.” William Blake was a prime inspiration, and she shared his belief that “one power alone makes a poet - imagination, the divine vision.” According to her obituary, “She stood as a witness to spiritual values in a society that rejected them. She drew Jungian psychology into her poetic vision of the divinity manifest in nature and the cosmos, and the ‘perennial wisdom’ and spiritual symbols common to all religions, peoples and times.” 17 Jones made his mark in a variety of media, but particularly engraving, watercolor, and poetry. Widely admired in his home country for his “extraordinary fluidity and variety of his markmaking” his art was greatly inspired by Jones’s passions for nature, mythology, and the Roman Catholic Church. Jones developed a concept for his love and respect of animals and nature that became a major touchstone for his philosophical outlook on being an artist. He called it “the intimate creature-
liness of things.” Jones said this meant “a care for, and appreciation of the particular genius of places, men, trees, animals, and yet withal a pervading sense of metamorphosis and mutability.”18 Jones’s “devotion to“ creaturely modes of being was a way of learning about the being of humans and landforms.”19 (My emphasis). In many ways, I find Onken’s use of animals, birds, as well as other archetypes of nature to be apt connections to our own sense of being. Often in an Onken painting, a human protagonist will be paired with an animal antagonist.
LOOKING CLOSELY AT FORM The composition of any painting, not only Michael Onken’s, is a key element to discern and understand its role in establishing unique form and meaning. Onken is a master of composition. Onken uses composition as a key structuring element and with it sets the visual stage with hierarchical clarity. Intuitively, the eye draws to key forms and must either question or accept the semantic direction established by composition. The artist has logically arranged pictorial elements, and sometimes the placement emphasizes the obvious, other times, emphasizing the often by-passed. Composition directs our interpretation in subtle, imperceptible ways. Colors are sumptuously brushed onto to the painting’s surface, layer upon layer. Passages in every inch of the painting’s support are intensively worked time and again with additional colors, shapes defining space, and textures. The complexity of form and color suggests by way of Onken’s technique an intricateness of meaning. Onken makes strong use of a style of painting seemingly naive and awkward. Though the style may summon to the mind children’s illustrated books; Onken carefully choses style, knowing style conveys significations.
The artist working direct from nature sketches plein air. Above all, it is the duty of the artist to create significant form. Corncrake is a bird found in Europe and Asia. Corncrake is an endangered bird found in Europe and Asia. Michael Onken, Corncrake, 2013, watercolor, gouache, and acrylic.
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The writer, no less than the visual artist, must find creative form in words and language. Michael Onken, Opera in an Upper Room, 2015, watercolor, gouache, and acrylic.
12 | THE PAINTING OF MICHAEL ONKEN In these paintings, the relaxed and seemingly unsophisticated style of limning figures and objects ironically hides and recodes the paintings’ deeper symbolisms. Onken crafts a vernacular voice to suggest connotations that might otherwise be perceived as oratory. Onken’s “vernacular voice” cannot be emphasized enough. The same subjects—people in relationships, animals, birds, scenes of nature—painted in a more grandiose style—say, a neoclassic realism—would alter their meaning considerably. Onken “says” what he has to, in a style befitting his temperament, subdued, subtle. The deepest, most profound aspects of life can be said in the most casual of voice. Onken whispers, no need to shout. Next is mood. The paintings project moods mysterious and incongruent vis-à-vis its subjects. For example, why is a woman having a cup of tea on the beach while standing over a stranded whale? That creates two distinct moods jarringly juxtaposed. The moods are often subtle and hard to discern, and yet, undeniably present. This “montage of moods” is what I find to be one of Onken’s principle pictorial strengths. Portraying mood in a painting is very difficult to do, and Onken does it well. Mood strongly establishes authorial intention. The enigmatic moods of the paintings envelop like fog their painted subjects thus stimulating viewers to ask: Why these people, Why these objects, Why this mood? This semantic use of mood conveyed through visual imagery equates mystery allegorically with our dim understandings of the vast and ultimately unfathomable universe.
