http://bit.ly/9kQvkY or S.L.A.M. emag http://artslammagazine.com/
Greg Patch: You’re right. My work is influenced by Eastern Philosophy. The deeper context is I was raised, educated and have always lived in the US. My first semester at art school was School of Visual Arts in NYC. I was painting large canvas of semi realistic paper bags and the old dial black telephones. It was a short semester. That was the late 60’s; happenings, dropping out and turning on was the path I followed for the next 6 mos. in an illegal living communal warehouse on Greenwich St. SoHo didn’t exist then. The WTC was just being built. The next chapter of my happening lasted 5 – 6 yrs traveling the US. Working, as a result of Nixon’s first draft lottery, resisting the draft to become labeled as un-trainable by the U.S. Army, as a manager at an organic juicery/food center in Tucson, AZ, a cowboy in Steamboat Springs, CO, a house painter, warehouser, office clerk, janitor, and a fine woodworker, etc. I returned to art school in the mid 70’s in Utica, NY. That was the MWP School of Art. Its’ short lived experimental curriculum was based on the Chicago Bauhaus and the Black Mountain School of the 30’s and 40’s. I finished my BFA/Painting at SUNY/New Paltz in 1980. The most repeated criticism I received at New Paltz was I focused on too many styles and influences. For the faculty that was a negative, I didn’t see it that way. lol I had the good fortune to apprentice with corten steel sculptor Willard Boepple at the Utica Boat Works and Bob Schuler in High Falls, NY on his Tethys Project. A short enroll with grad school ended with “why spend money that I don’t have access to on an environment I don’t want to be in”. I’ve worked/studied Traditional Medical Herbalism, Humanistic Astrology and co-operative living for 30 years. I was gifted with two co-created daughters at home, grown women now, a 1 year old home birth grandson and a great friend that I helped her Mom raise from 13 years old.
Greg Patch: Yes it is. Embarking, and along the way to that recognition to enjoy the color/form/line/texture/surface and the vibrations received by our senses. It’s the journey, not a destination necessarily. I see everything as interrelated and that interrelation is what feeds me in waves like breakfast, lunch and dinner being seen as the rhythm, or structure, with liveliness in between. If there is one message it is all messages. What is within is without/what is without is within, the microcosm is the macrocosm / the macrocosm is the microcosm, the infinite negative is the infinite positive / the infinite positive is the infinite negative, darkness is lightness / lightness is darkness. When I can accept these realizations a balance, calmness, or nurturing occurs for me. By caretaking the wholey vessel of self/earth/universe we caretake all that is. You are one. We are one. Us is them. They are us. It is Western. it is Eastern. It is one. It’s a celebration.
Infinity is a pattern in your work. Not necessarily the symbol, but as maybe a current or energy and even in how manifests in what seems to be every day sorts of events, like your sports/basketball drawings. Would you speak to us about this?
Greg Patch: When I’m thinking consciously it could be design dialogue, or, “orange/blue feels good”, “where is that going!” or, “what’s for lunch?” I enjoy allowing the unconscious, or the collective unconscious, or dynamic self, or being in the now or whatever to speak. Later I/viewer may note a bird, or an African woman running along a path, trees and mountains will become waves or letters/symbols may emerge. The meaning may be it’s an African woman running or is it a release of a cellular memory. Where did our cultural symbols come from, where are they going? We can pull a stone from a stream and the letters HU are in the stone. No one wrote or etched it. It’s there, formed when the stone was liquid. Some call it a synchronistic experience. I look at as being aware of what is a great truth in our universe. It occurs constantly. We as humans have borrowed and reflect our symbols from the nature we live in, stones, clouds, the patterns of a flower or the surface of the seas and oceans. They are from our ancient mythologies, our personal life memories, our DNA, the Earth’s memory. We are nature-nature is us-we are nature-…, spiraling and stringing along as one. Infinity is fascinating! Infinity exists in and beyond the micro and the macro, at the point where yin and yang merge. That is a huge play/workground! It was amazing for me when I real eyesed what the basketball drawings were showing me. Try to envision all of our activities from that perspective! Why and what patterns do birds make when they migrate. An amusing curiosity for me for the past several years is the word nomad. We tend to take things, nature, words and symbols for granted. Where do they come from, how did/do they derive, who are we, where are we/they going? For me the answer to the question “how many dimensions are there?” is “a one that includes all.”
