Watershed Catalogue Essay

Watershed is about time and mountains and rivers, and being human in the rhythmic landscape. It was made outdoors over the course of a year in Taos, New Mexico, along the banks of the Rio Grande and at the edge of its gorge, in a canyon descending from wilderness above Taos and in spring-fed fields at the foot of Taos Mountain.

Working earnestly throughout the events of this year [2021] felt important – to bring the news, worries, hopes, and disappointments as frequently as possible to the landscape so that it might help make sense of things. The effort proved worthwhile. It contextualized time’s passing and the many parallel experiences of shared events. It spoke to the fundamental unpredictability we live amidst always – even in something as personal as where a drop of water will run along the swells and crevasses of our own hands.

To work in the landscape is to choose to engage unpredictability and subject art making to forces beyond one’s control. In this, Nature is a collaborator. It sets the terms. I bring my attention and skillset. Nature adds material and subject matter: weather, form, life, light. Dirt. Bugs. Gyration and force; impetus that demands adaptation. It is unpredictable and leads to unpredictable outcomes. It is unceasingly fresh yet innately familiar: The forces acting upon my paintings are the same forces that have shaped the landscape and sustained our lives since the beginning. In them is something of ourselves; hopefully in the work will be something of them.

François Cheng writes in Empty and Full of the unique place landscape painting – “Mountain and Water” painting – occupied in historic Chinese culture: It was seen to be a reflection of our humanity, an external expression of the internal human experience. The landscape and landscape painting were not merely metaphor. To paint was to partake in the act of creation itself, to express the same essential, primordial ‘breath’ as that which creates the landscape and animates the ‘10,000 things,’ a Taoist term for phenomenal reality. It is an act of reciprocal becoming, a continuum of inner and outer, human and nature – much as mountains and waters mutually affect and become one another.

Today we know this, too, albeit through a different lens: to be human is to be literally part of the landscape in ways small and large. Each moment we correspond with it, ingest it, interlink with it, breathe out water vapor and carbon dioxide, feed plants that feed us; we give our bodies back to the land daily and ultimately return everything given to us by the landscape. We shape it, alter its dynamics, and partner in an infinitely complex dance of never-ending ecological cycles – cycles ongoing in watersheds globally and locally, defined by Mountains and animated in Rivers.

Mountains harvest water from the sky and hold it in their lakes and snowfields, and give it back to the land throughout the year. It courses down their slopes, recharges aquifers, feeds springs and fields, and collects into streams that collect into rivers that collect into the great oceans. All the while water is evaporating back into the sky, to then return to us as clouds raining and snowing themselves down to the Mountains.

Water is a mechanical force that shapes our world and animates all life; without water there is no life. It is the tool by which nature shaped the Rio Grande Gorge. It is the distributor of chance and possibility for plants and animals. It is the ever indeterminate determiner, always changing form, changing course, never traveling the same path twice; unceasingly moving. In being constant and ever-changing, in acting on the world and sustaining life by way of its action, water speaks of time and change, too. Water is the course of life, the cascading story, the flow of events. It is a source of so many metaphors, so much meaning and wisdom about how we might find our way, and about the eddies and flows of our lives’ unfolding.

Mountains are deities and teachers. Devotees circumambulate them in search of wisdom and hike their slopes in pursuit of purification and visions; seek ‘peak moments’ at their peaks. They’re the literal bedrock of our cities. They’re the coal in our power plants, the molybdenum in our phones, the pigments in my paints. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that they are the reason civilization in New Mexico is possible, as is the case in many other regions of the world. Without the action of mountains, rising into the sky, conjuring water from thin air, little would grow; green valleys would not be; rivers would not form. We would not be.

At the base of Taos Mountain, Carl Jung arrived at much the same conclusion. In his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he wrote:

I stood by the river and looked up at the [Taos] mountains…Suddenly a deep voice…spoke from behind me: ‘Do you not think that all life comes from the mountain?’ An elderly [Taos Pueblo man]…had asked me this heaven knows how far-reaching question. A glance at the river pouring down from the mountain showed me the outward image that had engendered this conclusion. Obviously all life came from the mountain, for where there is water, there is life.

