Seeing Balance in Gestures

A question is often asked when I describe that my approach is totally automatic, how do I know it when the work is finished? This is of course a consideration for all who are involved in an art making process. But the question is still a good one when it is observed that through the automatic approach my work is devoid of intention.

I see my work as being generated, not so much composed. The composition choices I make are the choice of surface, what media to use with what marking tool, and when to stop. Otherwise I just follow the spontaneous movement that arises inside me.

Because I have done this for a while I can somewhat predict how the various gestures will build up. The image has it’s own intrinsic form. It is like the formation of crystals which I observe as they are growing. What I have learned is that over the process that there are moments when the image will coalesce or constellate, showing a balance in its marking. Then the image may show more movement or depth.

There are several times an image will gain this balance, usually about five or six points like this in the process. These moments come more often in the beginning and then diminish over time. So if I pass one point of balance I know another will come. However when the the work is already rather dense the next point of balance requires a lot more marking. When the work is already dense I have to consider if I really want to continue on to eventually find the next point.

When choosing a single marking tool and medium, stopping is the only other compositional choice I make. Here are some examples of balance points in a drawing.

So why do I see these as balanced points? I am not really sure, but certainly has to do with how the mind organizes what is seen. It may be a pleasing ratio between the white and black. It may be various areas being more obviously indicated or delineated. It may be both. It may just naturally pass through traditionally discovered points of good compositional arrangement. But it all has to do with how we interpret what we see.

I also have another indication of a stopping point though. This is the point when the on viewing the image it will easily elicit an ecstatic response. This sometimes is when there is a more obvious compositional balance, but sometimes not, but usually they are very close. I then have to make a choice of which I want to be more pronounced. However I usually stay with the point that elicits a greater ecstatic response, because of the question of whether I may be capturing something very subtle, even though most may never see it as such.

Then it can be asked again, why do I see these ecstatic eliciting points? This is even a more challenging question. It may be related to those more traditionally viewed composition balance points. Or maybe it depicts a more subtle organization reflected back to the mind and nervous system. This I cannot know. But I still want to ensure it is in the work in hopes that this intrinsic quality can be communicated to other viewers.

A Social View On Ecstatic Personnage

 I recently saw a local grant to artists that wanted to support artists in communities that have been traditionally marginalized. And I have to reflect as a practitioner of ecstatic arts if that would incorporate myself. Historically ecstatic practitioners have been suppressed, their ceremonies outlawed and individuals targeted, exposed and executed. This of course was mainly, but not exclusively, in Europe. This transpired to such a great degree that a traditional lineage has been for the most eradicated to the extent that such practices are totally unrecognizable to most modern people. There is no community for me to belong to at this point. An eradicated community is surely a traditionally marginalized community, but there is no community currently present to enable one to make that acknowledgement.

Representations of ecstatic behavior in modern culture have been mostly reduced to horror film tropes or relegated to naive primitivism. Anyone who would begin to experience ecstatic moments would probably be inclined to suppress themselves based on externally assimilated expectations of acceptable and healthy behavior. Those who do not or cannot control their behaviors risk being medicated or even institutionalized. I was certainly wary of sharing too much when I first started exhibiting ecstatic behavior, and it took a long time for me to be open about it. And even in so named “Ecstatic Dance” events I experienced chiding, chastising, shunning and coercive suppression. This is the degree which this behavior has become redefined and misconstrued, to the point of not being recognized for what it is.

One of the reasons ecstatic behavior has been so completely marginalized is because it is an individual expression of autonomy. It is not something that is taught or learned but organically arises. It exists outside of an externally imposed cultural structure. And so it is a threat to a cultural order, especially where there is a hierarchy of spiritual authority. But it is more radical that that. It is a threat to any internalized cultural pretense within the individual. It subverts conceptual presuppositions and exposes the individual to their own expansive personal domain of awareness, perception and experience, completely outside of any reliance on thought. It is destructive to the structure of identity itself. I myself have had to actively surrender up pretense to enable myself to more fully enter into these experiences, which when I do will rip away further emotional attachments to other notions I have of myself, often in a painful manner.

