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The small things in between
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The small things in between
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Content
THE SMALL THINGS IN BETWEEN
by
Kim Sweet
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
May 2023
© 2023 Kim Sweet
ii
Thank you to my family for their continued and unflinching support.
And to my professors and mentor for their wisdom.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication …………………………………………………………………...………………… ii.
List of Figures ..………………………………………………………...…………...…………. iv.
Abstract ………………………………………………………………...……………….…...… v.
Prologue …………………………………………………………………..………………….… vi.
Chapter One: Emotional Terrain ………………………………….…………………………… 1
Chapter Two: The Geography of the Soul ………………………………...………………....….. 4
Chapter Three: Coordinates of the Self and the American West …………………………….…. 9
Chapter Four: The Grid—Mapping the World ……………………….…………….…….……..12
Conclusion ……………………………………………………………….……..…………….... 18
Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………….……... 22
Appendices …………………………………………………………………………………...… 21
Appendix A: Drawing Machine, Albrecht Dürer Woodcut 1895 ….………………………....... 21
Appendix B: Hoover Street, Los Angeles …………………….……………………………...… 21
iv
List of Figures
Figure 1: Drawing Machine, Albrecht Dürer Woodcut 1895-1-22-730 ………………………. 21
Figure 2: Hoover Street, Los Angeles …………………………………………………………. 21
v
Abstract
The American West continues to be a place of contradictions. Its landscape has been the
facilitator of human myths, dreams, and reinventions. It is a geography that bridges gaps between
numerous internal and external worlds.
In this thesis, Kim Sweet looks at the West through her personal lens. While focusing on the
vulnerability and quiet strength of the landscape in the midst of natural chaos and human-
imposed order, she simultaneously explores the same qualities among even more fragile and
ephemeral human beings, who are constantly buffeted by human-made and natural trauma.
Through her painting and research, Sweet asks whether it’s possible to justify the inherent
contradictions of reaching for the stars while accepting the existential realities of living an all-
too-earthly life.
vi
Prologue
My focus with this thesis is to look at the American West as a set of separate yet
converging ideas. First, a particular place, point or location—a landscape. Second, a place of
myths, reinvention, dreams, and new beginnings—an internal landscape. And third, a place
without a fixed identity that enables new constructions—new maps—that continue to transform
our internal and external worlds.
It’s worth noting that I’m looking at the landscape in a subjective way, framing my
encounter with the American West through a very personal lens as a modern twentieth/twenty-
first century woman in American society. My perspective from a specific moment in time is not
intended to diminish or dismiss the brutal history that was foundational in the formation of the
American West.
This project is a result of the many trips I’ve made between Arizona and California,
particularly during the past year and a half as an MFA candidate at USC. During my drives, I’ve
been taking in the majestic landscape while listening to books on tape about Edmund Burke and
his concept of the sublime. I’ve noticed a vulnerability in the West that’s hard to feel in other
places. The West, with its vast, expansive, and often unforgiving landscape, has compelled me to
focus on the fragility and ephemeral nature of the human condition.
This is ultimately what this project is about, our fleeting existence and fragility, and how,
despite this, we set out to make sense of life, to find a meaning that mitigates the suffering and
trauma.
1
Chapter One: Emotional Terrain
“I don’t think it’s possible for me to ever think about the American
landscape without thinking about the colonial history—and the colonial
violence—of that narrative.”
—Julie Mehretu
When you engage with landscape painting in 2023, this quote from artist Julie Mehretu is
a good starting point for the conversation. The American landscape is a politically charged
space. So how do I position my work and practice in relation to this quote?
Mehretu makes work from the collective pain that extends from colonial history. It is connected
to history. The landscapes in my work are disinterested in the movements of human history. The
landscape stands in for deep time, cosmic time, and shallow time, the seasons or the cycle of day
to night. This deep time contains a measure of human time, the cycles of day to night, year to
year. Human life is contained within cosmic time, or deep time is measured through markers of
shallow time. We experience the circle of life and death, and all the small things in between,
through a small sliver of cosmic time, shallow time. So that deep time and shallow time are seen
as distant and near. Through these dual lenses, distance and nearness, I am exploring how we
process pain and make peace with the ephemerality of human existence.
