Liberation from Fighting Series 01: Sketches

I began to move away from painting the Wisdom Kings as the work turned darker, toward students fighting violently. What I was teaching started to trouble me, and the doubt changed the direction of everything after it. Why are we motivating children to fight with hollow rewards? Was I teaching the right answers without understanding the problem? If every art has a medium through which its purpose is defined, what is the medium of martial arts?

This was free-form painting, acrylic on canvas and ink on newsprint, closer to early American abstraction than to anything I had done before. The violent energy of the marks is what produced the figures in them, rather than the other way round.

This period revealed the possibility that fighting wasn't a skill or behaviour but a medium from which they are created, and that the study of martial arts was an art, a theme, a radical alternative to understanding fighting in a way our eyes can't see, as though we are all born with the same learning obstacle. I saw martial arts like the black crayon that helps people understand something that at first appears distorted, a way of providing texture to the contours of a large feature of human nature we otherwise outlaw and yet celebrate almost everywhere.

I did not answer the question here. What these sketches record is the moment it became askable: the suspicion that the thing I had been teaching for a decade was the medium rather than the lesson.

Exhibited
Core. Liberation. Awakening, group exhibition with Artists in Momentum. Mississauga, Ontario, 31 May 2015.