I found myself in the most beautiful storm, on top of a mountain with lighting crashing down around me. This was love.
Black Mountains seem to be everywhere and are part of many myths.
What intrigues me is that these mountains seem to act like markers, buoys, and beacons that hold a space pointing to and reflecting a larger universal field of ideas and experiences.
Black mountains appear in many parts of my life. There is the Black Mountain near Cairns my current location. Then there are the Black Mountains of my father’s country, Montenegro. There are the Black Mountains that hover over Vancouver that I painted when I studied Art at Emily Carr in the 90’s. Yvonne Audette, my life drawing teacher at the Victorian College of the Arts, hung out with the Abstract Expressionists, De Kooning who studied art at the famous Black Mountain Art School. Most recently I traveled to Bhutan where I visited Buddhist temples in the Black Mountains.
I want these abstract paintings to act like mandala that access the viewer’s own internal landscapes, to be portals to their own imagination. These paintings are about looking through the layers of colour, texture, and gesture, an abstract lens and uncovering an archaeology of language and imagery.
Each painting is a diamond, a rotated square that functions as a portrait and landscape. The diamond is framing two joined triangles that signify the mountain above and the mountain below, and the masculine and feminine elements that create the synergy of the universe of life and death. The gestures framed within each painting are tempest like, a tantrum invoking a vortex, a portal, a mandala in chaos that allows the viewer to observe their own internal dynamics.
The artist books invite the viewer to see hidden images within the paintings. In this sense they are 'seeing tools' that act as guides.
‘Wild Cries of Ha Ha’ is the title of the artist book. It is drawn from the last phrase in the paintings title, and from one of eight mythological cremation grounds in Tibetan Buddhism's mystical philosophy. ‘Wild Cries of Ha Ha’ is one of those grounds and at its centre is a Black Mountain. In Bhutan I visited a sky burial site called ‘Ha Ha’ on a mountain peak. Monks and mystics go to these places to meditate. I am intrigued by this practice of monks and mystics spending sustained amounts of time in these places meditating with spirits, ghosts and the dead. A part of my preparation for this project was visiting and drawing in local cemeteries. I used these places to develop gestural information for the paintings. I used the information from the cemetery to create the paintings by allowing the intuitive experience to arise and be channeled into the gestures.
The artist books were made after the paintings. With each finished painting on the wall I would quickly sketch images that I could see. The artist books are the receiving process of seeing. Revealed in the drawing process are the hidden, unseen, ghosts within each painting. In this process the paintings become portals for a transmission to the artist. The artist books show some totally unexpected results, such as Griffins-Gargoyle’s which are outside my normal everyday looking. The process connects with my investigations into shamanic-animistic rituals.
Mark Misic, 2018