Review And Renewal For The Coming Anniversary

 In the impending twentieth anniversary of my automatic drawing, a specific moment very memorable it being so provocative, I am reviewing old journals and revising old ideas in order to comply a compendium of works and thought. It is also proving to be a reinvestment in my work for going forward.

As expected, there are things I remember contemplating and many things I don’t. There are things I recall writing about soon after which I could not touch on what they specifically referred to, the notions being so elusive. Some provocative experiences that I recall I see no mention of. I am seeing that many of my main motivating ideas over the years were clearly delineated in the earliest writings. As time goes on the ideas become more rarified, which require much rereading to figure what I was getting at. However what I am mostly uncovering is the development of a systemic methodology towards furthering the ecstatic response and the art that was all inclusive to it.

The entries fit into into a few basic categories, descriptions of the ecstatic experiences, methods that I developed to further go into such experiences, ideas around what ecstatic art could mean and how to incorporate those idea thematically into the work, along with ideas of general composition and a catalog of other poetic ideas and spontaneous visual imagery.

The first few months of doing this drawing were very intense. There were many unusual experiences and an endless flurry of thoughts. As this was not an artistic exercise towards any goal, rather a spontaneous but repeatable occurrence, it lived in a completely empty context. All previous notions around art making; source, meaning, metaphor and so on, were pulled into question by this void. And the intensity of the recurring ecstatic experiences challenged my internalized concepts of the nature of cognitive makeup through stark contrast. I was transfixed in this for several months, and recall that at one point making a decision to actively settle myself. I found an entry “30/3/03 This below zero temperature and lack of gravity is getting to me, I think I’ll come back down.”

The methodology for the work is non-linear due to the nature of the ecstatic experience, as delineated variously in the notes, specifically it being non-intentional. Because this draws so much attention to awareness of an internal landscape, it entails a dissonance when trying to apply a more objectified and analytical view to it, showing such to be non-functional to the internal inquiry. The furtherance of the ecstatic experience and the pictures that were being created through it could not stand separate in an artistic investigation nor creative statement, as a subject-object linear relationship was rendered inoperable to the task. It was something I had to actively let go of to go forward.

There is a phrase mentioned several times in the earlier journals, but one I do not actually recall, “direct metaphor”. This is about the notion I mention above. It implies a direct connection of the internal movement to the activity of the drawing and the resultant image. It also implies a lack of any intermediary interpreter of the work, even if that is a personal contemplation or conceptualization. The drawing is part of the experience as it also depicts the experience.

Viewing the artwork was also part of the ecstatic creative process. Even early on I found looking into the work would elicit an ecstatic response. This means that a measured look into the work would yield the automatic response for the creation of the work.  This became more and more pronounced over the years. And this further integrated and supported a subjective non-linear approach, where the process and results were indistinguishable. Again in the notion of this being a spontaneous action without intention, there was no reason to assume the image/object was the intended result of this automatic approach to art making. The idea of a specific intended outcome would lead to the “objective dissonance” mentioned before and block deeper investigation.

Now that I have established the non-linear characteristic of this process I need to go more into the elicitation of the ecstatic response and experience. Because even though I could only honestly view the work as non-linear, I have to write linearly. It is a systemically integrated approach which I unfortunately have to delineate bit by bit.

At the beginning, just poising the pen above the paper would elicit an ecstatic automatic response. There was no logic to this, but it was undeniable. In an effort to focus on what it was that was transpiring I began to find and develop other elicitations, although this was slow to start. i would focus on how it felt in my body trying to see where it would arise. I would try to hold different positions and degrees of relaxation to aide it. And through the effort at focusing on what I was doing physically, on the art, and perhaps on what was happening cognitively, different ecstatic experiences would emerge - alterations of my sense of being, of place and of presence. I figured early on to not expect or desire these occurrences, as that would have caused too much distress. They still came anyway. And I think somehow there were remnant memories of these experiences that I could utilize though reflection, on my body, my emotions, my thoughts to find them again.

So I began to collect things I could focus on to elicit the response, locations in my body, certain phrases, some memories and emotions, and of course the viewing of the work. The collection began to grow, but oftimes a focal point would also cease to function. I have noted some of these in the journal, but I know so many have come and gone that never were catalogued, but that doesn’t matter. What is of importance is that this was a functional, although very subjective, approach to the investigation of the work.

