Well... for starters, I do have quite a volatile relationship with my pencil and paper. The ideas are always with me, brewing at their own will. I am quiet until the ideas erupt like volcanic matter rushing up and streaming out like hot and cool at the same time, so whether pencil and paper are abused or nurtured, really depends on the mood of the idea. Recently, it's been a slow and sleepy affair, ruled by pattern and with something of a grace – like sitting at a lake, cool and placid, tapping now and again on its surface in hope of rousing the attention of the giant creature that lies beneath to come out the paper and grab me and pull me in. Only sometimes it does, and the relationship is volatile and rocky as it is stable and captivating, at times compelling as a very painful migraine pounding in masses of headache in tight pulses that draws you to focus on the pain by way of something like pressure therapy, because at the same time as labourious it is soothing and cooling like external seraphic rain on the skin of your face. But that’s only at the best of the best of times that’s when you feel it right through; I will go at it for hours without the slightest sense of discomfort in my 4-hour-awkwardly-stationed posture, dot after dot and line after line. The better times are when I can sit and track the creature’s swim and have a pencil or paintbrush move right in time, and when you have the enduring sensation of pins and needles like irritating rainshower coming to be but never quite refreshing … the other times leave me with landscapes of a lake and no creatures to be seen, and no rain, either.
But the best thing about drawing (versus painting, for example) is that you can have the simplest conditions – pencil meets paper, stand back and let your hand do the work while your body flips back into a recess behind it where your mind can melt and mold into dreamy pounds of imagined figures that come to play on the page and you’re never knowing, you’re always the audience, laying back in comfort and ease because you’ve forgotten about yourself. And so instead of being conscious of developing a style, and as I am pretty sure there’s much opportunity for different themes and phases, for me the greatest way to stylistic consequence is just to relax let creativity roll over me, and to find style by not trying to get it. That said, by a kind of irony it actually does sometimes take substantial efforts to be passive, as we’re not trained to act subconsciously. So then it can’t be got by trying not to get it, and hence the booze-induced or pot fuelled expression of quite a few people I know – and by quite a few people I include, occasionally, myself… but for the most part I do it soberly.
Well anyhow, it is honest – in fact somehow it feels like one thing I do most honestly… Talking and writing take more conscious efforts and so come out a little more coloured by motive and by wishes and desire; making music is still at a stage where it happens before becoming a symptom of the thought – when it does work it is always a result of a mental or emotional process and purely that, but sometimes it’s barred by my fingers’ inability to deliver.
And with all of that said I ‘m actually not happy with any of my drawings and if you ask me, all of them still need to be improved. What’s good about the process though is that I can see a way opening up to me, I’m getting to know the person I’m creatively becoming more each day and still so strangely as if passive, passive to her control. I may have mentioned in my last blog, that I feel much of the time as though I’m following myself, there’s always an energy taking lead that comes close toward me and pulls me toward it whether I’m moving or still. It could be part of what makes people believe in god (or *the force* – I reckon Star Wars has it down), or it might be a manifest idea of the alter-ego you are tracking and trying to meet, or even just its ghost. But this seems to be something people refer to when they speak of the Divine, of beautiful enchantment, tenuous threads of rapture or orgasmic revelation. And it is what artists seek. It can feel as a content or subtle euphoria, a unique kind of attainment as you’ve been its sole creator, mover and maker, that results in a certain agreement with the world. And so there is a wave that comes over you which casts invented scents and colours you’ve never seen; the world is more lucid and growingly magical as if it’s in love with you, and you can just breathe it in as freely as ever; yet, it is brief and fleeting, liminal and transitory, and it never holds for long enough.
David Lynch speaks about using the interesting unique method of transcendental meditation to induce ideas out of their base state and thus achieve them – and though his films may seem unnecessarily twisted and surreal, the point is that he has baited his skill to bring out the real stuff from under his conscious currents for us to have, to watch, almost to hold in our hands and to smell, see and taste (anyone who’s seen Eraserhead will know what I mean). The trick is to nurture and grow the systems around you, both personal and peripheral, and let them be simple mediums – and at the base of this keep a meditation which by its stillness, transcends the reality teeming around you in a fluffy buzz of ideas and thoughts, and lets you be grounded, wholly and silently.
So, with that in mind, my current project involves working on my painting method. This is certainly not a sleepy, gracefully passive, or unconscious process– no, it’s bloody hard work. So as long as I keep learning, hopefully it will eventually reach a similar stage to my drawing, where I can let it be more natural, and more efficient, than it is now.
...Well, that’s it for today - I now have to somehow magically whip up a 2,500 word research assignment for uni, due on Monday. I was up till 3am making pictures with pastels and crayons (I’m loving the crayon these days). Anyway, I might write about the essay later, here… though it’s not likely as I’ll be completely over it afterwards.
1 comment:
I think art is our way of becoming invisible. We are so often reminded of ourselves with petty needs and desires, that our only relief is to transpose the burden of existing to an object - To make something we know to be more important than ourselves.
It's hard to be invisible when you're not blind drunk.
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