I’m using images of the land in my paintings in three particular ways. First, the land
represents a place, a point or location. Not a real place so much as a starting point, an indication
of a location or state one finds oneself in. A desolate gray landscape, for example, can be a work
that explores emptiness and isolation. These landscapes are places in the mind arrived at through
disassociation and the desire to escape.
Secondly, my landscapes often refer to the American West’s ability to generate a
collective fantasy: the West as a place of myths, reinvention, dreams, and new beginnings. The
2
West in my work points to an idealized space and makes reference to how this collective shared
fantasy must impose a form of cognitive dissonance in order to maintain the fantasy. This
process parallels the American West’s persistent ability to remain a myth, a place of ideals, in
spite of the realities that undermine the illusion.
Finally, the landscape in my work is a psychological space, an internal landscape. A
protected place that holds memories. It is a place to preserve alternative narratives to be mined
later. These memories become the missing coordinates of forgotten self states. These internal
landscapes are the place of new beginnings. A place for new maps to be drawn with new
information about the world. Recording the new locations and positions.
By depicting the land in my paintings I seek to locate the self. This strategy functions as a
way for me to look at the myths and fantasies people engage in. To explore how these fantasies
protect us and then, when they no longer serve us, bind and imprison us. The land is also a place
of redemption. A place where memories are buried for safekeeping. A place of little treasures to
be recovered, becoming regained parts of a fractured self.
The land is also none of these things. It is simply the land. A disinterested, majestic place
that reminds us of our insignificance and takes us out of our narcissistic stance. It recenters us as
part of the world, not separate from it.
The land is not just a place to be dominated, controlled, and exploited and idealized by
humans. In my assessment the land is both brutal and unforgiving and bountiful and majestic.
But whatever qualities are projected onto the land, it remains a disinterested backdrop to the
human experience. Disinterested in the viewer’s gaze. (McGilchrist Riley, 118).
Even in spite of the damage we inflict upon the land, it is bound only by the laws of
nature not the presumptive control of man. Our disruptions to its cycles may lead to our
3
extinction, like all that came before us, but this land on this planet will continue within the laws
of its own cycles outside our meddling and small concerns. From life to death and death to
rebirth. Eventually heading to its own demise estimated to be 1.5 billion years from now. This is
a long way from the landscape depicting as a triumph of Manifest Destiny in the West.
My interest is in how the small shifts of human time exist against the ever expanding
universe. A study of human suffering in a detached world. Of human time in relation to cosmic
time. Where our problems are as impermanent as our joys.
In fact, my project is concerned with how this perspective of viewing our own experience
in relation to cosmic time can help us navigate the pain and trauma of life. My project looks to
make sense of human suffering and explore the possibilities of the engagement with art as an
antidote to suffering.
If we look at the role of the land in my work you can map a pathway from unawareness
to consciousness, from suffering to clarity to responsibility, and to humility. Then back again to
suffering
4
Chapter Two: The Geography of the Soul
“There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for
its outlines all our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like
water over a stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home. Some find it
in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched,
and find themselves refreshed in the desert. There are those born in rolling
countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness
of the city. For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or
a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe.
We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled,
loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition,
without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself
and we slip at last into place.”
― Josephine Hart, Damage
Suffering in life is unavoidable, but unprocessed, unresolved trauma is what I am trying
to understand. This project is an exploration of how we process this pain. Or perhaps more
correctly, how we do not. The landscape is one of the vehicles I use for this exploration.
I had already been describing my paintings of the land as internal landscapes, so
Josephine Hart’s passage, cited here, resonated deeply. Here, Hart lays out three phrases that
have become central to my work. Adding to the “internal landscape” are the ideas of “standing
cold with the shock of recognition” and “feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul
unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.” Each phrase seems to mirror a possible progression
through trauma; a progression from survival, to awareness, to self-actualization or wholeness.