It seems prescient that the discovery of the ecstatic response in me, that which challenges and disrupts identity, came just before the emergence of social media, which gave rise to an industry of personal branding and launched a torrent of divisive, manipulative and coercive discourse. The experience of an ecstatic response is very much antithetical to this whole trajectory of modern culture. I don’t know what a community of ecstatic practitioners might be, but I would assume that their connection would be informed of the shared experience that adherence to doctrine or dogma is totally superfluous to the primacy of being.  Could I consider myself a member of a community of disparate practitioners through time and space? Could I consider myself a community of one? Might a community be concerned with advocating for those who have displayed ecstatic abilities and who have been shunned, misdiagnosed, wrongly medicated and hospitalized? However,  this all is predicated on an initial step of reintroducing to the public the organic existence of ecstatic behavior and then in educating them about a practice of it. If there is complete cultural blindness, the question of understanding and acceptance can never arise.

The Great Witness

 In recently reviewing my old journals I have come across several references to “The Great Witness.” I honesty do not recall coining this phrase but on further reflection and review it refers to something that comes up very frequently in the formulation of my ideas and approach. It points to both an internal poise and to a sensory ecstatic outcome.

In the early days of doing ecstatic drawing, at my art table on a spring day I suddenly felt a huge presence behind me that put the hairs on neck on end. It seemed to be about ten feet tall, leaning over me and looking with extreme intensity to what I was drawing. There was no sense of a focus on me, only on the act of drawing. It was like a personage from a very high echelon was investigating an event done by one far below in significance.

I just kept on drawing for the benefit of this intense witness. After a minute or so the presence was just as suddenly gone. Now I don’t necessarily purport the true existence of spirits, but I do understand that a contained experience of one’s self and surrounding is actually more flexible than what may be commonly thought. I took the experience to be a lesson by example in how to increase my concentration in the task at hand while discounting any personal involvement and attachment to it.

I try to keep a continual visual attention to my artwork as I am doing it. This may seem like an obvious thing to say for a visual artist, but remember I am an automatic artist, so don’t use my eyes to plan placement of marks on the surface. So basically my visual focus is so I can see it open up while I am doing it, which then feeds back into the ecstatic response. I think the specific reference to the “Great Witness” in the journals is to moments when this visual focus leads to an expanded sense of awareness of the work, although I do not recall the exact moments of the references. It is odd to consider an ecstatic experience of witnessing, which implies the sense of witnessing as external to the individual, but this is what it can feel like.

In reflecting more on my internal landscape since my ecstatic emergence, I began to notice times when many images come into my mind, usually at moments of rest. It was sometimes a book of dream images whose pages were being flipped.  The detail was stunning of images that would suddenly appear before my mind’s eye. But I found I would have to relax as I focused on the images, as an effort to look further into them out of amazement would immediately end the flow.

The name of this blog,” tiny eyes look”, is also a reference to a practice of intense concentration with extreme detachment. I got it when eliciting my ecstatic response at a movement event. I found a rather pronounced ecstatic response, but also noticed that when the sense of those around me became more objectified, I would get distracted from the ecstatic experience. My view of the people had to be included into the ecstatic experience, and I had to detach from thoughts of them which would distract. There was a moment when the words “tiny eyes” came to me and the ecstatic experience expanded, so I took it on as a name.

At one of my pilgrimage performances, where I elicit ecstatic experience in the public concourse, I was at the corner of Market and Montgomery and came to a very pronounced ecstatic response. It was a “heaven on earth” experience, everything being amazingly beautiful and vast and the tears began to flow. My ecstatic overview was indeed awe producing. But I noticed that if I went into the awe response the ecstatic experience would lessen. I had never heard this ever being expressed, “don’t go into the awe,” but here was a case for it.

I haven’t before put these moments together, but it is very clear that the original “Great Witness” experience was a fundamental lesson that has been instrumental many times over the years. What I was being taught on that afternoon came to play in my efforts in the downtown SF pilgrimage. And I have probably over years honed this practice of intense focus coupled with extreme detachment to be able to find myself in that expanded space.