Continuation Body #3 by Adam Grossi
continuation body
It is 2019 and Steven Colbert is interviewing Keanu Reeves for a live television audience. After listening to Keanu share about the grief that has shaped his life, Steven asks,
What do you think happens when we die, Keanu Reeves?
Keanu turns his head away from Steven, returning his spine to a neutral posture. He takes one deep breath through his mouth, blowing out the exhale like he’s blowing out a birthday cake. Then he turns back to Steven and answers,
I know that the ones who love us will miss us.
The clip went viral. Honest, precise, sweet, and humble: the quintessence of Keanu.
Colbert placed the question at the transition: when we die. Instead of taking the bait and speculating about the hotly contested realm of the dead, Reeves grounds the question where it emerged: here, with us. In the land of the living.
—»«—
The ones who love us
will miss us.
Divorced of the tone with which it was delivered, that sentence might connote sadness. But Keanu spoke it with the measured gentleness for which he is famous. His voice carries the tender residue of his suffering, and also the stability of his kindness. Perhaps this is why it elicited awe and then applause from the studio audience.
—»«—
I know that
the ones who love us
will miss us.
Keanu, the casual philosopher-king, sates us with a universal truth. They will miss us. And this missing is necessarily painful, but it is also much more than that. When our beloveds pass, missing them becomes a vocation.
The question that we each must answer in our own way: how shall we prepare, while we have the gift of breath, to give those who love us the sacred burden of longing for our absent bodies?
Continuation Body #1 by Adam Grossi
—»«—
what happens when
In yoga and ayurveda there is great reverence for the power of transition. When things are in flux, neither what they once were nor what they will become, a deep space of possibility opens. The transition itself becomes a portal to another place. We connect with the liminal, the space between, which is also the space beyond.
Generally the formless is much more subtle. It is the ambient context within which forms appear. States of transition invite the formless to the foreground. What happens when the background becomes the subject?
In a paradox of unspeakable beauty, the movement of transition reveals a stillness. We simply need to follow the flux into the space that contains it. The mind, inhabiting that space, finds release. Relief follows, and then, maybe, empowerment.
—»«—
what happens when
For years I relied on the sunrise over Lake Michigan as a miracle of spiritual medicine. The late spring and fall were the best times, when the hour of the rise was easier to meet and the angle of the sun and clarity of the air create the most profound and spectacular light shows.
There is also beautiful, serene bird activity at the break of day. Geese cutting across the sky in formation. Mallards in their sweet partnerships, nestled into themselves on the pier or floating in the current. The occasional shock of Cormorant darting through the air just above the water, wings beating with a precision intensity. Gull, Raven, Sparrow, Swift. An assembly of nations.
—»«—
Lake is the subtle elder. Fresh waters, ancient body. For the first hour of daylight, Sun heralds the day by speaking in its most rarefied and radiant hues. For a painter, this is a study in possibility.
Look at how indigo supports lavender. Watch salmon catch fire. Follow the discourse of gold and blue, from the weightless sky phrasings that birth chartreuse to the young sun’s math rock compositions on the chop of the water’s surface. If you have ever wondered what the word mesmerize really means, fix your gaze on the current during the transition from night Sky to young Sun.
—»«—
Most of my formal yoga study took place in Chicago. It was there, within the warm integrity of the teachings and the grounded community at Tejas Yoga that I met Tamra. We became friends through our shared study and joy in community.
Several of our mutual friends live with my paintings, and Tamra reserved a wall in her light-filled condo for me. “That’s my Adam wall,” she said. Blush.
—»«—
Tamra’s ceiling is very high, and at the base of her Adam Wall is her television, so I figured whatever I made should leave plenty of clearance so as not to compete with the large black rectangle. This left a very wide space to consider, and I thought about making a very wide painting. But doing so would rob the wall of its lightness. After some deliberation we decided that three 18” square paintings would both hold the space well while also not suffocating it.
In terms of direction, things were very open-ended. Tamra expressed her enjoyment of my prior work involving water and birds, and I’m perpetually interested in pursuing those subjects. We talked about the blues that pervade so many of my paintings, and how medicinal those tones are. She asked me to work with those.
