patternsthatconnect

I have told the story before that in 1979 and 1980 I made lots of little works on paper and many of them I shoved in a folder as unfinished, only to rediscover them in 2010. I decided this year to complete them, adding what I would certainly not have added when I first made them.

I remember that they were created using a process akin to “automatic writing”, doing my best to make them unconsciously. That they were on paper, small in size and carried out in haste, helped me momentarily to suspend conscious judgment. Looking back I now think of it as the setting up of an “as if frame”, a term I borrowed from John Grinder. I also think of the process as a specific type of trance.

In going about completing these works I set up a new “as if frame” with the rules of 1) making minimal intervention, 2) keeping respect for the original image and 3) adding something that I would not have added all those years ago. A different type of trance ensues, a conversation between my two selves, Andy 1979/80 and Andy 2012.

Talking to Myself, 2012, acrylic and oil pastel with collage on paper, 15cm x 27.5cm

I have a number of unfinished sketches that I made in 1980. They were composed in the manner of automatic writing, paying as little conscious attention to what I was making as I knew how to back then (I have since learned hypnosis).

"Maquette", 2012, oil pastel on acrylic on paper, 29 cm x 21 cm

Many years later, I add to them, asking the question “what does this painting need to complete it, that I would have been unlikely to add in 1980?”

I think of them as an integration of conscious and unconscious processes as well as an integration of past and present. They also get me thinking about the act of finishing something, how we know, for example, when a painting is finished, and then whether there could be a recommencement at a much later date.

Forms on a coloured ground seems to be the theme of these sketches/small paintings on paper I made years ago.

I wonder what happens when you take a small sketch that was created almost unconsciously, years ago, and use it as a study for a large, quite consciously constructed painting today?

Even the title of Soren Kierkegaard’s book Philosophical Fragments or A Fragment of Philosophy, published in 1844, was a criticism of the systematising bent of the (Hegelian) philosophy of his day. Rather than a system he chose to offer only a fragment.

Today, looking through a pile of coloured sketches that I had made many years ago, later inadvertently hid, and then found only last year, there amongst them, was this fragment, once the lower edge of a little pastel sketch that I cropped. The rest of the sketch was lost, but this fragment was not. I like it because it was constructed almost unconsciously. It is the accidental off-cut of something that was consciously designed.

I could imagine ‘systematising” it by repeating it in various ways, according to a specific formula.

I completed a painting recently and gave it the title Wakefield Bridge because when I visited the Hepworth, Wakefield I saw three paintings that seemed to suggest a bridge between the work I was doing and where I wanted to it to go. I didn’t know consciously that I had also seen a painting there by J.M.W. Turner entitled Wakefield Bridge.

J.M.W. Turner, Wakefield Bridge, c.1798 Watercolour The British Museum ©The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved. Image by courtesy Hepworth Wakefield

How arrogant of me to name my painting after his, especially as a mantra I like to recite in regard to my painting is “Remember, its not major art you are making!”

According to Donald D Hofffman, when we construct colour, we use a wider area of our visual field to determine the colour we see at a point. The context changes what we see.

When we construct colour, rather than colour alone we construct several visual properties all at the same time, and we attempt to make those properties mutually consistent.

When we see the world we are far more than passive observers, the very act of seeing is an act of construction, of sense making, long before we even begin to consciously ‘make sense of it’.

‘Mind and body are one system’ is an NLP mantra (like  ‘you cannot not communicate’ and ‘the meaning of he communication is the response you receive’)). Many of these originate in Gregory Bateson’s writings. In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, referencing Aldous Huxley, Bateson argues that integrating mind and body, conscious and unconscious, achieves a state of grace, and that art has precisely this function. I find something similar in Stephen Gilligan‘s work, where self-relations is about integrating cognitive and somatic minds.

In Tony Godfrey’s book Painting Today, discussing Jonathan Lasker’s paintings, he explains that Lasker makes postcard-size drawings or doodles, with ballpoint pen and oil, and transposes them to large paintings as a way of consciously appreciating the unconscious.

I like the idea that the small-sized work: drawing, doodle,sketch, engages the somatic or unconscious mind (perhaps like automatic writing) and that one approach to integrating the two minds is to then transpose the product of the unconscious,consciously, to a larger scale painting.

I hope that it is appreciation rather than exploitation.

The book I have open nearly all the time at the moment is Painting Today by Tony Godfrey.

the book I have open nearly all the time

In it he says “Making a painting is all about hand, eye and brain co-ordination: no other art form links mind and body so totally”. I like that.

Are there some similarities to  Gregory Bateson’s suggestion in Steps to an Ecology of Mind that art integrates the reasons of the heart with the reasons of the reason, i.e. those multiple levels of mind “of which one extreme is called consciousness and the other the unconscious“?

To co-ordinate mind and body and to integrate conscious and unconscious seem to me to be slightly different descriptions of the same thing.

Stephen Gilligan uses the labels cognitive mind and somatic mind (body mind) more or less as synonyms for conscious and unconscious. He also adds a third: field mind, that I think in some ways seems similar to Jung’s collective unconscious. I believe Gilligan might also see art as a means of co-ordinating or integrating the three minds.

Does painting achieve this co-ordination more than any other art form?

Surely dance does it equally well (or better)?

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I am looking at these sketches I did ages ago

I like to paint them quickly, leave them for a long time (years) and then come back to look at them

They are both miniature paintings in their own right, and studies for larger work.

For me, because they are on a very small scale they don’t matter, and that means I can be more spontaneous  than in my larger paintings. Sometimes, I think that I would like to simply ‘reproduce’ them as large canvases. Other times I prefer that the approach taken finds its way into the other work.

In the sketches the unconscious or somatic mind is more ‘in charge’. If I am not careful, the larger paintings can become all too conscious or cognitive mind.

Integrating the two minds, is one of the things that painting can achieve.

A workplace learning activity I sometimes lead, has four teams, each representing a country, in turn represented by a coloured rectangle on a ‘playing board’. Each team member parts with a small amount of cash at the beginning of the activity (50p or £1). A team may win back their money at the end, or other countries may win it from them. It depends how many roads they are able to build. Each road is worth say 20p, and in order to build one, a team is required to negotiate with the country whose land (or other roads) they intend to cross. They ‘build’ the roads by use of a marker pen. This is not an art activity. it is an activity about negotiation, politics, strategic decision-making, values etc.
And look at some of the art that is unwittingly/unconsciously created

unconscious art, outsider art, collaborative art, found art, process art, conceptual art, abstract art, figurative art, not art at all?