Ecstatic Qualia

I always wonder how to describe my ecstatic experiences. They are so different from any other type of experience. I tend to think of them as resulting from a distinct perception. They are always confounding. It has been this way and it continues to be this way. It is as shocking as discovering that there is a color that has never seen before, except in this case it is a perception that has never been experienced before.

I am drawn to indicate them as separate qualia, unique from the other sense perceptions. Qualia are "the internal and subjective components of sense perceptions, arising from stimulation of the senses by phenomena." As sound is distinct from image and smell is distinct from touch so the ecstatic qualia appear distinct to me from all others.

I know, this is a confounding statement to make. It raises so many questions which are extremely challenging to pursue in thought. I cannot be definitive here. I just have to state that I am compelled to ponder the question of it, perception coming forth independent of the ones that we know and live with in a normal course of existence.

I have tried to describe the qualities of my ecstatic experiences on another post here. I did so by relating them to more normal experiences. However this can only be a distant representation. The ecstatic experience for me is not a collection of different sensations but more a systemic confluence of sensations mental, physical and visual and at other times aural as well. It can take place as a perception concurrently internal and external, sometimes without a clear distinction of which is primary.

Recently, as an example of sorts, during an ecstatic movement exploration I had the sensation of a white space in my chest area. I saw it in my mind's eye but could also feel it and see it inside my body. It also had a presence and an intelligence. I felt it was communicating to me, but was also a part of me. I am unable to say what that communication was but the sensation of it was systemic and unique. It came with a transformation of my normal sensation of being, which was an intense thing to experience.

And when it was gone the memory of it fades as well. I know it was something extraordinary, something to which all else pales in comparison, but the quality of the experience cannot be well represented in my mind. I know it when it happens. I have seen the white space before and know I will be familiar with it when I see it again. But I cannot quite recall the full quality of it when the perception is gone.

I assume that all of us are so individual that the descriptions of what I experience may have little recognition from others, even those who perceive their own ecstatic qualia. But I also assume that our form and make up are similar enough that the generalities can be recognized and acknowledged. There is a perception distinct from the ones commonly considered, one that can be indicated and discussed. Or perhaps, if not independent, then this acute culmination of various mental, physical and sensational processes is certainly a unique experience, one apart, the qualities of which can be recognized and explored.

I cannot escape thoughts on this distinction. And I am considering it an important place from which to explore, despite the challenges of describing the qualities of individual non shared experience which are not easily described in usual terms. This is what is put before me again and again as I recurrently find this increasingly familiar but distinct experience.

The Culmination of Dissolvement

By the time I completed this work I had already done a few works with organic debris mixed with acrylic compound, however with this one I decided to add some pigment into the mixture. In doing this I had the opportunity to vary the color of the mixture in order to add a distinct gestural element into what was a very textural and topographic surface.

The variance was in making a final and partial pass in a slightly whiter tint of the same orange color. This subtle contrast allowed the brighter color below to peer through which gave depth in an emblem like manner while still being integrated into the overall texture. This gave the work a certain presence which I always strive for.

On focusing onto this presence I found it growing when I became more aware of the many separate elements that made up the texture of the work. The more distinct I saw the various details the more the presence came forward. The more the parts and pieces began to separate and differentiate the more I could see the face of the whole. It was exciting to able to see this growing in two directions, a greater experience of the whole in complete relation to a view of increasingly distinct parts. The vision became more and more palpable, like a living breathing presence, the more and more it disintegrated.

Eventually the experience reached a point where I could no longer see deeper in the two directions, the parts and the whole, and the presence receded from prominence where it was just previously. However the notion of this paradox has stayed with me, of seeing the face of the whole only through seeing the infinite facets of its infinitely dividable parts, and has become part my personal mythology in my furthering exploration.

Unfortunately the tinted color I mixed became just bit more dark when it dried and that subtle level of contrast was lost. I never saw this again in this work quite the same.

Earth Bowl

There exist many objects of a religious nature. Many are associated with personages, others have to do with function in ritual and ceremony and others are tools for users to enter into spiritual realms and altered states. For some objects all these definitions may apply. The symbolic nature of many of these objects is important in reiterating the associations that make up a spiritual belief in practice. And perhaps because of the symbolism, or for more individual reasons, some objects are used to increase focus towards spiritual ends.

I have such an object, it was created through the practicality of it's function of focus for myself and from ideas about my ecstatic experience which I have explored in my art making. Here is the object.