Greg Patch: Kratophany describes a sacred response to an occurrence, a place, or with self. A word describing the experience that is beyond words. The body/mind hums in response to the experience. For me everything that is can be a kratophany if we allow ourselves to be there. I’m not a religious person, per se, but attempt to accept and act on my being a sacred being. Even as my attempts sometimes prevent the experience. lol I try to be amused by the situation to ease my frustration with the human experience of it.
S.L.A.M.: There is an uncompromising value of yours when it comes to the products you use to generating your work. You use colorfast beeswax colors, Khadi paper, Lokta, and the like. Would you share with SLAM readers why this is important to the work, to you personally, and for other artists?
Greg Patch: I can’t speak for other artists, that’s their reality. I’m learning to be uncompromising within to assure I enjoy an aware quality in relationship with other. I was told, and heeded, in the early 80’s that my poor health condition was a result of the materials in my personal environment. Our environment is a mess whether we accept the idea of climate change or not. My early life was in a small college town in Maine. When I wasn’t in school or playing sports I was in the woods, in a lake, pond or stream, or sitting in a field eating wild strawberries. Water was clear without being treated to be and it was alive with whole nourishment. When we align to that process instead of making it happen then the process occurs and we find ourselves there. It is appearing as a species we have gone beyond our means environmentally, physically, economically, etc. We assumed the possibility our means would expand with our theories. We have bodies that don’t exist on theories of economics, religions, philosophies, etc. alone.
My latest works, the Webh/Ground series is my exploring the existence of a pattern and structure that we live within. Webh is the Proto Indo-European root word for web, weave and wave. We could call that structure what is that makes all things one. When that structure breaks destruction occurs. It doesn’t take a scientist to figure out our need to restructure. Physical, mental and spiritual infrastructures need to be mended as we realize our world as globally one. The medium I work is fragile. It challenges my and viewers concepts of permanence, value and loss. Realizing, accepting and acting upon that is essential to what I am portraying. The challenge for me/us is to reassure the fear held by self/others of that experience. That the we are the them, the they are the us can be a kratography we are experiencing. There’s an initial reaction to imbalance. It can be fear, freezing or retreating back to the old way, that on the way to the imbalance created the problem we face. That kind of reaction is atypically deadly. Healing imbalances show us stages of evolving toward balance/harmony. First comes recognizing and accepting, then understanding, then resolving. Brain scientists are publishing studies now that show lifestyle is an addictive behavior. We all have addictions. It’s sensible to me to imbibe in healing addictions. Its hard work and sometimes hopeless feeling. However, its apocalyptic and irresponsible to not prepare and support life for future generations. I’d like to practice at a brighter, more optimistic vision for them.
Greg Patch: Lol, yeah, the old hot potato game combined with “should of”. That sounds to me like a treacherous slope downward, or sideways! I quoted that phrase because I feel that way. It doesn’t make sense to me to continue using the toxic materials that helped create the problem. We know that arsenic, lead, cadmium, chromium, preservatives, fungicides, PCBs, petroleum products, acrylics, plastics, etc. kill living organisms, like humans. Why perpetuate the problem by masking them with beautiful artwork in the name of environmental awareness?
Greg Patch: Look for the completed WebhGrund 9 on my blog later in the week.
Continue in my learning and sharing the art of visual arts and healing. Am in the process of purchasing non toxic dry pigments, local beeswax and exploring the multi-dimensional. And continue doing healing work in progress. It’ll be transitional, isn’t it always!, so I’ll leave you with no major predictions.
S.L.A.M.: Where can readers go to find out more about you and your work?
www.greenartstudio.com
S.L.A.M. F.A.D. #98 Greg Patch – Celebrating Kratophany
S.L.A.M.: Greg, your work upon first viewing seems influenced by Eastern Philosophy. And yet when the viewer spends time with a piece or pieces, there is a much deeper process at work here. Would you share with SLAM viewers a little bit about your influences, background?