As stated, trauma is unavoidable. In fact it is a byproduct of life. There is seemingly no
order to its disbursement. Some lives are infested with deep trauma and some brush lightly
against it. Whatever fate has bestowed upon each of us, we must contend with our particular
allotment.
5
Ideally we take in the pain, process the trauma, and digest it, gaining strength from our
ability to take it in and make it a part of us. To absorb it and through this consumption and
elimination move forward with clarity and conviction, finding a reason larger than the pain.
Yet we seem to have lost our ability to embody our pain. Instead we often fast track grief,
no longer letting it run its full course. It is my contention that this limited capacity to contend
with pain is a fully modern problem. Marshall Berman, in his book All That Is Solid Melts into
Air, makes a reference to this loss:
To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure,
power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world - and, at the
same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know,
everything we are.
Promises. Promises. It is this idea, the idea of an implied promise of a better life, that
connects my interest in the land of the American West with trauma. Perhaps it is an American
idea that the future will be better. But those who are lured to the West with the promise of a
better future are similar to those who stay in abusive, dysfunctional relationships; they both need
to believe the future will be better. To believe again that the ideal that was first presented to them
was real, that they can achieve this promised future if they just work hard enough (Kernberg).
There is a kind of consent implicit in a promise even if the promise is implied. Unlike a
place that offers you nothing, no promises, for those who do not prosper in the land of
opportunity there is a sense of deep despair at having missed the mark. But the West is not the
promised land. It is often a harsh and violent place, with blood soaked land, strewed with broken
promises and a history filled with the systematic eradication of the indigenous peoples who lived
on this so-called “virgin land” long before it was called the American West (Smith).
6
Yet even knowing all of this, the landscape of the American West still represents the
hope of a better future. Why is this? Why is this landscape in spite of these realities still
idealized? What kind of disconnect (trauma bond) must exist between this land, the reality of this
space and its ideal perception, to keep this myth alive? Is there a kind of a double bind at work?
For many, life in the West is a series of broken promises and broken dreams. And that is
of course life. But there is a deeper sense of loss and despair when this happens in the place
where dreams are supposed to come true. Through the myth of the West, the West has become
an idealized space very different from reality. The mythology has enabled a kind of collective
shared fantasy to arise.
1
This shared psychic space, or collective fantasy, then becomes the
organizing principle of perception; regardless of any outside data points This shared psychic
space, or collective fantasy, then becomes the organizing principle of perception; regardless of
how contrary this delusion is from an alternative perspective.
2
In this fantasy, the land is imbued with cinematic color, meaning, direction, thrills, and
promises of unending prosperity and social ascendancy. Once inside this shared psychic space
the “truth” is often subjugated to maintain the fantasy. After all, having sacrificed so much to
come to the land of opportunity—only to find it was not as advertised—who has the courage to
admit they were a sucker for accepting the terms? And, more fundamentally, who has the support
1
For many of the indigenous people of North America, enticement into a shared fantastical space with the settlers,
when it did occur, was short lived. Once the pseudo-friendship between the early settlers and the indigenous people
outgrew its usefulness, that is, when the settlers learned how to survive in the new landscape on their own, the
indigenous people became “savages” in order to justify their eradication by the invading population. This transition
from idealization to devaluation, from guide and friend to savage and foe, happened in quick succession. My project
looks at the link between broken promises and those who still hope for their fulfillment, in spite of the facts that
contradict the illusion. My project is also interested in a way out of this diluted state. The indigenous people were
not caught up in the illusion of a shared fantasy. They were fully conscious of the falsehoods embedded in the
mythology. Their knowledge is, in part, why they were such a threat. The shared fantasy is an illusion used to lure
new dreamers into a shared psychotic space. Any outside contradictions to this fantasy are a threat.
2
The term "shared fantasy" was coined by Sander, F. (1989). The middle years: New psychoanalytic perspectives
(pp. 160–176). New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press [14].
7
system or resources to go “home” once they discover the ruse? It is unlikely to be anyone who
was persuaded by this promise in the first place.
