Another self-portrait, a little more colour this time. Wanted a different angle, so spent a good 30 minutes balancing mirrors on boxes and an old easel, until I could see myself comfortably while drawing.
I’ve used a little illusion here, running some patches of colour straight across the facial boundary. Our brains fill in the missing lines, so it’s actually quite difficult not to see a complete face. I’ve also deliberately placed the specularity along the top of the head at the wrong level, but again our brains plonk it back where we think it should be, and we still interpolate a surface correctly.
This is all stuff I learned while researching for my psychology doctorate – as well as the lovely dot of white on the pupil of the eye which we instantly read as a shiny curved surface. A good third of my thesis was directly concerned with visual perception, and what our brains have to do in order to interpret the “visual field”.
So, 20 years ago, my brain full of psychology theory (and practice), how to make art from it?
There were some obvious directions to go in:
Make art out of optical illusions – be a contemporary MC Escher. Well, not only had Escher already done it, he’d pretty much covered every base, and with far greater skill than I could ever hope to achieve.
Then there’s the whole cognitive thing. Logic, axioms, deduction, contradiction, the beauty of mathematical structures. But I still had bad feelings from that side of my research – I had addressed an international conference on “Truth Maintenance, Second Order Logic and Default Logic”, exposing my humble piece of research to the scrutiny of the two dozen or so logicians from around the world who were actually interested in this little niche. I realised at this point that, whatever I was, I was not a logician. It was rather like being a fish addressing a conference of cycling enthusiasts. So, I didn’t really want to follow this direction creatively either.
I’d also spent quite a lot time researching dreams and dream interpretation. I’ve always had very vivid dreams, and have been fascinated by those who spend their lives deriving meaning from them. Well, there’s the straightforward path of “Dream Art”, an approach with a good provenance, especially from the surrealist movement. But a brief survey of Dali’s work convinced me that my dreams weren’t anything like as interesting as his, and again, I wasn’t going to come close to his technical skill … not for a long time, at least.
Another tiny strand which led from my doctoral research, which barely made it into my thesis at all, was the question of emotion, spirituality and relationship. The abstract expressionists had already had a good go at this kind of thing, but I felt there was still something missing – there didn’t seem to be much in modernism that was exploring spontaneous action within groups, and where this was explored, it was mostly in the fields of poetry and music.
After a couple of years, I made contact with a small number of artists, poets, musicians and dancers who were working with these ideas; mostly Live artists with a strong affiliation to psychotherapy or art therapy. The next 18 years have been a colourful path through painting, music and live performance which have culminated in my focus on (mainly sacred) ritual.
This seems to set me apart from the mainstream, whose practitioners, though often deeply spiritual, seem to produce strictly secular work. The inclusion of direct emotion or passion into a post-modern piece or event seems to be taboo.
But whether my work turns out to be a retrograde step back into modernism, or (as I hope) a progressive synthesis between modernist and post-modernist ideas, only time will tell.