Tamra gave me full license to let the visual language of the paintings grow in any direction, with one important boundary: no black birds. The bird shapes in my paintings are often silhouettes, so they end up in dark tones. They could be any type of birds, she explained. But this stretch of her life path requires the support of bright color.
After decades of loving partnership, Tamra lost her husband, Anthony, not so long ago. This home, with the designated Adam Wall, is also her first time cultivating a place in his absence. I had the pleasure of meeting Anthony several times, and the honor of being present, along with our shared yoga teachers, at his funeral.
When we meet at her home to contemplate the commission, we share notes about our partner griefs. I’d been trying to recuperate my own lightness after a devastating divorce, so we were both struggling to make sense of the absence of a body that, in a substantive way, is also part of our own.
Those who love us
will miss us.
—»«—
Elesa Commerse. photo by Adam Grossi
A deep bow to Elesa Commerse, among my most beloved teachers and spiritual supports. Before the pandemic I witnessed her presence literally unlock people. From Elesa I learned that love, fully embodied and truly expressed, can disarm long-constructed defenses within the span of a shared moment. It is extraordinary to witness someone rediscover their own radiance. A kind of sloughing off, a waking up. Something they’ve been withholding from themselves is suddenly received. You see the flood of nourishment. Such is the power of the heart. Don’t let anyone make you forget that.
There is a reason students grieve the end of a time spent with a real teacher. They grieve the loss of the presence of that love. What we practice, as good students, is carrying our teachers within us when we leave the room so that we may keep them with us when they leave their bodies.
—»«—
the ones who love us
will miss us
We miss them, but we find them yet. Elesa gave me this phrasing, by which I would come to name these paintings: continuation body.
The continuation body is the one that stays here as the physical body is missed by those who love it. Its heart is our imprint on those with whom we’ve shared the world.
Elesa, teaching through the screen during the pandemic, wove lessons on justice and moral courage through the fabric of love, which is, of course, the only thread capable of supporting them. She reminded us that, while we have a body, we are called by our love to use it, so that when we inevitably leave this realm, the love that guided our traverse will echo through the material.
After decades of intense practice, David Swenson said that the only universal definition of yoga he could share was that the yogi is the one who leaves a place in better shape than they found it. The continuation body is the great meditation on this entering and exiting.
The emergence of these paintings was a proper slog. I began them with delightfully soft touches that invoked current. These brush strokes landed just before I left Chicago to embark on an entirely new and personally epic transition: moving back into my childhood home with my mother.
The paintings called my attention amidst the turbulence of nesting anew in the place I’d first come into form. I had a lot of trouble making sense of the birds. I didn’t want to use silhouette shapes, which are just too common in visual culture at the moment. But elaborating on the representation of specific birds was feeling too concrete, too tied to identity. I spent many hours struggling with some gull-like bodies. I enjoyed this passage, but also felt it was too dense, too complicated, too unclear in the transmission.
The next attempt was a clean slate and an emphasis on the open space of the great lake at sunrise. I enjoyed the simplicity of these compositions, but couldn’t seem to seed the richness of the subject in them.
Returning to the space of doodles and quick sketches, I remembered how electric the simplest of marks can feel. They gesture at Bird without committing to species. They leave the portal open.
The bird’s body could be Anthony, or Lilac, or the continuation of that which the prior day gifts us when we emerge from the void of night. With the forms simplified, I was able to paint into the transition between bird, water, sky.
Finally, having located the foundation of the compositions in these simple, gestural bird forms, the paintings emerged.
Continuation Body, 2023
three panels, 18”x18” each
acrylic and flashe on wood panel
People often ask me how I know when a painting is finished. Sometimes they express grief that something beautiful was painted over in pursuit of something else. Among my learnings after some three decades of devotion to the creative discipline is the hermetic nature of the goal. What I’m looking for is hidden in a cave that first must be approached. There is impulse and there is inspiration, both of which propel the early stages of the work. But it is only when I am lost in transition — somewhere between the idea that got me started and the finished work — that the stillness of intention is able to speak clearly to me. I know I’m finished when that voice settles into a satisfied silence.
I hope you enjoyed learning about this painting and process. If you’re interested in commissioning a painting, please read this page. To follow along my creative process and support the work, I invite you to join me on Patreon. You can also receive periodic updates via my free newsletter.
Continuation Body by Adam Grossi is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
