The Painter as alchemist: From colors to archetypes

 

The Alchemist 17th century Oil on Canvas by Mattheus van Hellemont

After pondering over the significance of what I do as a painter and the message my work carries with its narratives, it becomes interestingly notable the similarities between the alchemist and the painter. The alchemist obsessive pursuit of transforming lead into gold serves as a perfect metaphor for creative people living today in a consumerist society that have to come up with new ways of transforming all the rubbish into something beautiful and significant. In an age where we are constantly bombarded by mind numbing news and consumer culture propaganda, we are in need of artists that work as alchemists. These lotus like souls float over the muddy waters of our consumer driven society and their art blooms like a gleam of hope for a better future. The artist that becomes aware of the world around him/her can filter, distill and transform the experiences and information the keeps the masses asleep. Their art is like a golden bell that wakes up the dormant souls in this world. Art is indeed a very powerful tool. Just consider for a moment that about 10,000 years ago human civilizations on this planet developed agriculture. Long before this, about 40,000 years ago we started to paint in caves. That is how ancient and fundamentally important art is in our society.

 

Cro-Magnon artists painting Font-de-Gaume, France by Charles R. Knight

 

Imagine an art class where you would be required to paint with pure primary colors straight out of the tube without mixing. How would you create a landscape, a portrait or an abstract painting using only ultramarine blue, cadmium red or yellow? It can be done of course but once we create these primary color exercises we start to realize, how much more advantageous it is to be able to mix any of these colors and create a much more rich, and varied palette. After all, painting without the knowledge of mixing and expanding the chromatic spectrum is like learning just a few words in a new language. We expand our vocabulary and learn to pars and conjugate once we learn how colors interact and behave with each other. For a narrative painter, concepts, stories and archetypes are equally important as colors.

 

A star shapped color palette arrangement by Patrick McGrath Muñiz

 

It seems quite natural therefore to see the painter as an innate alchemist who creates work by association, destruction and construction.. This is someone who is constantly experimenting with different amalgamations of pigments and media in order to find the perfect recipe that will produce a gem, a work of art. Not only is the formal/material process important in order to achieve success, but the content (not just for a narrative painter) is just as important and becomes another layer added to the color palette. In the content palette one may find a limited number of archetypes. We may already be familiar with them but it is always good to refresh our memories be mindful of their existence. They come in many shapes and forms throughout time and different cultures. They are primary forces behind the gods, the saints, the heroes and villains we hear about in all world mythologies, religions and folklore. The different combinations of these archetypes produces a wide array of possible stories with specific ends and messages to be derived by the viewer.  

 

Study of archetypes derived from Roman Catholic Iconography by Patrick McGrath Muñiz

Going back to our art class, I have to ask myself when was the last time I learned how to compose a story with archetypes in a painting class? If mixing colors was seldom taught in both my undergrad and graduate painting curricula, I don't ever recall archetypes being mentioned as counterparts to color when it comes to conceptualization or storytelling. There can be many reasons for this huge gap in art academia but something remains crystal clear to me as a keep studying art on my own. The study of archetypes for an artist (even abstract) is as important as knowing your art history and as important as knowing how to mix the primary colors. As  alchemists, if we strive to create gold (art) out of the most basic materials, we should also be aware of how to construct our stories. No matter how abstract they may be, our creations will never escape or be independent of color, hidden archetypes and our own human history.
 

 

Studying archetypal themes in my journal.

In the following blog posts, I'll delve deeper into the understanding and exploration of these building blocks of narrative painting called archetypes. This will be part of the documentation for the development of my next project: A Tarot inspired by human history, social inequality and the environment.