Another aesthetic technique bears unpacking: that of the juxtaposition of disparate elements. This visual strategy of placement and proximity gives pause in one’s thinking, challenging one to force a relationship. It moves one out of one’s comfort zone and into new considerations. See for example the painting of a young woman carrying a white peacock while looking back at a wild boar. One further aesthetic technique must be considered, that of titles. Onken’s titles are useful segues into potential content. Weigh them patiently. To paint, as Onken does, with his resolute attention to line, color, shape, and texture is to slow time itself to a crawl. Both for the maker and viewer. Viewers must pace themselves when unpacking these fixed images. This type of deliberate and measured viewing remains a valuable experience in today’s hyper-paced worlds of immediate gratification. Too many messages in today’s world whiz by us without our full consent or understanding. Practicing to read closely and slowly unpack artworks in museums can prepare us to skillfully unpack those whizzing, complex media images and messages. Obliquely, the paintings of Michael Onken murmur with unconscious stirrings, alluding to dormant wellsprings of the collective human heritage and our primal relationships to nature itself. These paintings are like fresh water from ancient springs sparkling with small mysteries.
KYLE KINSER, a local cabinetmaker from Makanda, has long collaborated with friends and artists. Kinser’s approach to his art is simple and direct, as he seeks to hand-craft wood into objects of beauty and function. Kyle’s results seem to reflect the voice of nature itself. It is a likely pairing of Kyle Kinser and his friend Michael Onken, as both share a respect for nature. The two works in the exhibit by Kyle and Michael allow each artist’s individual vision to stand on its own within the collaboration. I suggest that each artist’s contribution to the collaboration seems to speak of relationships. Those formal relationships found within the woodworks themselves in Kyle’s, and to human relationships in Michael’s. The collaborations also point to the relationships of fine art and craft. And to friendships. Michael Onken with Kyle Kinser, Wall Cabinet, 2015, recycled Luan Mahogany, Walnut, Redwood, Ash, Carved wooden block. Detail below.
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Here, the brotherhood, or perhaps, sisterhood between the species may be read as one of mutual respect. Bees worldwide have been recently threatened with extinction. Michael Onken, Bee, 2015, graphite on handmade paper.
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CONCLUSION The theologian Rowan Williams would be in agreement with Joseph Campbell regarding the still relevant value today of the stories from mythology. In a Williams’ book review on fairy tales he declared the value of mythology today. Williams noted that J.R.R. Tolkien in a famous 1947 essay on fairy tales lamented their connection with childhood and reminded readers that it was indeed a genre worth serious analysis and something to “think with.” Williams wrote “paradoxically, in our day, it is adults who seem most to need and use them, because they are just about the only stories we have in common with which to think through deep dilemmas and to keep alive registers of emotion and imagination otherwise being eroded.” Critically, “they provide a framework for imagining our human situation overall.”20
The paintings therefore, have become a way of “looking back,” as a way forward. They are talismanic aide-mémoires evoking the potential and power of art. Today, we live in a world of multiple and disparate myths. The kernels of truth that may likely advance the next truly universal myths into place will be based on nature as source, not culture. Onken’s paintings are catalysts for such thinking without being didactic or evangelical. They present a structure to consider, leaving content to the responsibility of the viewer. Unequivocally, these paintings are not myths, though they clearly function to suggest something like the mythological. They set out myth logic in their patterns of intention. Their supreme value is that they are not oratory; their rhetorical value is steeped in “everyday language” that transcodes archetypal stories into painted imagery imbued with the mystery that our real lives always already seem to be so intimately entangled. n
The valuable argument Williams asserts is that we have not lost or outgrown the necessity for mythologies. A loss like that is almost impossible to imagine. We are in need of myths that respect the Earth not as a resource, but as our shared, collective home. To learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and sea.21 At the center of society’s shared condition stands the individual. These paintings, as stated above, have socially-symbolic significance for the individual. I read our shared state as the doublebind, be it the mind-body dilemma or any of the other, numerous contradictions that color existence. The classic double-bind is that of the subject, the person, who is both a subject capable of fierce agency and subjected to, acted-upon by forces beyond his or her control. I think these paintings speak first to individuals suggesting the “wisdom of nature” and “our brotherhood with the animals and sea.” For the contradictions of existence, these paintings function as antidote and promise.