I want to emphasize the subjective nature of this as being systemic, in that a perceptual division of body, emotion and thinking is not very distinct in the elicitation of the ecstatic experience nor in the experience that comes, to the degree it does. For instance I would get notions of parts of my body thinking. Or a mental image would have an external presence as well as a localized bodily quality. Or an analytical thought would come with an extreme emotional response. None of this is very logical, but it was all FUNCTIONAL! It enabled an ongoing discovery and experience to deepen. And that it was rather illogical was further support for maintaining an open and focused attention on the interior landscape, as what would show up might do so in a completely unexpected way. So in this non-linear subjective systemic process I evolved and grew into the art.

I know defining art so far from an object or an observable event is a challenge for many. But I have developed inside a void so no rules outside of it need be applied. And as I have seen, such an exercise of external definition is a detriment to the process, or at minimum a distraction. So for me the art is the process and result indistinguishable by necessity, with a circular metaphorical approach needing to be applied. In other words, I paint the painting as the painting paints me and as I paint the shifting environment. Even in performances where there is no material media involved, ink is still being moved.

Return Of The Street Ecstatic

I know that the proximity of other people is a stimuli for my ecstatic response. In the cloistering during the pandemic we all were removed from crowds. But in the summer of the first opening I went to an event at a local beer garden. It was the first gathering I had been to in months and just being in a congregation of folks, which I had avoided for so long, seemed to be like a dream to me.

At the venue i saw and interacted with many people I knew, sharing stories of what we had been doing during the shut down and thoughts on what  the future might hold for us. But I also began to notice that my ecstatic response was getting very much activated when passing through the crowd. It usually takes me focusing on a proven stimuli to garner an ecstatic response in myself, but sometimes, as in this moment, the response comes independently.

I decided to focus on it as I moved among the groups of people, feeling it rise in me, but trying to mitigate my involuntary movements to not draw too much attention to myself. As by course, it was very stimulating on a systemic level, physically, mentally and emotionally. i do not want to assert the occurrence of a concrete interaction as that goes outside the phenomenological logic of the ecstatic experience. However this experience of the presence of others felt very foundational and complex with a sense that I was being made aware of an immensely detailed connection.

What the ecstatic experience can show me, as it has many times before, is the contrast of it to the usual experience of daily life. I noticed the same on this occasion. I began to see how the usual ways of interacting - talking, the use of body language and such - felt as an adjunct to the much more profound presence I was also experiencing, seeing the usual way of connecting and communication as subordinate to a fuller presence and interaction, even though this usual experience is considered the paramount of personal exchange.  I could see it as narrowly defined and limited based on social structuring, a veneer to a deeper interaction that no engagement in conversation would be able to give awareness to. All the words and ideas were at best distractions to what was more fully transpiring.

After this I decided to return to venturing into public as a street ecstatic. I have done this as artistic performance and thought it important to do as I was the only person I knew of who was engaging like this. However I was now considering it more as an exercise just to reenter into this profound experience of the presence of those surrounding me. It is a way to bring it forward and eschew the normal daily life experience, which felt so constrained in contrast. The question of it being an art performance was not as important. Just realizing and honoring this rare and profound level of experience would give the exercise importance.

Some time later on I went out to the Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park to engage my ecstatic behavior in public. Although I didn’t get into any close proximity with anyone, I used the presence of others as stimuli and found the ecstatic response as by course. Some outings I may find a very pronounced response, and others less so. The exercise is about doing the best I can during that time to elicit the response. As usual people pretty much ignored me. But still I could feel the profundity of their presence within me when paying attention to those around me.

After some time of engaging on the Concourse I started to make my way out of the park. On my path I came close to and passed a group of people waiting in line to enter the Tea Garden. Although I wasn’t expressly focusing on the people at that moment, just their close proximity had the ecstatic response rise inside me. It was a wave of heightened intensity, and with widening eyes I made an effort to suppress my involuntary movements as I was passing so very close to people. This last unexpected reaction was another confirmation of the objectivity of ecstatic experience. It rises above the threshold of subjective illusion, surprising me with its occurrence and showing the actuality of its existence.

Fluxations In Static Blue

Here is the gallery write up for an immense immersive ambient work I created entitled Fluxations In Static Blue for the gallery space.

The idea of this immersive installation is to allow the viewer to become fully enveloped by the detail and texture within the markings of the artwork. The complex interaction of lines will act to stimulate the viewer, who may then begin to experience the movement of the piece. Of course this movement is movement within the viewer being stimulated, the act of observing being dynamic. Further this allows the viewer to begin to observe the complexity of activity happening in the perception of themselves and their surroundings, which is far more complex and detailed than one is usually aware of. Becoming aware of this immense complexity is the basis of an ecstatic response.

