making images

Then it dawned on me. Part of the reason that I'm free to do, and not doing, is because the whole 'being a painter' thing doesn't work any better now than it did then. The whole idea of 'making art' is oppressive, for me. It oppresses almost like parental or educational expectations; an externally-driven set of judgements, based on history, and fashion...

When I started painting again two years ago I wasn't thinking of 'painting'. I just started making images. Cheat images, really, images that used scans, and computer enhancement. Not clever, serious art at all.

And that's what I want to do. Make images. Trivial, frivolous images. Images that come out how they want to come out, images that somehow manage to break free of that art tutor who is STILL in my head, saying, 'don't be tight, don't be graphicky'.  Why can't I be 'graphicky' if I want to? What's with all the judgements and rules?

This is my trivial begonia. Glowing at me from a pot in a pub in the middle of a hilly Scottish wilderness. Not serious, not art. Just me in a pub, watching the light...

blocking, freeing, working...

I'm still thinking about Jim's question about what's better - a considered response, or one from the gut. That's one that needs to percolate for a while...

Meanwhile, I was struck by something Kathleen said on her FB site, about avoiding the creative aspects of our selves by 'getting on' and being busy. This interested me because this morning the following thought wandered into my mind (curiously, or not, a little after a dream about someone in my past making me eat the brightly coloured sweater a friend gave me when I was at art college - mmmm....). The thought was: 'I became an academic so that I could go on avoiding trying to work out how to be a painter'.

Here I am. I've resigned from my post. I've hung up my thinkpic jobs for the summer. I'm well. And, for some reason or other, I'm afraid. Not doing it. Wandering about, doing all sorts of things. Except drawing, or painting.

Someone told me yesterday about a comment on the radio in relation to creativity - that you have to work hard to be creative. That creativity isn't this thing that (in many people's imagination) 'just happens'. You know, that fantasy about the muse, that idea that people who think they aren't creative, but of course are, often seem to have about creative people 'just doing it'. I'm not creative, they say, I can't just create stuff, like X can.

But creative people don't just create stuff either. They work. And, also, they know how to take stuff and prism it. In our last Artist's Way group, someone commented on what a wonderful sense of colour a member of the group had.  How do you do it, we said? How do you know how to put these exquisite colours together? She looked amazed. I just look outside, she said, at the garden....

objecting to abstract

It's not that I didn't know that it was simply a matter of shapes and patterns,

before that moment two years go. But somehow the knowing changed.

A lot of people might look at these two paintings and try to decide which one was better than the other. A painter might feel immediately inadequate in front of Cezanne's wonderful appleyness, fearing that he or she could never 'capture' real forms in this way. But it seems to me now that it's nothing to do, really, with the capturing of forms. Both paintings are just paint. Paint which either makes you feel something, or it doesn't. You could, in theory, be drawn in to the one on the left, despite its lack of cleverness or depth, because it evokes something for you - knowing it or not, you might suddenly feel a Sri Lankan forest in monsoon rain; the corner of a dream; a sense of possibility. The one on the right might, on the other hand, just make you think of old geezers poncing around in smocks. Either way, they're both just paint.

Not that paint that makes you feel is very popular these days. I was thinking about what Kathleen said about the body, and it suddenly occured to me that a conceptual approach to making images stays up there in the head. An aesthetic or moody response is, on the other hand, an issue for the gut.... Now don't anyone start in on the problems of simplistic binaries. I know! But I'd also say that Derrida never said we weren't allowed them, only that we have to look carefully at the work they're doing. And for me right now, simplistic ol' head/body is doing some powerful work....

accidental bodies

I love Jim's story about Kandinsky discovering the beauty of his own painting by not recognising it. For a long time, I felt that I didn't really understand what (contemporary) abstract painters were doing. When I was at St Martins in the mid 70s, I was eased out of the life room by a subtle culture that told me that 'working from life' was meaningless, old hat. I tried to 'do abstract', and made a lot of flat rubbish that had no life in it.

I carried the sense that 'life' should not be a source of any art I might produce for decades, and yet I kept returning to life - to the sharp green edges of a pink flower, to the strange depths of lichen on a branch close up, to the shape of a thousand pebbles under a turquoise sea. How could this not be something to do with art?

But, most of the drawings and paintings I made of 'life' were also flat, appeared pointless. Why try to make an image of that gloriousness, I thought in the end, when it's simply there before me, in a much more interesting way?

Having done nothing for 25 years, two years ago, doing something that was nothing to do with art, I suddenly looked at the way green pigment was flowing into yellow. And suddenly it all made sense. It suddenly seemed so simple. Of COURSE you aren't trying to make the wonder of the pattern on the shell, as it is, when it's a pattern on a shell. You're a prism. The light that comes out after it has passed through you can't possibly be the light that came in.