Do I imagine reality Or does the real imagine me? Unimaginable imaginer What part does the imagined play?22 In this complete and untitled poem, Kathleen Raine pithily proposes the power of the mind, the double-bind of existence (“do I imagine,” or “does the real imagine me”); but I also read this, and quite significantly, as the power of art.
MICHAEL ONKEN is Professor Emeritus at Southern Illinois University Carbondale where he taught for 34 years. Onken was Head of Graduate Studies for 29 years. In 1991, Professor Onken inaugurated for students the Summer Workshop Program and traveled with them to the Hospitalfield Centre for Art & Culture in Arbroath, Scotland. Onken remains today associated with the Scotland workshop. Onken’s art has been shown throughout the world, most recently in 2013 with the Illinois State Museum, Chicago gallery. In 2009, Onken’s woodcuts illustrated the book, The Girl from the Sea: A Play for Voices by George MacKay Brown by Old Stile Press, UK. This is Onken’s first solo exhibition at Cedarhurst.
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Among the best works in the exhibit. Mysterious setting with no obvious significance. Stellar use of color and composition to set the mood of the painting. Michael Onken, Rising Wind with Turf Smoke, 2006, watercolor, gouache, and acrylic.
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1 Excerpt from Kathleen Raine (British 1908-2003), “No
10 Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, (NY: Doubleday,
Where,” 1992 from Living With Mystery: Poems 1987-91, (Golgonooza Press: Ipswich, UK, 1992).
1988), p. 22.
11 The Power of Myth, p. 49. 2 Dave Hare, “Rowan Williams: God’s Boxer,” The Guardian, July 8, 2011, accessed online, 12-16-2015.
3 Rusty Freeman in e-mail correspondence with
12 The Power of Myth, p. 53. 13 The Power of Myth, p. 55.
Michael Onken, June 7, 2015.
14 The Power of Myth, p.70.
4 NPR Interview with Yuval Noah Harari, “We Went from
15 The Power of Myth, p. 71.
Hunter-Gatherers to Space Explorers, But Are We Happier?” www.npr.org/2015/02/07. Harari’s book is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, (NY: HarperCollins, 2015).
16 The Power of Myth, p. 99. Moyers asked in a follow-up
Praying with Icons of the Virgin, (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2002, 2012), p. xiv. Emphasis here is mine.
6 Calvin S. Hall and Vernon J. Nordby, A Primer of Jungian
17 Obituary, The Guardian, July 8, 2003
5 Rowan Williams, “Introduction,” Ponder These Things:
Psychology, (NY: Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 41-42.
7 Northrup Frye, “The Archetypes of Literature,” (orig. 1951) in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Vincent Leitch, gen. ed., (NY: Norton and Company, 2001), pp. 1452-1453.
8 Christine Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field: An Investiga- tion,” Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melo drama and the Woman’s Film, (BFI Publishing, 1987), p.5.
9 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac,
Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1976), p. ix.
question, how do those of us who are not artists or poets learn these things? Campbell replied, “I’ll tell you a very nice way. Read and read and read. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.”
18 Matthew Sperling, “Lines of Poetry,” Apollo magazine, October 2015, p. 84.
19 Sperling, p. 84. 20 Rowan Williams, “Tales Now More Than Ever,” New Statesman, December 22, 2014.
21 Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, 1988, p31. 22 Kathleen Raine, Untitled poem from Living With Mystery: Poems 1987-91, (Golgonooza Press: Ipswich, UK, 1992).
Onken’s paintings are not “about” myths. For the artist, these paintings are about everyday life, and people going about their lives. What makes these narrative fragments so intriguing is their familiarity. Michael Onken, The Play of St. Columba, 2015, mixed media.