It is akin to a shift of view point, seeing what is not usually noticed in a habitual setting, or more so, to an opening of a vista. It is analogous to when urban dwellers visit remote settings and find a night sky filled with complex and detailed textures of an immense multitude of stars. This shift in vista can be awe inspiring, even disturbing, seeing revealed what is always there but what has not been habituated to as the usual environment. One may feel displaced, that they are elsewhere, even while knowing the setting to be the same.

This is the nature of "standing outside" in the classical definition of ecstasy. And when this happens to the personal sense of self, beginning to find the complexity of perception and activity of self, the opening vista feels again as one standing outside, or even as other, as this shifted sense of self contrasts greatly to the usual sense of self to which one has been habituated.

 

What is Ecstatic Automatism?

All the marks I apply to my art are done through a process best described as Ecstatic Automatism. It is a process of repeatedly and continuously stimulating an automatic ecstatic reflex. This results in an explosive and rapid movement of mark making on the working surface. The image is generated rather than constructed, with me standing outside of the composition.

This ecstatic response is also stimulated within me by viewing the results of my work. This is one of the guides to completing a work, the degree which the image stimulates the ecstatic experience within me. I have seen this response in other viewers at various levels. Hopefully the image holds the same potential to stimulate a degree of ecstatic response for everyone who experiences it as well.

Skull Painting Series

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.

Ecstatic Art vs Improvised Art

I recently was asked to give a talk. In the talk I decided to explain the difference between what I do in making art through an ecstatic response and artistic improvisation. This contrast is informative towards understanding what the ecstatic approach consist of, as it is very distant from other forms of art making.

To start I think it is good to explain that when I started doing ecstatic automatic drawing I had no word such as ecstatic to describe it. The automatic drawing just started happening. This definition I found much later on. This is pertinent as there was no a priori notion that ecstatic art was something to pursue.

The nature of ecstatic art is that the ecstatic response is followed and let to unfold. My concentration is more on my body and less on the formation of the image. Certainly I concentrate on the image, but more so as a way to elicit the ecstatic response. The image that comes is generated, not composed. I have learned not interfere with the process of the image's unfolding, a discipline that took a great deal of patience and relinquishing. My focus is on eliciting the ecstatic response. I let the image take care of itself.

Having been trained as a jazz musician I have a solid understand of improvisation. And what is different in this from the ecstatic automatic approach is that in improvisation I am very focused of the form I am working with. Improvisation consists of engaging and responding to form though cultivating an intuitive and immediate response to the form. There is a starting point of some sort, a seed or such, that is extrapolated upon. As the work grows the artist responds to the form that is evolving in an effort to further cultivate the work. Sometimes a mental image forms that the artist conveys and other times the response comes more instantly or extemporaneously. But it is still an engagement with the form.

Good improvisors can take and create through many types of form, whether in art, music, literature or otherwise. In fact almost all composition is related to improvisation, even if the final result is codified and repeatedly performed. This however is just not possible in the ecstatic approach. There is no formal seed, all comes completely spontaneously. Certainly there is a form that comes, but this is a form that is generated by the nature of the process. I find it to be very consistent in its own way. It does not vary due to any thoughts of ideas or reflections I may have about it.

I stress this point because I think this is difficult for people to infer. Many suggest I should look at such and such art work, listen to such and such music, focus in such and such a way. But in the face of the process that transpires this is just meaningless, because there is no way to interject this into the making of the art. This may seem radical to some people, somehow outside of their conception of how art is made, or even outside of their notion of  human behavior. But I have been doing this for long enough to be comfortable with the way it comes forth. The forms that come are like the natural forms of the blowing wind, the flowing of water and the crystallization of ice. The wind doesn't improvise, and neither do I when doing ecstatic art. The forms are intrinsic. They are revealed as a part of, as well as a result of, the process.

Ecstatic Scrolls

Being at the point of ten years from discovering my ability to draw automatically, on reflection of that time I find a desire to return to the very direct way of making my art as it was in the early days. At the time there was as much of the fervor to understand the process flowing through me as there was to make interesting images. In fact the latter was more challenging as I was at the mercy of the spontaneous movement to make images. I had to work within the process to remain authentic and to not circumnavigate a discovery of deeper possibilities. 