Three new paintings in Antigua

 

"The Water Flask", "The Plate" and "The Exchange" (El Intercambio) are three new paintings I just sent over to La Antigua Galeria de Arte in Antigua Guatemala. For all three works I used friends that live in Guatemala as models for the characters. All three contain narratives that relate directly to the Neocolonial status of not just Guatemala and other Central American countries but of many more across the globe. The readings of Yuval Harari and Jared Diamond have been influential in my work. I find more and more clearly the historical connections and continuous line that bridges Imperialism from the ancient world to the European conquest of the Americas to the current global colonization by large transnational corporations. What drives this unity  for conquest and domination is a blind belief in the fiction of money and power. Today money seems to the universal religion that unites all in a common capitalist cause. When  animals are seen in merely  utilitarian terms, as objects and not as beings with rights, they become mass produced food and commodities. These in turn become processed objects valued in monetary terms. The same happens with many other precious natural resources from water to plants to the land. All becomes subject to the rules of the market. This belief in the supremacy of capital is ultimately contributing to the destruction of almost everything that lives on this planet, therefore leading to the suicide of our own species. These works reflect on our histories, inherited myths and current fictions.

 

 

The Plate 18" x 24" Oil on canvas by Patrick McGrath Muñiz.

Available at La Antigua Galeria de Arte.

 

A standing woman holds and shows us a plate that resembles an old Mayan plate. On a closer inspection we discover that the Mayan figures painted on the plate allude to a modern day fast food franchise.  It suggests socio-economic power hierarchies from the past to the present reflected in food production and consumption. Behind her we appreciate two painted figures from a mural. The Ancient Egyptian and Greek youths are accompanied by oxen and symbolize animal husbandry and agriculture, two important revolutions in the history of humanity that keep evolving to this day with the industrialization and mass production of GMO's across the globe. The haloed corn serpent around the woman's head, is Ouroboros, the serpent that eats its own tail, which also symbolizes the eternal cycles in nature of life and death. The imagery in the painting is meant to evoke food by utilizing symbols associated with it that at the same time control or influence the way we understand and consume them. The plate is old, the plate is broken and it is also empty, just as the whole idea behind the sanctity of food in an age of corporations.

 

 

El Intercambio  (The Exchange) 24" x 24" Oil on canvas by Patrick McGrath Muñiz.

Available at La Antigua Galeria de Arte.

 

In the painting El Intercambio (The Exchange) two men pose in front of a Central American landscape and meet at a table. The one on the left represents the indigenous cultures and their beliefs. The one to the right is inspired after Saint Isidore the laborer, who was aided by an angel who plowed the soil. This character represents the West and  holds a pomegranate seed on one hand while holding a coin on the other. The pomegranate symbolizes Pluto, the Classical god of the underworld, power and riches. An inscription on the coin reads: Monsanctus Dominus Global, in allusion  to a large transnational seed corporation's global dominion. The apparent transaction occurs between two different cultures and belief systems. One places its faith in the god of money while the other holds Mother Earth and the natural world as sacred. The inscription below reads: Fatali Pretium Fructuum (The predestined price of produce) We can see that the gold coins on the table are really chocolate candy gold coins, a commentary on the created fiction and value of money. From the military drone to the flying saucer in the sky, the scene is a reflection of past and present conquest, colonization with its shock doctrine and myths of progress and development. Who will benefit most in the end from this exchange?

 

 

The Water Flask 18" x 24" Oil on canvas by Patrick McGrath Muñiz.

Available at La Antigua Galeria de Arte.

 

A woman holds a green round flask on her hands with a yellow halo around her. The flask is inspired after a Menas flask, a particular kind of small ancient terracotta flask sold to early Coptic Christians as containers for holy water. In this case the iconography of St. Menas of Alexandria has been replaced by the Nestle Logo, one of the largest transnational food and water corporations that has been responsible for unethical exploitation, water extraction, pollution and other fraudulent activities in a number of countries from Ethiopia to Colombia. The illegal appropriation, branding and re-selling of water as a commodity is just the tip of the iceberg from  a deceitful corporation that  paints itself as a "Pure Life" nurturing Icon. In a painting as in our own lives ruled by corporations, appearances can often be deceiving.  This brings us to question: Who has the divine right to water? Who has the right to sell it and who can afford to buy it?

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Holy Gospel of Consumption

 

Mirabile Futurum 16" x 20" Oil on Canvas by Patrick McGrath Muñiz

 

With Climate change already upon us and becoming more real than ever with every passing year, we ought to ask ourselves how we got to the present state to begin with? What is the root cause of this already beyond un-debatable man made impact on climate and the environment? It would be quite easy to conclude that the rampant nature exploitation activities from our industrial society and over consumption of natural resources are behind it. We could fill pages exposing the failure of globalized capitalism which is driven by economic growth and it's unsustainable extraction practices. It would be after all quite apparent that oil companies reliant on fossil fuels that cause CO2 emissions, large trans-national corporations, government lack of regulations and big state polluters like China are responsible for much of our climate's present state and future.

