When did you start painting?
I started when I was fifteen. I was lucky. In my high school there happened to be a teacher who taught us how to use oil paint. I loved it and carried on on my own after she left. Then, in college as a biology major, I took a painting class and really fell in love with it. I thought I would follow my heart – if I ever wanted to be a doctor I could go back to school – and just kept going. So I studied painting as an undergraduate and then later as a graduate student at Yale.
When did you start consciously investigating what you might call spirituality?
I was pretty young. I think I was eleven when I read Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse, and The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, by Alan Watts. Those blew my mind. I found them very profound, and somehow I could access what was being described. I had a curious feeling of recognition, even as a kid. I went to meditation groups at summer camp and in high school. Then, exploring as a teenager, I read a book called Das Energi, by Paul Williams, and works by Krishnamurti and Shunryu Suzuki.
I’m Jewish, and my father was Israeli, so after college I went to Israel and did a programme for English-speaking youth who didn’t know their Jewish heritage. It was very exciting and led me to a very long engagement with my own heritage as a Jew. I lived in Israel, studied at Yeshiva, and was painting all the while. I applied to graduate school at Yale with the paintings done during this time in Jerusalem. After Yale, in 1992, I went back to Israel and lived an observant Orthodox life for about for ten years.
I don’t think of myself as an observant Jew now. I don’t do all of the activities, the rituals and observance, but I’m definitely a Jew.I’m aware of the Sabbath, and I loosely follow some of the customs with my kids. I find it rich and beautiful. I dip into the sacred writing, opening it up in terms that make sense to me. I’m grateful for it.
When I came back from Israel, I did a series of retreats at the Insight Meditation Society, in Barre, Massachusetts. I fell in love with that practice and it became ongoing. Another part of what I was trying to do then was to get a handle, as a painter, on what’s going on in the larger art world. I think the art world is a bit crazy – the art market and the art world have become conflated – but I knew that what I was doing as a painter was important whether or not it showed up in the gallery world. I think all painters, all creative people, know that about their work, but I was trying to find out in exactly what way it was important. I wrote an essay in 2014 called ‘How Painting Can Help Save the World, Actually’ (which can be found on my website ([jordan wolfson how painting can change the world]).
It wasn’t long after writing this essay – within a week – that two different people presented me with quotes from Rupert Spira. These really spoke to me, and I thought it was interesting that two should turn up in the same week! So I looked him up. He had recently published The Transparency of Things and I got myself a copy. I was teaching in Denver then, and while everyone was drawing I would read it.
I remember distinctly the experience, as I went through his writing, of my mind being undone. It was like a reorganisation, an opening up. I went through that book very slowly over two or three years. Then I started listening to audio downloads from Rupert’s retreats, but because of my life circumstances I wasn’t able to go to a retreat until October 2019, in California, just before the world shut down.
So painting and spirituality have always gone together for me, because they’re both to do with what’s real.
Would you talk about how you work, the process and the materials you use?
Drawing, over the years, has led my painting. I don’t mean in the sense of doing a preparatory drawing before the painting. It’s more like I’m exploring. I’m working from observation all the time, even the work that looks abstract. I’m looking, and the simplest way of engaging formally with my perception is through drawing. I can find my mark, my rhythm, most simply in drawing.
The drawing has led me to explore my own temperament creatively. I’ll make a mark with charcoal and then ask how I can do it with a thick brush full of paint, or with a rag. Drawing leads me towards my way of making. I get to know myself more directly in drawing, and I can explore more easily. I find a way of working I like, then I see if I can maintain the same attitude with painting. I try to bring the same level of spontaneity and ease from drawing into painting. With painting, you can keep going. It dries, and you can just keep adding to it.
I noticed in your series that you go from form to formlessness, from abstraction back to form, back and forth. Do you have any preference? Doyou feel the essence is formless?
No, because there’s something essential about the situation that is both form and formless. They both need to be there. That seems to be how things are; it’s the juxtaposition of all of that. It does seem to me that form comes out of non-form, and that to understand form in its essential reality, we need to be open to the reality of non-form. The wonder is that, somehow, in the context of non-form we live with form.
In my work, going from form to non-form is kind of like riffing on the form that I’ve been exploring. I listen to music a great deal when I’m painting.
This practice has impacted other areas of my life. I have two daughters, and how I am as a father has been influenced by my painting practice. There’s something about the creative process that has an essential quality: This is real; this isn’t just about making a picture; this is about life. That was what struck me as a young man.
Over the years as I’ve explored in the studio, I’ve found the challenge to be to see if I could take it outside. What does it mean to take the concerns of compositional wholeness, or spontaneity with attention, or whatever it might be, and bring it out of the studio? Then it becomes painting as a life practice. Is there a way of painting not just being an art-world activity but – in its roots, depths and reality – about being a human being? What does that look like? In recent years, I’ve been trying to teach with that in mind, and that’s also how I understand the book.
With my book, the feeling wasn’t so much that I wanted to write it as it was that I wanted these ideas to be in the world, and I didn’t see that occurring anywhere. So I thought it was up to me. The idea of writing a book seemed really daunting, so I just started writing things down. I didn’t want to belabour it or get all intense about it, so I decided to self-publish it, and a friend designed it. I’m grateful for the whole thing.
Jordan’s book, Painting and Consciousness, is available to buy through his website.
For more artwork, we invite you to visit Costanza Coletti's illustrations .
