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In these watercolors, Cage became more appreciative of how the expressive qualities of a painted mark could be tied to the intrinsic properties of the painting instrument and the rock (as opposed to being a gesture overtly expressive of a bodily motion). By being executed in a spirit of equanimity (constancy of pressure and motion) and by being shaped by the rock around which it is formed, the painted mark symbolizes a balanced relationship between the individual self and the material world outside without being re-presented (i.e., painted and modeled realistically). In leaving a sign of their presence on the paper, the rocks are the ostensible subject matter of the paintings and serve to maintain the connection between the material world of nature and the artist. At a deeper level, the randomly overlapping circular marks and broad washes become the very principle of creation and are essential to the process of making art because they establish a conceptual link to nature in the way they are cropped by chance procedures. In this, the painting process itself imitates nature’s processes of operation following the Indian aesthetic described by Coomaraswamy. The paintings, as visual images, develop almost the way elements develop in natural settings, the blooming of flowers in a field, the disposition of rocks in a stream bed, or variety of trees in a forest. As Kass has pointed out, Fluxus artist George Brecht, whom Cage knew in New York in the late 50s, related chance images made by artists to such “chance images” in nature in an attempt to place them in the same conceptual category.31 These ideas were at the heart of Cage’s efforts in the workshop.32 They have a basis in Dada thought, especially that of Arp who believed that there were “laws of chance,” and that these laws embrace all other laws and reveal a deeper sense of nature, beyond comprehension by purely rational means or in purely rational terms.
