Geomantic Art
Art should imitate nature not in its appearance but in its manner of operation. --John Cage
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Earlier this month I did a Zoom talk about my work for a group of my classmates from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. That day, we went on a virtual tour of the Hidden Pond and environs, via my website. Toward the end of our “walk,” someone noted that the connections between my paintings and the landscapes that inspire them, connections that are perfectly obvious to me, are not so obvious to the viewer.
A few days later, I posted an example of the inspiration and a resulting painting on Instagram. This produced more comments and likes than I’ve had on a post in a looong time. So I’m thinking I will expand on that here, and take as a case in point the group of paintings titled Erosions.
For that we need some backstory. So let’s return to 1994 or thereabouts. I had not then made the permanent move to Maine, but I was going back and forth from Kentucky once a year, always landing at Lincolnville Beach. Lincolnville Beach is a pocket beach on Route One, a crescent of sand bordered by expanses of riprap and smaller beach rocks. On the west end of the beach is the Lobster Pound and the ferry slip. On the eastern end, there are two restaurants and a breakwater. I had a camera, and I had rolls of slide film, and I looked at all those rocks at the beach and wanted to document them as memory jogs for when I was back at my studio in Louisville. But I was and still am a terrible photographer. All the slides I took turned out blue. I blamed the film, and twelve years passed before I found a way to deal with those two hundred slides of rocks.
By that time, 2006, I’d decided to move from Belfast, Maine to Lincolnville, and was in the process of building a house on land not far from the beach. It’s a wet piece of property, and the digging that went on for the foundation exposed a system of culverts running west to east across the property. As mounds of soil and culvert pieces were laid bare to the rain, I discovered that the heavy clay was full of rocks, large, small and in between. I saw patterns happening, and I remembered those slides.
Still in Belfast, I stapled sheets of watercolor paper onto boards, propped them on an easel, and projected the slides onto them. Now the blue color no longer mattered. In fact it was a plus, because I was freed from having to think about local color (the actual color of the rocks and the beach sand) and just focus on pattern. I drew the projected images—not all of the rocks, but some of them, the ones that for me seemed to pick out patterns across the paper.
Then I began to paint. Paint is pigment, some of it is earth, and what moves pigment is solvent. Since the paint was acrylic, the solvent was water. I chose a mix of Arches watercolor paper, both 140 lb. and 300 lb., as well as a handmade paper that a friend had given me. Each type was sturdy enough to absorb quantities of water without falling apart. I had a basic methodology for getting the paint onto the rock forms. I dampened the whole sheet, and painted the rocks selectively, causing the paint to bleed out beyond the margins of the pencilled forms. Acrylic paint dries quickly though, and so as I went along I sprayed the rocks with more water, to keep things moving.
The first paintings I did were heavily influenced by the color of the soil and rocks that had been my inspiration. They are dense with pigment.
As I continued the series, I looked for more variation in color and size of the rock forms, and as always happens with my groups or series of paintings, I began to simplify the imagery, lighten it up, leave more negative space. Was I getting tired of making so many rocks, or just asking myself “what if”? At the same time, I came across a reference to the Chinese painter known as One Corner Ma.
“Ma Yuan (Song dynasty, 1160-1225) came from a prominent painting family. His grandfather, father, uncles, and son all served in the imperial Painting Academy. Ma occasionally painted flowers, but his genius lay in landscape painting. . . . Eventually Ma Yuan developed a personal style, with marked decorative elements such as the pine. A characteristic feature of many paintings is the so-called 'one-corner' composition, in which the actual subjects of the painting are pushed to a corner or a side, leaving the other part of the painting more or less empty.”
So “what if” became my rationale for making the final paintings in the group, with rock forms in only one corner of the sheet, and minimal color.
I have always been drawn to Chinese landscapes, and to various forms of divination and semiotics. One of those forms, geomancy, is the art of divination from stones or handfuls of earth thrown onto the ground.
“Among the Chinese, in particular, this practice of geomancy is rooted in traditional philosophic conceptions of the relationship that exists between human beings and the vital forces of their environment and the need to achieve a harmonious balance between the two to ensure well-being.”
Was I in some way, unbeknownst to me, seeking harmony with this new place where I had chosen to live? I was not familiar with geomancy at the time, only learning about it later when the Erosions were part of my exhibition at Coleman Burke Gallery (New York) curated by Mark Wethli. In the catalog essay, he wrote
“The convergence of geological imagery with an implied system of notation connects Zopp’s work in subtle ways to a range of metaphysical approaches to the land, from geomancy to Shintoism to divination, which—each in its own way—regards the landscape and the natural world (including human kind) as sacred, interconnected, and capable of being instinctively deciphered and understood, the better to align human needs with both natural and metaphysical principles.”
Mark Wethli’s “Erosions, Geologics & Terrains: the Geomantic Art of Dudley Zopp,” catalogue essay was published on the occasion of the exhibition Erosions at Coleman Burke Gallery, New York, 2011. I remain grateful to Mark for the invitation to exhibit and his deeply insightful essay .
Learn more about Ma Yuan at the China Online Museum website.
The source of the geomancy quote is here.
Most of the Erosions paintings are on Arches paper, and all are 30 x 22 inches. I have a limited number still available, so whether you find yourself in Maine for a visit or live here year-round, you can see them in person at my studio. Let me know if you’d like to be on the mailing list for summer studio events - I will probably not be promoting those dates here.
Thank you for reading, and don’t forget to subscribe to The Hidden Pond for the weekly newsletter. The plants, animals and I are most grateful.
Love your work with beach rocks. They should float as they are depicted, but instead sit firmly where they are. Love the freedom allowed to the medium, to do what liquid does. Atmospheric, fugitive, fragile, elemental.
Thanks for sharing beach stones from the Trap. It is one of my favorite places.
The show at Coleman Burke was my first encounter with your work. I still remember the pure delight I felt seeing the Erosions. This is a wonderful essay on their genesis.