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.