Basically it is a small tub. The inside covered in a coat of top soil mixed with acrylic compound. The outside is wrapped in an bright orange velveteen fabric. This construction resembles other pieces I have created which have an interior of organic material with a brightly colored frame. These are honorific pieces to material, or specially to the fundamental interaction of material.

The coating of the tub occurred through using it to mix up top soil and mud mixtures with which I would paint. This layer was unintentional as I wasn't attempting to make an art piece with the tub. But in seeing the beauty of what looks like a hole into the mulch of the earth I decided to wrap the outside with an honorific cover.

However the function of the this object is to focus my ecstatic response. I discovered the use of this particular bucket of cup shape because of painting. My original stimulus was facing a drawing surface with a drawing implement in hand. Waiting in this position I could find the response that I had discovered and with which I was beginning to become familiar. At one point further on I also discovered that putting my brush into a paint bucket to be a stimulus as well, which was quite a surprise to me. Over the years I have used this to "prime the pump" before I paint to keep the response as constant as possible. Usually I have a cup on my art table just to point my marking tool to as a way to increase focus. Why this works I cannot say, perhaps I have trained this from my act of painting.

I can use my earth bowl in the same way, to focus myself towards an ecstatic response. The difference is that it is decorated in a way as such a ceremonial object can be. I have not so much used this particular object in this way but I do know it is very functional. On one occasion I brought it to an open sort of gathering where I was doing what I do, peering into the bowl as I would. At one point though a friend of mine who knows about me took a long stick and slowly pointed it into the bucket. On seeing I felt something very intensely cutting down through me in the same manner. So it doesn't have to be me who is using into the bowl to have it function for me.

The artifact I have created also has a certain level of symbolic association which is related to the thoughts I have gained about my actions and ecstatic experience. Also the symbolic nature of the shape and action I use with it are very potent as well; penetration, a portal, entering into depth, a vessel, a womb,etc.. All of these associations and others I have gathered will surely culminate as I go forward in continued exploration and performance.

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.

Invented Marking Tools

When I first started doing this art I first used traditional art marking tools. The tool of choice in the beginning was the ink pen, a quill shaft with speedball nibs. This is what I was using the night I first began to draw automatically. I also experimented with various brushes as this was an obvious choice. It became clear though that the mark of these tools though would dictate look of the result, mostly calligraphic in nature. After a time I began to see that in order to vary the composition more than it had been I needed to use non traditional tools, but only non traditional in that they were weren't sold in art supply stores. There are all perfectly valid for making art. Every marking tool had to be invented in the first place, and usually designed for a specific application and look. Outside of that application new inventions have to be made.

An influence in this decision was viewing a work by Henri Michaux, a well known French automatic artist. I saw a density of ink that I was not able to get with calligraphy brushes. I sought to reverse engineer what sort of object could make such a mark and came upon the idea of using a root which had been slightly crushed. This seemed to work well. Although I have never found out what tools Michaux used in his works I would say this incident is the only direct influence of an artist's work I have taken, the nature of my work being spontaneous and not imitative.

I began to experiment with various objects and materials, grass, sticks, weeds, fabric, root systems, steel wool, feathers, reeds, glass containers, bark, wire brushes, etc., whatever seemed possible. I even once painted with a half desiccated worm I found on my door step. The imprint of the rings on its tail can be seen in the drawing, which greatly disturbed me when I finished it. I found each item had its own mark and in this way I could create a vocabulary of marks by choosing different tools. As I had little choice on the placement of marks on the picture plane this expanded my possibilities in composition.

When I began do canvases I had to invent objects which would work for oil and acrylic paints. Up until then I worked mostly with ink on paper. I found that eucalyptus bark worked well as a kind of quill for oil paint if I mixed the paint to the right constancy. I still used bunched weeds for wide stains of color. Foam and balls of bunched string also worked well in running paint over a longer path than most brushes could. I also constructed brushes with boar bristle and plant fiber that would hold both thick and thin paint at the same time so that the stroke wouldn't come out dry looking but still retain enough paint for the stroke to cover a distance. Pot scrubbers were also very good on initial layers in the painting. Often I would have an idea of how I wanted a mark to look and then invent the tool to make that mark, and sometimes engineer a consistency of paint to work with it.

The tool I use almost exclusively now is the ball bead chain. I experimented with this early on, getting the idea from seeing billboards up close in the Paris Metro platforms. With this I can get a multitude of marks on each pass. I can also get a smaller mark than with any other tool I have tried.

Here are some photos of tools I have used.