3.
THE ARTIST – THE SPACE BETWEEN ANGELS AND DEMONS
“We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.”
Artists are at home at the edge. They inhabit the creative space of in between. This space appears to open after what has been described as the destruction of the ego.
Marshall Arisman, an American painter, illustrator, storyteller and educator, born in 1937, has been featured widely in the press from TIME magazine to Mother Jones. Permanent collections of his work are displayed in the Smithsonian and the Museum of American Art. One of his most famous images is the iconic cover of the novel American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, portraying the protagonist, Patrick Bateman, as part-man, part-devil.
Marshall confides that his creative process has stayed the same for nearly 50 years. He gets up in the morning, gets dressed and goes to his studio. “What takes me there is my ego. I am in front of a blank canvas, thinking ‘I’ll do the best painting I have ever done’. What I forget is that my ego can’t paint but it does get me to the studio! In front of the blank canvas my ego doesn’t know what to do, so I start painting.”
The process of creating a painting always starts with something, normally a photo. He puts it up and thinks “I’ll paint this frog.” In the middle of the process, though, if the frog looks like a pig, he lets it be that. He never knows where he is going. In fact, he thinks that his best paintings are those where he is trying to control things less.
“Twenty minutes later I realize my painting is not so good. I start to argue with myself: ‘this is not good’, ‘you should stop now and give up’, ‘you never could paint’.” This internal argument goes on for 20 minutes, sometimes for up to two hours, until he acknowledges “this is still terrible!”
Marshall explains that it is at this point that his ego starts to recede a little. “Somewhere in the middle of this destruction is the part of me that can paint and it energizes only when I’ve decided that what I’ve done from ego is worthless. There is a little space. It does not last long, 15 minutes perhaps, but it’s enough. I can only get to this space through the destruction of my ego.”
For Marshall what is created through this process does not come from him, but “through” him. “When people say to me ‘I love your paintings’, I reply ‘I wasn’t there’. Mark Rothko also alluded to the fact that he was a channel. Energy came through him. I cherish this space. I’m addicted to it. Now being 75 years old, my ego is not attached to painting, but to finding the space again. But never am I able to stay there.”
Letting go of the ego is a key part of the program Marshall teaches at the School for Visual Arts in New York. He first asks his students to stand up and tell their story, which must be true, with pictures. At the beginning they are extremely self-conscious, telling it in a way that is unnatural, feeling shy standing in front of the group. Then he gets them to retell the story for two to three weeks, culminating in retelling it with a dog-mask on. Eventually the students are able to let go of their ego and relive the moment as they tell the story. “They are closer to it,” he says. “At that point we get good stories.”
Marshall recalls his grandmother, who was a noted psychic and spiritualist. “She lived in a community of mediums and I spent much of my childhood surrounded by psychics. She said to me ‘You must learn in your life to stand in the space between angels and demons. Angels are playfully seductive and tempting, demons are interesting and dangerous’. In my study now I literally work in that middle space. I have paintings of angels on one side of the wall and demons on the other. I think this Not Knowing space is the ‘human’ space of being in between.”