 

 

Time magazine cover for Jan 2, 1989

The truth is we could trace the origins of these destructive systems  a little further back in time.  In 1989, Time magazine instead of going for the usual "Man of the Year" cover, used a photograph  by  artist Christo of a globe covered with plastic and tied up with twine. The cover read:  "Planet of the Year: Endangered Earth". As significant as this may seem at the time, the accompanying essay by Thomas Sancton was a powerful statement in itself worth quoting as it described the roots of the problem:

"In many pagan societies, the earth was seen as a mother, a fertile giver of life. Nature-the soil, forest, sea- was endowed with divinity, and mortals were subordinate to it. The Judeo-Christian tradition introduced a radically different concept. The earth was the creation of a monotheistic God, who, after shaping it, ordered its inhabitants in the words of Genesis: "be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth". The idea of dominion could be interpreted as an invitation to use nature as a convenience. Thus the spread of Christianity, which is generally considered to have paved the way for the development of technology, may at the same time have carried the seeds of the wanton exploitation of nature that has often accompanied technological progress".

 

Neo-Genesis 12" x 12" Ink on paper by Patrick McGrath Muñiz

 

 

This was certainly not a new idea at the time as it formed the basis of the growing counter culture ecological movement. But being included in such a widespread magazine read by millions was indeed significant and revealing. This anthropocentric anti-environmental world view and even demonization of nature is definitely not exclusive to the Judeo-Christian tradition but it undoubtedly influenced western thought from the  theologian  St. Augustine to the philosopher Francis Bacon.  Western capitalism was in turn inspired by the belief in a fruitful and multiplying human civilization with  its economic growth, prosperity and technological progress based on competition, a free market and its dominion,  manipulation and exploitation over Mother Nature.  With the fall of the Iron Curtain, the dissolution of the Soviet Union  and the increasing power of communications with the rise of the internet in the 1990's, Capitalism became a fast growing world phenomenon and to this day it defines much of our globalized cultural and social landscapes from New York to Beijing.

 

 

An industrial area, with a power plant, south of Yangzhou's downtown, China

 

 

Yuval Harari on his book Sapiens: a brief history of humanity argues that  modern day capitalism resembles more a religion rather than an economic theory. The collective fiction  of the supremacy of money is  one big cultural construct that sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. The utilitarian and extractionist  approach to nature from  free market fundamentalism is propagated through the mass media in order to indoctrinate the people to become passive consumers rather than active world citizens that may question these created fictions. 

Hercules and the Virtues 36" x 28" Oil and metal leaf on wood panel by Patrick McGrath Muñiz

Despite the best efforts of well intentioned people within the Church from LeonardoBoff to Pope Francis to revise the Christian doctrines in a new ecological light, these dogmas and inherited beliefs in a human superiority over animals, plants, other peoples  and other lands is hard to overlook.  From the idea of a "Promised Land" to the "Manifest Destiny", these conveniently designed myths have served  the interests of empires, monarchies, monotheistic  proselytizing religions and economic monopolies around the globe.   It is extremely important we know the root of a problem before we prepare to fix it, especially when we are dealing with our very own existence and future on this planet.

 

American Progress Oil painting by John Glast (Circa 1872)

 

Of course Christianity  or any other monotheist religions are not the primary cause of our current environmental crisis. We created a negative impact on the ecosystem long before any of these modern day religions showed up, from the hunter gatherer societies to the agricultural revolution and the rise of the first big cities. But by digging deep into the historical relation between religion, empire, money and the natural world  we can gain a much better understanding of our present day ecological downfall.  It is time we change not only our consumption habits but our core beliefs as well. While the unquestioned "sacrosanctity" of the ruling corpocracy and global financial institutions is kept in place by our unyielding monotheistic faith in the power of money over everything else we can only expect one big thing to change,  that is our planet and our very existence on it.

 

Novus Ordo Seclorum print by artist Carlos Barberena