Form, Content And Substance In Art

My art can be classified as abstract, but this is not at all accurate to what I do. The heart of it is a very basic interaction with substance. This oversight of the most substantial comes from its transparency by its very prevalence. It is overlooked while ideas and concepts take precedence. Ideas and concepts define the abstract. But neither form nor content are the foundation, rather it is substance.

Early art forms have a great awareness on the substantial. In tribal ceremonial rituals, decorating the body with mud and organic materials is about the relationship the participants have to these materials found in their worlds. A head dress is more about the materials that make it up than an item to be worn. Mud may become a disguise but it is a disguise made up of soil. It is not specific properties that are as important as the actuality of the material, it's history and relationship to those that seek and use it in their world.

Many artists in contemporary art have begun to put attention back on substance. Joseph Beuys is the prime example. He makes his metaphors and associations based on the origin, properties and history of various materials; fat, felt, wax, honey, basalt. Their inclusion in his work shows the potency of meaning materials have outside of any form in which they can be placed. The form chosen in his work reinforces the inherent meaning of the materials themselves.

Ideas and critical thinking about art are often blind to this aspect of the substantial. When it is discussed that Van Gough used earth pigments in his early works to represent the rural life of the peasants he was depicting it color as symbol that is referred to. What is not mentioned is that the pigments used actually come from the earth. The metaphor is greater than just a reference to an earth tone, a single property of the material. The artist depicts the lives of peasants and their agrarian connection to earth by using earth itself.

Andy Warhol's greatest attribute in his art would be considered his cleverness in taking the emblematic out of popular culture and putting it into the context of an art culture. However in this displacement of the emblems of consumerism he was commenting on the increasing abstraction in the culture away from a view of the substantial. The labels and product packages he reproduced stand for substantial materials, food substances and processed metal. However these substances require no label to be identified as what they are. The label is given due to a capitalistic and consumer economy, They are a complete abstraction. By reproducing labels and boxes which are empty, having no physical connection with the stuff they represent, he is showing how these emblems create distance from the actual by removing it once more. He is very much referring to the concrete and our relationship to it.

The great trickster and showman Yves Klein is often referred to a having invented a proprietary color, International Klein Blue or IKB. In actuality he formulated a binder/pigment recipe which would retain the greatest intensity of his chosen pigment. Color cannot be invented, it is a property of material, in this case ultramarine pigment, which cannot invented either. This is something that is forgotten in the cultural legend of the artist. It is possible that this misinterpretation was propagated by Yves Klein's own design, and if so this is a sly comment on how the substantial is easily overlooked by the lure of the conceptual. One can claim ownership to an idea, but not to the existence of substance.

The First Day

It was a Sunday evening, November 22, 2002, when I first started drawing automatically. I was asked by a friend to make a design for them. I took out the board from under my bed to use as a drawing table. It was large board with a smooth and white formica top. First though I just decided to draw for myself.

Somewhere in the activity I began to notice a movement churning inside me when concentrating on making sure every line had intent and integrity of its own. I had noticed this movement inside while also drawing a year before and thought it curious to feel it again. I decided to explore it.

Here is the series of drawings in order of how they were made that evening that led to me automatically drawing.

Below is a drawing I was playing with when noticed the movement again inside me. I tried to focus on it when making some of these marks here, seeing how my concentration could bring it out.

I decided to focus on the movement more than on the drawing, to let the activity of drawing bring it out.

I closed my eyes to better feel the movement and found it growing. My body began to spontaneously shake and gyrate. But when I opened my eyes I returned to the activity of drawing. I could feel the link of control of my mind over my hand.

At some point in here when I opened my eyes again I saw my hand moving about on its own automatically. The link of control was no longer there. I was a witness to the activity of my drawing. This was a very surprising moment.

Here is what I drew the next day.

Here is what I drew the day after.

When I look at these images now I cannot fully recall how profound the experience was of first discovering this movement inside me that drew by itself. It changed the direction of my life, one in which I am still following.

The next two months were incredibly intense for me with many strange spontaneous experiences. They were perhaps not a strange as what I have discovered since that heady time, but for a while I was completely immersed in a newly opening and unfamiliar world.

The Development of Perception

The reason I have been doing this art for a number of years now is because of the intriguing experience of doing it. The resulting artifact was not as intriguing to me. I was very dismayed to find myself doing work that resembled abstract expressionism, an art movement of fifty years past. This is not a career move I would have made otherwise. But I spent a lot of time at the task as the approach seemed more authentic to me than any other art I had made.

The provocative experience of doing the work has compelled me to explore it, to discover what is there. And in that I also have spent lot of time looking into the works I create. I wanted to see what I might be capturing that was as provocative as the experience of doing it. Truly, I could find a certain effect of the work, but it was very delicate and ephemeral. It took a level of attention that was not immediate in coming and easy to dispel. This seemed to be more about my relationship to the work than the work itself.

I was also not sure that the images had much difference from common sights seen day to day; stains on the sidewalk, the pattern of plaster on a wall, a store window having been painted over to hide work being done inside, spontaneous, random and unintentional. There was not much that differentiated these from my art. My experience was so provocative but the images I was creating were completely pedestrian. I was dismayed at this too. But maybe it didn't matter, maybe the organic process is what mattered. So I became interested in looking at these sights in my everyday and pondered the connection between the man made and the organic.

From the time I began doing this art I also began to have moments of lucid experience. At first they were rare, but over the years they have come more regularly. In this state everything I look at is completely intriguing. I am mesmerized by all around me. All is the same but somehow different, enhanced in a way that is very difficult to pin point. It would come spontaneously. There was no effort to see it this way, it was just there.

At three years of doing this artwork I saw an extreme three dimensionality in one of my paintings, like a topographical map. It was an illusion of sorts, again an effect that would come and go and which required some time to see, but unmistakeable and provocative when there. And there was also something more I could see, something in my relation to the work which helped to elicit my ecstatic response. This was not new to me, but more pronounced. I began to guide my compositions to make these effects more pronounced, to bring them more to the fore. If I could see depth and find an ecstatic response from my work perhaps I could make them so others could find it too.

In recent years I worked on a series of large scale images with many small dots. I invented a brush that made many small marks with each stroke. With this I can get a complexity of pattern that I cannot with other marking tools. The result is an open, deep and immersive texture which I think is the best invitation so far to the experience I find in my own work. I feel successful in my goal of bringing the door to my experience as forward as possible. I of course have also spent much time myself looking into these works, peering into the minutia of detail they have and feeling the effect they hold for me.

The lucid moments come much more commonly these days. I am beginning to know how to elicit them with varying degree of success. I find I can slip into to it fairly readily, or I just seem to find myself there. I can easily see it in the texture around me and there is nothing lacking in texture, if one looks closely enough. My vision can take me into a stunning wonderland. Nothing has changed, it is all still the mundane, but still amazing. It is not so different from looking at my art work, perhaps it even stimulates me more.

So I begin to think that my art making has been training to see in this way, that my focus on my art has enhanced my natural perceptive abilities. Maybe my images have been fairly ordinary all along, but now I can see the extraordinary within the ordinary from my involvement with them. My art maybe isn't about showing something new or intriguing, but about learning how to see the new and intriguing in the familiar. And when everything becomes that much more intriguing, even though experience is rather odd, everything seems that much more familiar to me as well.