the open field is a series of music paintings i have been working on since 1994. you can find the paintings and a little book i wrote on painting music at the above link
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my original idea for the open field series is that one works in the field for a span of years, leaves the tools in good condition, and, having advanced the field that much more, passes it on to the next generation… a wide open and fertile field.
the open field refers to the ancient system of farming, where a serf is allotted a strip of land large enough to plough in a day.. the traces of open fields still remain in Wales, Ireland, Britain and Germany as shells ringing round the manors turned into towns.*
i took the phrase from t.s. eliot's "Four Quartets," poem two, "East Coker"*
the sublime theme
Five hundred years ago the artist was in a great position. Employment by the church was steady and contracts were awarded competitively. Regardless of one's belief system (most of the great artists were pagan/agnostic/humanists) one was given a sublime theme to paint. Take Rosso Fiorentino's "Depostion," 
To my knowledge this is the only Renaissance painting that shows Christ in a beatific state of bliss... That is, the painter took the scripture quite literally and painted the crucified man entered into Paradise. The concept that a soul might enter Paradise is a sublime theme shared by many religions, but never in Christian art, save for Rosso's painting, do we find the smiling golden Christ. By the way, this painting has been called "the most disturbing painting to come out of the Renaissance"*.. go figure.
What happened to the sublime theme?
The late director Ingmar Bergman said art lost its sublime theme when painting stopped being worship. What theme replaced it? The cult of individualism which Bergman says turned artists into sheep bleating about their isolation.
Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which are unimportant in this connection, it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans; "eternal values," "immortality," and "masterpiece" were terms not applicable to his case. The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility.
Today the individual has become the highest form, and the greatest bane, of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny each other's existence. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal.
Ingmar Bergman, "Why I Make Movies," Horizon 3, no. 1 (September 1960
As art became more egocentric art became boring! What are the sublime themes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries? DeKooning's "Woman" series was sublime; Hirst's "Diamond Skull" is diabolic.
Music is the Sublime Theme
We know that art at its best can uplift the human spirit. Even Picasso's Guernica, comparable only to Goya's series "The Horrors of War," showing the violence of war seeks to produce peace... sounding the alarm, to expose forever and protest the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. This painting is a scream against wartime atrocities, especially war on civilians. It is a painting so powerful and disturbing that even in 2003 in advance of the Iraq War arguments made in the UN by Colin Powell the Bush administration had the tapestry of Guernica taken down.**
Painting Music
We know that music can and does uplift the human spirit. Can paintings take musical structure as its subject to create these forms... wrest them out of time and space and materiality... to depict these musical forms two dimensionally so that we might have the same experience of the spirit exalted? In a word, yes. Roy LeMaistre, "Beethoven in the Key of A," 1935
Paul Klee "Bach Fugue in Red," 1921
Kandinsky, "Composition 9," 1936
*
Maybe some of you remember the first time you saw this passage from Disney's "Fantasia" set to Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, music painting animation by Oskar Fischinger, 1940.
Walt Disney, Fantasia, 1940
Notes:
*"Italian painting : artists and their masterpieces throughout the ages;" Zuffi, Castria, Rodgers; Koneman, 1998; p.179; "This is without question one of the most disturbing pictures of the sixteenth century." One has to ask, "More disturbing than Bosch and Brueghel? Wow!"
** "What's behind the UN's cover-up of Picasso's Guernica? "; David Cohen, Slate, Thursday, Feb. 6, 2003
*
EAST COKER
I
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.
In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.
Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.