You're not looking for something nice out there to paint - you're looking for shapes and patterns that move you, that excite you. So that you can make something new.

So now I'm working on getting out of the way... as things come in... as they enter the pool of my awareness. And as my awareness starts, for the first time in decades, to link up to my body.

Everything has a life of its own

There I am, trying to stop, and then I get my first comment, after over six months of my little monologue here...

So the first thing that happened when I intended to stop is that I found that I didn't. Or. What? I stopped, but the blog didn't. I stepped back, and something flowed into the space.

Jim's comment about the Master seems to point directly to what I've been circling around these last few months. I wonder if what stops, when you slow everything right down, is your mind - your intentions, your plans, your goals - all your trying. But if you're lucky enough to be able to stop all this, even for a moment, you don't turn into a blank; you don't go away. Where there used to be the endless rabbiting of thought and the mind, there's still, or, perhaps, now, awareness.

Awareness is a space. Do things appear in that space, if you get out of the way?

If they do, I suppose they're likely to still be the emergent effects of the subterranean interactions I talked about before. Could you ever slow it down enough that even they would stop? And would you want to? If you're alive, a living system constantly in motion, renewing itself, adapting itself, in order to stay alive, you need those interactions and their effects - to guide you, to lead you on. But perhaps consciousness gives you something unique that you can insert into the mix (because, of course, consciousness is only a tiny part of what actually makes things happen as they do in your overall system...). It gives me the possibility of considering what kind of spaces I want to make, and the possibility of observing and pondering upon the different things that appear in the different spaces.

After I posted this, I suddenly looked at the image and thought of Anish Kapoor again. Perhaps what happens when you stop intending and trying is that you start to notice. Which links back to those earlier thoughts about responding. When you're a little more to one side, you see things that you wouldn't have noticed before. Things that you think you know suddenly reveal themselves as something extraordinary. The world changes.

Slowing down even more

All these interactions. All this emergence. As an experiment, I'm stopping the blog for the summer. To see what happens when you slow it down completely.

Will it just slow down?

What happens when everything slows RIGHT down?

'Slow thinking may nurture creativity'

From a complexity perspective, it might be expected that large numbers of interactions between multiple components would create the conditions for the emergence of novel forms. As I've discussed in previous posts, Maisel's immersion - the doing, doing, doing of creative working - seems to be aiming to do this. I've been wrestling for some time with the contrast between this idea and the letting go, doing nothing, getting out of the way approach, which in the end seems to be the thing that shifts things, moves them along.

Perhaps I'm being graeco-roman logical here, looking for one or the other of my simplistic little binary to come out on top. It's far more likely to be an intertwining of the two - attention, immersion, working, pushing materials or words together endlessly, and walking away, letting go, catching the things that are released in meditation, when you're looking the other way.

There's a big intellectual trend for 'connectivity' these days. We like network metaphors, ways of thinking that banish boundaries, ideas of blurring, multiplicity. Isn't social networking a cool phenomenon, we say; lets get with it, get tweeting our students, shifting our sorry antiquated asses onto facebook, marvel at what's emerging. Then we start trying to make connectivity happen; setting up social networking sites for a particular purpose, trying to create conditions that we hope will result in the same exciting unfettered happenings we see spontaneously occurring all around us. And then nothing happens. Mmmm.

Even when it is naturally occurring, massive connectivity isn't necessarily always a good thing. An analysis by complexity theorists of the global financial crisis in 2008 (New Scientist, 25.10.08) suggested that over-connectivity could be the cause of the collapse of such large systems. This is partly because there's no longer sufficient diversity within the overall system to allow for differentiated responses, required in different parts of the system so that these parts can respond to varying local conditions. The analysts suggest the need to insert 'firebreaks' to cut back the connectivity, making the system less uniform.

A more recent article entitled 'Slow thinking may nurture creativity' (New Scientist, 27.3.10) also suggests limits to connectivity, this time in the human brain. Apparently a number of studies in the past have suggested that  'high integrity white matter' is associated with higher mental function and intelligence. A recent study, however, suggests that lower white matter integrity, which involves slower communication between some areas, 'might allow for the linkage of more disparate ideas, more novelty, and more creativity'. This is reported as a surprise, as 'speedy information transfer' is normally seen to be a good thing, in terms of mental function. The researchers suggest that writing novels or creating art may not be things that require 'sheer mental speed'.....

One of the problems with this view, however, is that it could be interpreted as suggesting that the potential for creativity is hardwired into the brain (ie. you got low integrity, I got high...you're superior, I'm a creative dunce), as with the traditional view of intelligence and IQ.  All the research results which point to  neuroplasticity (ie. the brain's capacity to change and mould and reshape itself throughout life) would go against this idea. What interested me was the idea that slow connections might be better in terms of creating conditions for the emergence of creativity.