In small ways, the participants slowly become complicit in concealing the falseness of the
promise. Unable or unwilling to question what it means to live in relation to a string of broken
promises, for those who cannot escape a kind of cognitive dissonance arises in order to reconcile
all that is irreconcilable.
Prolonged trauma relies on a similar trajectory. A future promise is made to persuade a
person to take a leap of faith before they fully calculate the costs of their decision. (Or, in some
cases, no consent is needed as they are too young to make such a choice.) Future faking and
slowly slicing away at boundaries, grooming, until the persuaded feels complicit in what unfolds.
It is this notion of complicity that serves to elongate trauma.
And, having separated themselves from much of what would have served to reorient
them, they remain in this fantastical space. They remain as they have lost access to the
coordinates necessary to escape. Like a person in the fog who is unable to see that the road home
is just a few steps ahead.
I think this is what Hart is looking at in her novel Damage. She has said the book was “a
confession without the desire for repentance. The unnamed narrator seems to say to us I cannot
repent for to do so would be to deny the very thing which brought me into existence. I destroyed
my family and brought about the death of my son. I am drowning in sorrow. I am broken by
grief. But I do not repent.”
3
Not unlike Western mythology, the narrator in Damage lives in an idealized space
disconnected from reality. He goes through the motions to keep the myth of his life alive but in
3
Josephine Hart, The Guardian, Nov 25, 2011
8
order to do this he must sacrifice himself. If we replace “existence” with consciousness in Hart’s
description, then at the end of the novel Hart’s narrator is unwilling to renounce the very thing
that brought him into awareness.
While he may not have fully understood the costs of his awakening, he is not prepared to
disassociate from the outcome. Instead, he willingly chooses to live a life above the fog of
illusion. Repenting would be a lie. And worse still, by asking for absolution he would betray the
truth - his willingness to pay the price for his autonomy at long last.
9
Chapter Three: Coordinates of the Self and the American West
"There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that
species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony,
is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the
first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that
way will enslave you and make your life vacuous."
—Cormac McCarthy, New York Times Interview, 1992
The West is a harsh place. There is a simplicity and beauty in this—a truth. I think it is
this harshness that drew me to the Western landscape as a subject. I liked the idea of painting a
“pretty picture” of this landscape that belies the brutality that exists within it. I wanted to
understand how much darkness is a part of beauty, and if true beauty can only be known through
vulnerability.
McCarthy understands this. He writes about the other side of the myth, the darker side.
About the brutality people are capable of and the unflinching, disinterested stance of the natural
world towards his plight. There is no life, no real life, until this darkness is known, until its truth
is fully embodied. To have access to and mastery over both sides of our human nature is to be
fully human. And being fully human means confronting our own mortality, conscious of our own
impending death.
In the expansive terrain of the Western landscape there is the possibility of recalibrating
our place in the cosmic order. As postmodernists we have the illusion of our mastery over the
world, the land. And to a large extent this is true. But we are often just one crisis, one awakening,
away from our frailty. When placed amidst the vastness of the western landscape, we are more
aware of the threat to our mortality that nature can pose.
10
The Western landscape offers the possibility of an encounter with something that might
be called the sublime. Although Kant and Burke wrote much on the sublime, poet and diplomat
Octavio Paz touches on the sublime with simplicity and directness:
“All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence as something unique,
untransferable, and very precious, [this] Self-discovery is above all the realization that we
are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall-that of our consciousness-
between the world and ourselves.”
4
The sublime undermines the self and dislodges the Western egocentric understanding of
our place in the world. A sublime encounter serves to reorder the human experience and human
consciousness. calling into question humanity's place and primacy in the world.
Megan Riley McGilchrist, author of The Western Landscape in Cormac McCarthy and
Wallace Stegner: Myths of the Frontier, describes the Western landscape as a disruptive force to
our human-centric model of the world:
“Man is not the measure of all things, but simply a component, and perhaps
not the most important one, of the whole. This is a very long way from the
triumphalism of Manifest Destiny in the West, which trumpeted the inevitable
victory of the American people over the landscape and its inhabitants”
(McGilchrist Riley, 118).
