Amazing SMRN Meeting of July 30, 2026
On July 30, 2026, SMRN held another engaging meeting with a wonderful group of members, including Melika Hashemi, Mena El Shazly, Niusha Hatefinia, Steven Baris, Mihai Băcăran, Lynn M. Kirby, and Laura Marks.
The meeting began with Dr. Steven Baris, who shared his recent paintings and discussed what he calls diagrammatic thinking. He distinguished this from conventional diagrams, which are usually finished objects intended to communicate information. For Steven, diagrammatic thinking is instead a process: he thinks through geometric forms such as lines, circles, and grids as a painting develops. He also discussed his interest in geometric traditions beyond Western abstraction, including Australian Aboriginal work and Marshall Islands navigation charts.
Steven showed several works and process videos, explaining how his paintings develop improvisationally through layering, adding and removing paint, and responding to forms that emerge along the way. This led to a lively discussion about process and materiality, particularly the difference between painting and time-based media. While video can directly reveal movement and duration, Steven emphasized the physicality of painting and the way the process of making remains embedded in its layers and surface.
In the second half of the meeting, our discussion turned to spirituality in artistic and scholarly practice. Laura invited members to reflect on how spiritual or religious commitments inform their work and how comfortable they feel acknowledging them within academic and artistic contexts. Members discussed meditation, repetition, concentration, mysticism, and uncertainty as different ways spirituality may enter creative practice, even when a work is not explicitly described as spiritual.
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