This is a painting I have just started in my garage. I attempted to put myself in a meditative state in order to tap into a primordial part of my brain.
I was reading about Georg baselitz who attempts a trance like state in order to paint. Kevin Power states that Georg Baselitz is in search of some kind of “transcendental state, or what he terms automatism” (Power 1991:9).
Power, K. (1991) ‘Hanging Between Analysis and Chaos’ in D’Offay. A. (ed) George Baselitz. London: Anthony d’Offay Gallery.
Freud (1908) was concerned with inner life and saw the artistic product not as aesthetic object but as aesthetic experience.
Freud, S (1908) ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming’ in Strachey, J (ed) (2001) The complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud volume IX. London: Vintage
Ricoeur (1970) suggests that we might think of aesthetic experience in terms of an alteration of dreaming and waking states.
Ricoeur, P. (1970) Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Since the beginnings of expression there have been shifts in psychic levels during aesthetic experience. Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams (1998) interpret Paleolithic cave paintings as related to the pursuit of contact with a parallel spiritual universe. They believe that paleolithic man used underground caves in the quest for spiritual visions. Geometric drawings are interpreted as representations of hallucinations in a trancelike state and they suggest that animal paintings were used to rituality materialise the animal spirits already present underground.
Clottes, J and Lewis-Williams, D. (1998) The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves. New York: Abrams.
Michel Lorblanchet (1990) suggests that some of the cave paintings were never meant to be viewed, the meaning was in the doing, whereas other images were carefully considered for their visual impressions. There are engraved panels in which hundreds of superimposed animals and signs have been drawn over the top of each other rendering them almost un-visible.
Lorblanchet, M. (1990) Spitting Images: Replicating the Spotted Horses of Pech-Merle. Archaeology Magazine.