Greg Patch: You’re right. My work is influenced by Eastern Philosophy. The deeper context is I was raised, educated and have always lived in the US. My first semester at art school was School of Visual Arts in NYC. I was painting large canvas of semi realistic paper bags and the old dial black telephones. It was a short semester. That was the late 60’s; happenings, dropping out and turning on was the path I followed for the next 6 mos. in an illegal living communal warehouse on Greenwich St. SoHo didn’t exist then. The WTC was just being built. The next chapter of my happening lasted 5 – 6 yrs traveling the US. Working, as a result of Nixon’s first draft lottery, resisting the draft to become labeled as un-trainable by the U.S. Army, as a manager at an organic juicery/food center in Tucson, AZ, a cowboy in Steamboat Springs, CO, a house painter, warehouser, office clerk, janitor, and a fine woodworker, etc. I returned to art school in the mid 70’s in Utica, NY. That was the MWP School of Art. Its’ short lived experimental curriculum was based on the Chicago Bauhaus and the Black Mountain School of the 30’s and 40’s. I finished my BFA/Painting at SUNY/New Paltz in 1980. The most repeated criticism I received at New Paltz was I focused on too many styles and influences. For the faculty that was a negative, I didn’t see it that way. lol I had the good fortune to apprentice with corten steel sculptor Willard Boepple at the Utica Boat Works and Bob Schuler in High Falls, NY on his Tethys Project. A short enroll with grad school ended with “why spend money that I don’t have access to on an environment I don’t want to be in”. I’ve worked/studied Traditional Medical Herbalism, Humanistic Astrology and co-operative living for 30 years. I was gifted with two co-created daughters at home, grown women now, a 1 year old home birth grandson and a great friend that I helped her Mom raise from 13 years old.
S.L.A.M.: In reading about your (multiple) Chakra series there is a focus on the space between the various Chakras themselves. A place where the energy merges, or exchanges in or as waves. There is a Chinese term and pictogram, “hsiang sheng.” It’s a term reflecting the relationship between yin and yang, the mutual arising or inseparability. (It should be stated with respect to the idea that these are principles and not necessarily men or women.)
Relationship and resonance are two words that come to mind here. Not just our relationships with each other but within ourselves individually as well as upon the earth or within nature at large and individually. Is this something you would like your audience to take away from your work?
Greg Patch: Yes it is. Embarking, and along the way to that recognition to enjoy the color/form/line/texture/surface and the vibrations received by our senses. It’s the journey, not a destination necessarily. I see everything as interrelated and that interrelation is what feeds me in waves like breakfast, lunch and dinner being seen as the rhythm, or structure, with liveliness in between. If there is one message it is all messages. What is within is without/what is without is within, the microcosm is the macrocosm / the macrocosm is the microcosm, the infinite negative is the infinite positive / the infinite positive is the infinite negative, darkness is lightness / lightness is darkness. When I can accept these realizations a balance, calmness, or nurturing occurs for me. By caretaking the wholey vessel of self/earth/universe we caretake all that is. You are one. We are one. Us is them. They are us. It is Western. it is Eastern. It is one. It’s a celebration.
S.L.A.M.: You’ve stated that “there is a quantum moment within a process when these merged perspectives (principles?) bring forth the world in its totality.” But this isn’t merely about what we see, is it? It’s also about your individual process as well, is it not? One is prompted to ask, where does Greg go when he’s in process?
Infinity is a pattern in your work. Not necessarily the symbol, but as maybe a current or energy and even in how manifests in what seems to be every day sorts of events, like your sports/basketball drawings. Would you speak to us about this?
Greg Patch: When I’m thinking consciously it could be design dialogue, or, “orange/blue feels good”, “where is that going!” or, “what’s for lunch?” I enjoy allowing the unconscious, or the collective unconscious, or dynamic self, or being in the now or whatever to speak. Later I/viewer may note a bird, or an African woman running along a path, trees and mountains will become waves or letters/symbols may emerge. The meaning may be it’s an African woman running or is it a release of a cellular memory. Where did our cultural symbols come from, where are they going? We can pull a stone from a stream and the letters HU are in the stone. No one wrote or etched it. It’s there, formed when the stone was liquid. Some call it a synchronistic experience. I look at as being aware of what is a great truth in our universe. It occurs constantly. We as humans have borrowed and reflect our symbols from the nature we live in, stones, clouds, the patterns of a flower or the surface of the seas and oceans. They are from our ancient mythologies, our personal life memories, our DNA, the Earth’s memory. We are nature-nature is us-we are nature-…, spiraling and stringing along as one. Infinity is fascinating! Infinity exists in and beyond the micro and the macro, at the point where yin and yang merge. That is a huge play/workground! It was amazing for me when I real eyesed what the basketball drawings were showing me. Try to envision all of our activities from that perspective! Why and what patterns do birds make when they migrate. An amusing curiosity for me for the past several years is the word nomad. We tend to take things, nature, words and symbols for granted. Where do they come from, how did/do they derive, who are we, where are we/they going? For me the answer to the question “how many dimensions are there?” is “a one that includes all.”
