It Loves To Happen

In botany, dehiscence is the splitting open of a fruit or a seedpod, pushing out along built-in lines of weakness. A plum bursts open with sweetness because of ripeness; a seedpod surrenders its seeds not from force but because it is ready to do so. In medicine, dehiscence is the swelling and bursting of a wound before the onset of sepsis. Our bodies’ wounds are swollen openings, like those emergent fruits and buds, and they too have built-in lines of weakness. 

Both uses of the word dehiscence speak to a threshold where “closed” becomes unsustainable—a white-knuckled fist hurts, and it is a relief when it releases. This is a truth within our bodies, for plants, and in art studios. 

Dehiscence is immediate. Dehiscence is inevitable. Dehiscence is ongoing. Dehiscence has its own logic. Dehiscence loves to happen.

In the artist’s studio, success is not attained but disclosed. What dehiscence discloses can be a particular solution to resistance in painting, or it can reveal an unexpected overarching theme across paintings. Like a bud or a wound, inspiration bursts from artists’ swollen seams, regardless of the artist’s intent or resistances.

Each dehiscent disclosure is an instance of that which “loves to happen,” my artistic invocation. Something emerges through a collapse. It is interior; it is also universal. You can feel it, a sudden quickening and fullness inside subjective experience. When something solid and fixed becomes dynamic, it is always a surprise. 

The presence of UFOs in my seascape paintings appeared in a somehow gradual, sudden, and repeated entheos: God in me, God moving in me. The inherent mystery of the UFOs’ presence transforms the mundane beach and surf into a statement about more-than-human inspiration. Halos of light and dim grey ovals made their way into my paintings—dehiscent disclosure exploding from nowhere, from something larger than myself.

One of the rules in making art is to honor inspiration when it comes, especially when it repeats. If artists self-censor or refuse dehiscent inspiration on moral or aesthetic grounds, they risk being closed and inhibited at the very moments opening is required. It is pure folly to ignore or to decorate or to improve dehiscent urges that never justify themselves and often contradict prior intentions. The urges are meant to be trusted. 

My so-called fire paintings are my most artistically and commercially successful painting series. I resisted these dehiscent fires for a year. I clenched and closed as fires continued to emerge, bursting into my paintings. I thought I was endorsing catastrophe. Revisiting historic assumptions about landscape painting and confronting the thorny aesthetic problem that forest fires are beautiful, I realized that depicting destructive forces registers the instability inherent in inspiration and life itself. 

Dehiscence would not be ignored. Landscapes ablaze were an urgent demand that I needed to trust. Instability and destruction cannot be ignored—they are an everyday reality, becoming increasingly striking and common. Catastrophic imagery is part of a larger unfolding that does not resolve into harmony but constantly moves through tension, excess, and release.

Dehiscence opens along lines of weakness where form yields to what presses through it, like the UFOs or the fires pressed into my landscape painting. In the studio and in art generally, an image arrives unbidden and unwelcome, yet freighted with its own authority that requires consent and disciplined attention to experience, explore, and express what urges and insists. 

To create a painting is to allow an opening to occur, even when it disturbs, or bursts open the very form from which it emerges. Seed pods, ripened fruit, and human beings open because they must. It is not failure but emergence, and emergence is something that loves to happen.