The work in Watershed is therefore about humanity and life as much as it is about the landscape. It seemed appropriate to situate the exhibit between Taos Mountain and the Rio Grande, real world manifestations of archetypal figures so integral to Chinese landscape painting, the Tao Te Ching, and the I-Ching, and so prominent in this area’s ecological and cultural dynamics. As Zen master Dōgen once wrote, “When you find your place where you are, practice occurs.” And so I spent time within the watershed, the ‘body’ of my home, to pursue a deeper relationship with the Mountain and the River.

The 8’ x 23’ installation of seventy-two 14” x 11” paintings, 10,000 Mountains / Winter, is one expression of this pursuit. I spent twenty four days painting at base of Taos Mountain this past winter [2021] – from early January to the last hours before Spring equinox – starting sets of (usually) three to five paintings that were later completed in my studio. Each group is a story of a single day as it evolved, and every painting in the installation iterates around shared constants: the mountain, composition, format. The pieces are vignettes of time and change; they’re homages to a sacred mountain; they’re just colors and gestures; they’re weather reports of inner and outer realms.

Out in a whiteout or the freezing cold, or in the middle of the night, or on a squally day, one realizes a certain kind of humanness. Moving paint is difficult with stiff hands; it’s hard to see in the dark. The weather is too fast to keep up with. It’s not fun exactly; it’s definitely uncomfortable. But it’s also the priceless, vital, potent confirmation of being alive and bearing witness through the ups and down of one’s bodily experience, moods, and personal challenges: they are nature, too. They shape the mountain in the painting as the mountain shapes them. The mountain is never the same mountain, and we are never the same as we meet it day after day.

I can say with certainty that I’ve come to know this landscape better than I ever thought I would. And still, as I traced over the depths and heights of Taos Mountain while painting 10,000 Mountains / Winter, I found I also barely knew it at all. Ten years’ time is hardly enough to understand even its most basic form, let alone the myriad ways weather and light acts upon it, or the millennia of human habitation that preceded my painting it, or the epochs that preceded humanity. I’m nearer than I’ve ever been to this place and still a million miles away.

This realization underlines how understanding anything – knowing it truly and deeply – is likely something of a Sisyphean task. It’s as unending as the weather is changing. While finalizing Watershed, I came across an excerpt of the Breton fisherman’s prayer interpreted in a poem by Winfred Garrison:

O, God, thy sea is so great

and my boat is so small.

In so far as the landscape is us, and we are it, we are small boats in the vastest of oceans. In painting landscape for the last decade, I’ve had to acknowledge my work will never end. But in the impossibility of knowing the entirety of anything is also the hunger and joy of knowing it at all.

We live within the landscape such that often we almost forget it’s there – save for a spectacular sunset or foreboding storm. The grand and the dramatic capture our attention for good reason. Yet the story of us, of the landscape, is also a story of the daily grind and the small miracles; sometimes just showing up is all we can do, and is all we need to do, to discover the miraculous sprouting out of the mundane.

And so the structure of my practice has evolved over time from seeking out the grand view and stalking the dramatic, to just showing up day after day. It may be in a field down the road from my studio, or working along the same stream every few weeks when I go for a hike. The key is returning to a common subject or composition repeatedly. It’s mundane, it’s miraculous. In this repetition is a chance to take small steps towards greater knowing and, as a result, better painting. In this repetition is a surrender to just meeting Nature as it is, and as I am, on any given day amidst the bigger story of time and change.

On a snowy day in March [2021], while standing in the field beneath Taos Mountain, I was reminded of a poem Rumi wrote many years ago:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other"

doesn't make any sense.

There is no end and no beginning, then, to us, to water, or to the landscape. There is interaction and there is change; there is transformation and regeneration; there is giving and there is receiving. There are Mountains and Rivers becoming one another. And we are the Mountain and the River, and they are us.

Jivan Lee

Taos, New Mexico

June 2021