Mcgilchrist’s statement points to the position the land occupies in my work, wherein the
landscape is not a glorification of man over nature but a way to acknowledge an imperfect
reiteration of man as a part of the whole. It is imperfect because he is part of the whole as much
as this is possible. In the very fact of this awareness a rupture between man and the world which
4
Descartes, René. Discourse on the Method, Optics, Geometry and Meteorology (1637), trans. P.J. Olscamp,
revised edition (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001, pg. 9.
11
separation, a distance. The grid in my work is a way to acknowledge that man has separated
himself from the natural world through consciousness.
The grid is also a way to explore what happens when we remain unaware of our own
agency, asleep in a shared phantasmagorical space. In my work the grid is sometimes obliterated,
blurred, buried or painted over. The act of burying the awareness in the painting is an attempt to
acknowledge that when we do not separate ourselves from the phantasmatic, we are not fully
present in our life.
If we look again at the nameless narrator in Hart’s Damage, his life was unknowable to
him because he did not occupy it, he was an absence not a presence. His encounter with the
sublime jarred him into an awakening. In that moment he became a presence in his life. Finally
fully conscious of the depths of his own darkness and simultaneously the fragility of his own
existence.
12
Chapter Four: The Grid—Mapping the World
“When I turn my mind's eye upon myself, I understand that I am a thing
which is incomplete and dependent on another and which aspires without
limit to ever greater and better things…”
― René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy
The grid has a long history of applications in painting, but it is Descartes’ development of
the Cartesian grid in combination with his statement, “I think therefore I am,” that attracted me
to the grid. Descartes' awareness, i.e. his understanding of human consciousness, could be
represented as the grid. His brilliant expression, the grid, that linked geometric and algebraic
ideas in a visual form could for me in my work be a stand-in for his assertion of human
consciousness. The grid could be a visual for the human capacity of consciousness. This made
the grid an interesting vehicle to explore how we are separate from the world through our
awareness but also remain a part of it. This separateness is an essential component in mapping
our choices. A growing awareness can lift one out of the fog of trauma. With distance you can
come out of a state of confusion into a state of clarity. The grid is a way for me to connect with a
system of thinking that maps a series of coordinates. It is a stand in for our ability to be aware of
ourselves.
This is not to say the Drawing Machine, the wire framed device used by artists like
Alberti and Durer to map a subject, is not also a part of the conversation.
5
Or that it is of interest
5
The Drawing Machine, Alberti’s “reticolato” or grid, was a device used by Alberti and other artists like Dürer,
Piero della Francesca, and da Vinci to more accurately depict perspectival space on the flat surface of the canvas.
Alberti wrote about the device in his first general treatise Della Pittura on the laws of perspective in 1435. The
National Portrait Gallery in London describes the device in this way:
“Alberti's Frame was the name of the most successful of the drawing devices invented. This drawing
machine is made up of a square wooden frame, across which horizontal and vertical threads are stretched at
regular intervals to form a grid. A foot or so in front of this gridded frame is a rod, the same height as the
distance from the bottom of the frame to the middle of the grid. This rod is important because, by lining up
13
that the edges of USC are mapped by the Jeffersonian grid.
6
But as I have stated it is the grid’s
association with Descartes that felt relevant in finding a way to point to this concern in my work.
I had already been making works about this connection. Trying to find ways to connect these
ideas. I was making a group of paired paintings. A single figure and its partner a separate
painting of a landscape. The subject of both of these paintings was the internal landscape or
interior world of the figure. One painting was the thinker, the portrait, and the other was a pointer
to the thinking of that thinker, the landscape.
I was trying to understand the foundations and pathways of trauma. To map the places in
the conscience and unconscious mind where trauma resided. A lot of the language of trauma and
recovery points to the land. Words like unearthing, being in a fog, being lost in the woods made
the landscape a good vehicle to explore the internal landscape of the thinker.
