John Cage, New River Rocks and Washes, 1990, 101" x 384", watercolor on Rag paper

John Cage's feathers

 

At the beginning of the third day of the workshop, Cage said that he had a dream during the night about what the works in Series III (24 works, each 36 x 15 in.) should be like. Following this, he chose to paint around a single mandala-like stone to create a circular shape near the bottom of each work that recalls the enso paintings of Japanese Zenga (Zen calligraphic painting). Each of these works would have a wash covering all of the paper, with a final neutral wash added as well; colors were to be light and dry. Unlike traditional Zenga paintings, the stone’s position along the horizontal axis was determined by chance so that the circular shape would often be cropped by the paper on either right or left, but seldom centered.

In the initial stages of the workshop, Cage was still tentative enough to want to use feathers as a way to further avoid the implications of the painted mark associated with the brush. By the final works, Series IV (8 works, each 26 1/2 x 40 in.), he had gained enough confidence in the workshop procedures and his own sense of the studio practice that he decided to abandon feathers and to use brushes for the first time. He restricted the stones to the lower part of the paper representing the “golden rectangle,” which he also had done in his Ryoanji pencil drawings of 1983. The first work in the series had 195 “moves” (i.e., positions for stones to be painted around) and took a whole day to complete. The remaining seven works in the series had fewer moves and were all painted on Friday, the last day of the workshop.