Here is something I shared on an online forum about work I have been doing.
I have been putting in time at my studio after long periods of absence. My method is most succinctly described as ecstatic automatism. It can also be explained as exciting the kundalini, because the kundalini model fits well, although I don’t often use that term. I have been working on my skull series. Though my application of paint is automatic the imagery in the work is made through stencils on top of the canvas or as rubbings from a relief below the canvas.
The artistic endeavor is both a practice in image making as well in cultivating an ecstatic response. On an initial level I can excite the movement in my body to draw and paint, and this is simple enough and what I have been doing mostly on my return to the studio. However, when I remember this is a double faceted endeavor, I work to put my attention on my body and the flow of the movement inside of it. Then my head goes light, sensations ripple through my body, I start to take quick breaths (breath of fire) and emit various utterances, and my perception starts to shift and grow.
I know why I neglect this focus, because it is a challenge to have so much attention on the art making as well as cultivating the internal shifts. They do not necessarily support each other (they can support each other, but that takes a higher level of concentration to find.) But this integration, in practice and in result, is the apparent goal in my art.
The symbol of the skull is common and deep in culture. One of the reasons I picked it. Also because I did a series on diagrams of the human heart, and this is a contrast to that series. But it isn’t a skull that I am intending to depict, but rather the concept of it, enmeshed and emerging from a less formed color field of ecstatic markings, rather how thoughts emerge from nebulous areas of the consciousness, if you have ever looked to see how this transpires.
To me the ecstatic state is one of reduction and requires detachment and surrender to find. Although the experience is heady, it requires and yields more levels of stripping away. To me the skulls are also symbols of this, as they are used in Tibetan spiritual art depicting the act of removal from the senses, and perhaps the state of cessation or ego death, which is a part of the enlightenment that is sought. But again my skull images are also symbols of the idea of death. In teachings of realization it is purported that the experience of life is illusory, which of course includes death. So in my own clumsy terms, being realized requires passing through death to discover that death does not exist. This is quite a paradox with deep comic/tragic implications. Especially in that very few, regardless of their efforts, will find realization to know this as such. (I wonder what the algebraic computations are of the above equation coupled with tragedy + time = comedy.) The working title of the series is “Your Idea of Death Never Had a Life”. I also imagine it as depicting the conception of death existing in different individuals.
This is an example of my artistic way to integrate these ideas about the ecstatic experience into what I do as an ecstatic progenitor. And so it really makes more sense if I keep my attention on the flow of my internal ecstatic response while I paint. It is an integrative work. So I am going to push to keep this attention up.
Posts