So the work began to intertwine the thinker, the grid, with the thoughts, both conscious
the eye with the rod and the center of the grid, the eye is always fixed in the same position when looking at
things.” (www.npg.org.uk) [See image )
Alberti’s writing in 1435 even points to the same concerns expressed by Rosinda Kraus from The Grid, 1970, about
the grid in painting:
“The first thing to know is that a point is a sign [signum] which one might say is not divisible into parts. I
call a sign anything which exists on a surface so that it is visible to the eye … Points joined together
continuously in a row constitute a line. So for us a line will be a sign whose length can be divided into
parts, but it will be so slender in width that it cannot be split ... If many lines are joined closely together like
threads in a cloth, they will create a surface.” (Alberti 1435–36, p. 42)
6
Landscape architect, designer, planner, and UCLA Extension instructor Rhett Beavers discovered the relationship
between the map of downtown Los Angeles near USC and the Jefferson grid. In the ongoing series the "Laws That
Shaped Los Angeles," KCET's Jeremy Rosenberg, in conversation with Beavers work, describes how Jefferson's
1785 Land Ordinance bill "leads in a straight line to the creation of most of the street grids of modern Los Angeles."
Beavers then expands on this subject, stating “One of the most interesting areas of L.A.'s street grid is the point
where it pivots -- a clash of founding cultures made manifest along Hoover Street just west of downtown -- where
the Jeffersonian city grid abuts a pre-existing Spanish colonial grid."
This area runs alongside USC. I drive this path almost daily as I commute between my classes. "The grid in L.A. is
part of a national survey instituted by Jefferson and amplified over time," says Rhett Beavers. "Jefferson was
looking for a way to transfer federal lands into the hands of the people. In Image 2, you can clearly see this division:
the eastern streets align to about a 36-degree angle while the western streets are at a 45-degree angle.
14
and unconscious, the land. The landscape was a way to look at the conscious mind but also a way
to explore the unconscious mind. I also began to think that in combination with the land the grid
could suggest the presence of the thinker without the figure. So that the experience of the work
would not be connected to the outer physical details of the portrait. In this way the thinker might
be more universally understood. Not as the embodiment of their physicality but as the human
condition.
And there was something about the order the grid imposed that was interesting. The grid
was a way to organize and order a space, to activate and map the canvas. In this simple choice so
much of what a painting is was now directly in the mix. That is the grid and its relationship to
painting. Principally the foundational structure of painting, that is painting on stretched linen or
canvas, is the grid.
Each time a painting begins, even before the first mark is made, the artist is contending
with this central idea. A painting is an object whose primary structure is the grid. It is a central
element to making a painting on canvas, as within this object there is a grid formed by the weave
of the canvas or linen. The grid is made up of threads woven together up/down and left/right to
make a cloth. When this material is stretched on a frame, the frame or stretcher then contains the
grid.
Rosalind Krauss wrote concisely and beautifully about this in her 1979 essay, “The
Grid.”
“The grid is an introjection of the boundaries of the world into the interior
of the work; it is a mapping of the space inside the frame onto itself. It is a
mode of repetition, the content of which is the conventional nature of art itself.”
15
As a painter, this strikes at the core of what it means to make a painting. In my work, the
grid is a stand-in for human consciousness, it maps our awareness. It points to this history and to
those who sought to understand the world as an observer. Observation requires distance. To
observe is to separate. A separation from the world must exist to gain perspective. Again I was
struck by the nameless narrator in Damage. He was fully immersed in the fog of a shared
fantastical space, unconscious of the actions he was engaged in, with little ability to see himself
or his choices with any agency.
Descartes identifies the distance possible through the thought process, noting that the
observing mind is observing itself.
7
This activity of self-reflexive consciousness is also an
essential part of the process of making a painting. The artist makes the work in a state of
attachment to the work, with love and full commitment, but she must be equally able at some
point to look dispassionately, from a distance, at the work. It is from this distance that the work
can be seen separately from the artist's fantasy of what he wants the work to be or what he might
think the work is. Separation and distance are both essential to seeing, i.e. conceptualizing,
understanding, the work. As distance is to seeing a life.
The grid mirrors our attempt not only to order and map the coordinates of our place in the
world but it also affirms our awareness of our own containment, by time, in a certain moment.