S.L.A.M.: There is a great word that you used on your blog, kratophany. It is the best word to describe your work and your words, your thoughts as reflected on the blog. You are perhaps a cartographer of kratophany, to wax a philosophical pun. Do you see us as a society that has lost the ability to recognize this kratophany in our world, our way of life? Are there any solutions to this state of being?
Greg Patch: Kratophany describes a sacred response to an occurrence, a place, or with self. A word describing the experience that is beyond words. The body/mind hums in response to the experience. For me everything that is can be a kratophany if we allow ourselves to be there. I’m not a religious person, per se, but attempt to accept and act on my being a sacred being. Even as my attempts sometimes prevent the experience. lol I try to be amused by the situation to ease my frustration with the human experience of it.
S.L.A.M.: There is an uncompromising value of yours when it comes to the products you use to generating your work. You use colorfast beeswax colors, Khadi paper, Lokta, and the like. Would you share with SLAM readers why this is important to the work, to you personally, and for other artists?
Greg Patch: I can’t speak for other artists, that’s their reality. I’m learning to be uncompromising within to assure I enjoy an aware quality in relationship with other. I was told, and heeded, in the early 80’s that my poor health condition was a result of the materials in my personal environment. Our environment is a mess whether we accept the idea of climate change or not. My early life was in a small college town in Maine. When I wasn’t in school or playing sports I was in the woods, in a lake, pond or stream, or sitting in a field eating wild strawberries. Water was clear without being treated to be and it was alive with whole nourishment. When we align to that process instead of making it happen then the process occurs and we find ourselves there. It is appearing as a species we have gone beyond our means environmentally, physically, economically, etc. We assumed the possibility our means would expand with our theories. We have bodies that don’t exist on theories of economics, religions, philosophies, etc. alone.
My latest works, the Webh/Ground series is my exploring the existence of a pattern and structure that we live within. Webh is the Proto Indo-European root word for web, weave and wave. We could call that structure what is that makes all things one. When that structure breaks destruction occurs. It doesn’t take a scientist to figure out our need to restructure. Physical, mental and spiritual infrastructures need to be mended as we realize our world as globally one. The medium I work is fragile. It challenges my and viewers concepts of permanence, value and loss. Realizing, accepting and acting upon that is essential to what I am portraying. The challenge for me/us is to reassure the fear held by self/others of that experience. That the we are the them, the they are the us can be a kratography we are experiencing. There’s an initial reaction to imbalance. It can be fear, freezing or retreating back to the old way, that on the way to the imbalance created the problem we face. That kind of reaction is atypically deadly. Healing imbalances show us stages of evolving toward balance/harmony. First comes recognizing and accepting, then understanding, then resolving. Brain scientists are publishing studies now that show lifestyle is an addictive behavior. We all have addictions. It’s sensible to me to imbibe in healing addictions. Its hard work and sometimes hopeless feeling. However, its apocalyptic and irresponsible to not prepare and support life for future generations. I’d like to practice at a brighter, more optimistic vision for them.
S.L.A.M.: You’ve stated on your blog that “we shouldn’t be… asking artists to make art about climate.” This is an interesting stance to take. Especially since many people are reacting about the environment in this exact manner– “There’s another disaster! Quick! React! Make a painting!” –rather than stepping back and looking deeper, maybe toward causation and participation in these exact things. Would you share with us your take on this?
Greg Patch: Lol, yeah, the old hot potato game combined with “should of”. That sounds to me like a treacherous slope downward, or sideways! I quoted that phrase because I feel that way. It doesn’t make sense to me to continue using the toxic materials that helped create the problem. We know that arsenic, lead, cadmium, chromium, preservatives, fungicides, PCBs, petroleum products, acrylics, plastics, etc. kill living organisms, like humans. Why perpetuate the problem by masking them with beautiful artwork in the name of environmental awareness?
S.L.A.M.: What can SLAM readers look forward to from you?
Greg Patch: Look for the completed WebhGrund 9 on my blog later in the week.
Continue in my learning and sharing the art of visual arts and healing. Am in the process of purchasing non toxic dry pigments, local beeswax and exploring the multi-dimensional. And continue doing healing work in progress. It’ll be transitional, isn’t it always!, so I’ll leave you with no major predictions.
S.L.A.M.: Where can readers go to find out more about you and your work?
www.greenartstudio.com
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