In that end though I have worked much on producing interesting images, trying and fabricating different different types of marking tools, using various substances as my paint and various supports to paint upon. More recently I began to include imagery in my work as the time was appropriate in my evolution to do so while still holding to an automatic ecstatic approach when applying paint. All this led to composition based on what I thought abut the experience of ecstatic movement and ecstatic perception.  Although I have many works that are more of a color composition, the works that incorporate a concept or theme are the more appealing to me. And I see this is an attempt to communicate something, or even offer an experience.

However my own experience is what is the most provocative. I do not know how to communicate this or offer it up, although I seem to be trying to do so in these compositions. I can truly change my surroundings and my sense of self by a pointed surrender of my perception. I have some talent as an ecstatic. And in a most forward thinking way I assert my art to exist in this experiential enhancement to my perception - I paint the entirety of my experience. I think it possible my images offer this, to others as it does for me, but I have been doing it for ten years. The effort is individual, even if the discovery may be universal.

So I think back to that time and am compelled to return to a more direct approach, and to a more direct inquiry. To that end I am working on scrolls, what I have thought of long ago but am doing now. Basically I paint with brush and ink one section at  time. I now have finished two scrolls, each about one hundred feet of a continuous and spontaneous drawing. And although there are conceptual aspects to this work and the product it is, I take it as an effort to refine my process. That is to reduce it to most essential, eschewing other artistic distractions, that I may better focus on looking into what I have been in training see. If the seeing is the essence of the art, then this is really all I need.

Night Visions In Phosphene Hues

I have recently completed five works in a series which I call Night Visions In Phosphene Hues. What these works are is an attempt to incorporate three different aspects of subjectivity into a work of art, thereby having it be a model of a certain subjective experiences. I will explain.

I have a vivid visual imagination. Images are continually being offered to me through my intuition. This is most obvious when I am at rest or in bed. I call these night visions. I see all sorts of images passing through my mind's eye, art works, graphic images, strange scenes and settings and abstract markings and symbols. It is a skill I have worked on. Sometimes I keep track of the images I see, but mostly I just forget them. There is too much to catalog and not much proof of the use to do so. 

However, from the collection of images I have made I picked five which seem to have the most relation to a spiritual theme, as I interpret them. These I designed in outline which I reproduced in twine to be used as a rubbing as is one of my procedures in composition. Then I selected colors based on phosphenes in a specific degree of light. Phosphenes are the color fields you see when you close you eyes. In different light there are different groups of colors, so I made five different color palettes. 

These two, intuitive images and phosphate colors, are two aspects of subjective experience. By subjective I mean truly from one's point of experience. These experiences cannot be shared, reproduced or imitated. Maybe no experiences can be, but these obviously cannot be included with those we think can, whether erroneously or not. I see this as an important distinction to make.

There is also something I have intuitively realized in the relation of these two aspects of subjectivity, that phosphenes and intuitional mental images enhance and foster each other, (although I believe for most of us it is very difficult to focus on both simultaneously, not without a bit of practice.) What I mean is the swirl of color in one's eyes is a stimulus for free association and conversely an intuitive image (or dream image) can form back into a color shadow of the phosphene. I have certainly experienced the latter, so I have some confirmation in my own observations. I have recently been reading about various stages of imagery in regards to lucid dreaming that pass through phosphene to full formed dreaming (hypnogogic imagery) and levels of visions through shapes and patterns to entire scenes (entopic imagery and form constants), so I am happy to know my intuitive insight has some other confirmation as well.  

The third aspect of subjectivity in the work is the ecstatic manner in which the color fields are applied. Now a color field from my ecstatic application (with the appropriate tool) very much has the grainy and entropic flow of the phosphene. Whether this relation is actual or just representative I cannot say, although it may have a basis in brownian motion or some other such physical structure. Regardless, it is a fair representation of the view of a phosphene color field. Beyond this there is the possibility that the marks themselves as a document of the ecstatic experience contain a signature of the experience that can be passed to the viewer. This I cannot know for sure, but certainly many of my works show an incredible level of depth or movement for almost all viewers, and a major stimulus for me towards the ecstatic experience, though it is my body of work.

The final works show an intuitive image emerging out of a color field generated by an ecstatic approach that is representative of the phosphene in form and color. It is a model of these subjective processes, resulting from the processes themselves, incorporating themes of spiritual inquiry. Essentially it is pointing to what is truly unique in an individual - a subjectivity that cannot shared, reproduced or imitated, since it is truly unique. My hope is that this work will bring this aspect of being into greater focus and make it less likely to be overlooked by concerns of an objectivity that usually gets the majority of our attention.