7
I am looking at this passage from Descartes to understand the distance possible through thought and our own
conscious awareness:
“Then, examining closely what I was, and seeing that I could imagine that I had no body and that there was
no world or place where I was, I could not imagine that I did not exist at all. On the contrary, precisely
because I doubted the existence of other things it followed quite obviously and certainly that I did exist. If,
on the other hand, I had only ceased to think while everything else that I had imagined remained true, I
would have had no reason to believe that I existed; therefore I realized that I was a substance whose
essence, or nature, is nothing but thought, and which, in order to exist, needs no place to exist nor any other
material thing.”
—Descartes, Discourse on Method, Fourth Part, pg. 28.
16
We are contained in time, like the painting is contained within the boundaries of the frame. And
the painting can be contained by and constrained within its own time. However, if it is art its
consciousness transcends its time and is a universal touch stone, a thread of consciousness that
weaves timelessly through human consciousness.
8
That is why when we look at a great painting
we see past its origins, past its place in time. A work of art is dislodged from time. It is a
disruption where we can experience humanity outside of time.
And this of course is the great gift of painting, that this unlikely thing, this object, this
sheet of cloth stretched on a wooden frame and activated by the artist might reach the level of a
work of art. What an undertaking, what hubris and humility must exist in the right measure to
make this a possibility. To this end, in my painting I try to understand that my consciousness is
mapping a world where all the measuring and marks I am making and placing within the
confines of this world called the painting are an offering to some kind of transmutation. I am
trying to understand what must and can exist in this world. And to be aware of the forces that are
activating the painting. The painting, if it is good, has its own agency, its own force, separate
from my own wants and desires. A painting then becomes a world within the world - with a
8
In What is Art, Tolstoy asserts that “Art begins when one person, with the object of joining another or others to
himself in one and the same feeling, expresses that feeling by certain external indications. To take the simplest
example: a boy, having experienced, let us say, fear on encountering a wolf, relates that encounter; and, in order to
evoke in others the feeling he has experienced, describes himself, his condition before the encounter, the
surroundings, the woods, his own lightheartedness, and then the wolf's appearance, its movements, the distance
between himself and the wolf, etc. All this, if only the boy, when telling the story, again experiences the feelings he
had lived through and infects the hearers and compels them to feel what the narrator had experienced is art. If even
the boy had not seen a wolf but had frequently been afraid of one, and if, wishing to evoke in others the fear he had
felt, he invented an encounter with a wolf and recounted it so as to make his hearers share the feelings he
experienced when he feared the world, that also would be art. And just in the same way it is art if a man, having
experienced either the fear of suffering or the attraction of enjoyment (whether in reality or in imagination)
expresses these feelings on canvas or in marble so that others are infected by them. And it is also art if a man feels or
imagines to himself feelings of delight, gladness, sorrow, despair, courage, or despondency and the transition from
one to another of these feelings, and expresses these feelings by sounds so that the hearers are infected by them and
experience them as they were experienced by the composer.
17
consciousness of its own that has the possibility to ping the consciousness of the viewer who is
engaged in looking at the painting.
18
Conclusion
The first thing is to be quiet. I drop my agenda or expectations, and listen.
Then I soften my gaze. The eyes are aggressive, and once you realize they
are out there hunting, you can learn to tune them down, and let what is out
there come to you. The body knows things way before the brain does. Art
is primarily about the development of consciousness, not the development
of an object. The object is just a catalyst.
–Hudson
9
So where does all of this leave us? It is my hope that my work offers viewers some of
what has been touched on here. But in closing I would like to add one more thing to consider.
That becoming more fully aware of our life and the choices we make is not only a way to process
trauma, but it is a way to consider what we allow into our lives. To consider how we choose to
live. To be mindful of the cost of our choices.
This may seem a small thing but it is important to me, I make my work in a way that
resists the incursion of the digital into my painting. I am not opposed to tools and if the digital is
a better tool then I will use that tool. But what seems to be happening is we are no longer able to
discern when something is better. Instead we use it because it is in the short term easier. What we
are losing in this trade is the time to develop the discernment needed to assess what makes
something better.
A growing reliance on the digital without discernment is concerning. Are we truly
making choices? Or are we instead abdicating choice for perceived ease. I am suspicious of the
ease with which we accept something as better. We have lost a great deal to ease. Like the
9
Hudson quote found in Two Coats of Paint, Uncategorized. QUOTE: Hudson on looking at art February 15, 2014.
19
unnamed narrator in Damage, are we unconsciously abdicating choice with a string of easy
decisions until we are also just absences in our own lives, no longer fully present (Hart).
I am not opposed to technology or convenience but I would like to understand what we
are sacrificing. And ask that we be more intentional, more conscious of how we are navigating
our increasingly digital world. If the industrial revolution and modernism separated us from a
direct interpersonal dependence on the landscape, then what would our participation in the digital
landscape shift? Is this world we are building a better world or a seemingly better one? It has
been said that we now live in a post natural selection world. A Post Darwinist construct where
natural selection has been replaced with human need (Purdy). Selection is predicated by what
resources we, humanity, deem as important. It is no longer predicated on a species' ability of
integration and adaptation to its natural surroundings for its own survival. We have supplanted
nature with human commodification (McKibben).
And now we are moments away from the formation of a non celluloid brain that will hold
human consciousness (Kirsch). But who decides whose consciousnesses’ are transferred? Who’s
consciousness is worthy. Is our history of Fascism not enough to give us great pause? What part
in this human implemented evolution do we have the wisdom to play? If the state of natural
landscape under our stewardship is any indicator I am highly suspect of our capability to make
these decisions.
Perhaps we are just carbon-based forms meant to interface with this real world and this
real world is after all only a virtual construct to match the limitations of our human perceptions.
Both waiting for the next human generated stage of evolution. But I am not sure that divorcing
ourselves from this real world, with all of its random magic, is worth trading up. Our lives are
being radically changed. What are the unforeseen consequences of lives lived where we are
20
content to replace the fluctuating light between day and night with the steady blue light of the
computer screen?
I paint in the manner that I do to remember what came before me. Not as a luddite but to
remind myself to act with humility, with an awareness that I do not have the discernment to
forfeit my life to the ease of the digital for the sake of ease alone.
I paint to remind myself what art can offer. I think Hudson was right, art is about the
development of consciousness and the painting is a catalyst. And perhaps the future of hybrid
humans is only a progression of consciousness, but given all of the trauma and destruction we
are capable of I am not sure we are the best stewards for the next step in human evolution. I trust
art as a keeper of human consciousness more than I trust human ambition.
I paint to try to engage in my work with the fullness of my own consciousness. So when I
leave my studio fully aware of the unlikeliness of my pursuits and look up at the vastness of the
darkening desert sky I am ok with that. After all my life is a small thing in the arch of cosmic
time, it is but a tiny witness to her ever changing beauty and mysteries. And I am more than ok
with that.
21
Images
Image 1.
Example of a Drawing Machine, Albrecht Dürer Woodcut 1895-1-22-730 (negative number 38408),
©The British Museum
Image 2.
Hoover Street, Los Angeles. Image from USC archives.
22
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
The American West continues to be a place of contradictions. Its landscape has been the facilitator of human myths, dreams, and reinventions. It is a geography that bridges gaps between numerous internal and external worlds.
In this thesis, Kim Sweet looks at the West through her personal lens. While focusing on the vulnerability and quiet strength of the landscape in the midst of natural chaos and human-imposed order, she simultaneously explores the same qualities among even more fragile and ephemeral human beings, who are constantly buffeted by human-made and natural trauma.
Through her painting and research, Sweet asks whether it’s possible to justify the inherent contradictions of reaching for the stars while accepting the existential realities of living an all-too-earthly life.
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Sweet, Kim
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Core Title
The small things in between
School
Roski School of Art and Design
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Master of Fine Arts
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Fine Arts
Degree Conferral Date
2023-05
Publication Date
04/03/2023
Defense Date
03/31/2023
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Tags
landscape painting
prolonged trauma
the grid
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