The Artistic Urge from Prehistory to the Present.

I have been working on my 2m by 2m canvas. I attempted some gestural, Pollock style movements in my painting, but realised that this added a decorative effect and detracted from the unconcious mark making that is my goal. I therefore rubbed alot of the oil paint off with a cloth and worked more pencil marks and emulsion paint over the top. I included some symbols which are meaningful to me in the pencil marks. I think that the smeared paint added another dimention to the painting.

Anton Ehrenzweig (1967:29) states that there is a conflict between purposeful and spontaneous ways of working, while the artist is consciously shaping the large scale composition his unconscious spontaneity will add countless hardly articulate inflections. He states that if the attention is drawn towards these distortions, scribbles and textures it would “interfere with their apparent lack of structure….and rob them of their most precious quality, that impression of unstructured chaos on which their emotional impact and therefore also their unconscious order and significance depends”.

Ehrenzweig, A. (1967) The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imaginatic. London: Weidenfeld.

A question I’m always asking myself is: Is it finished?

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.

•Paul Bahn (1998) argues that the aesthetic urge in man is not some recent refinement of civilization, but part of an ancient deep seated need of our species.

Bahn, P, G. (1998) The Cambridge Illustrated History of Prehistoric Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

•In 1878 Nietzsche said “everything essential in human development occurred in primeval times, long before those four thousand years with which we are more or less familiar. Man probably hasn’t changed much more in these years” (Nietzsche 2008:12).

Nietzsche, F. (2008) Nietzsche: Human, all too Human and Beyond Good and Evil. Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited.

•Griselda Pollock (2006) in Psychoanalysis and the image suggests that although the artworks of ancient cultures may be perceived as infantile and compared with childhood formations which are counted as immature, “the psychoanalytic study of the pre-history of individuals or what we might call ancient human cultures is always a study of the self, not the other, of the pre-shaped present not the superseded past” (Pollock 2006:12).

Pollock, G. (ed) (2006) Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives. Maiden, USA: Blackwell Publishing.

•The markings in much contemporary art are comparable to the markings in ancient works of art.

•Of course the world has changed a lot since we lived in caves. We now have advances in technology and capitalist consumerism requires a constant state of progress.

•As Jean-Francois Lyotard predicted, in the western world many of us live in a comfort zone experiencing life through the television.

Lyotard,J-F. (1986) ‘Defining the Postmodern’ In Postmodernism. London: Institute of contemporary Arts.

•Edward Smith and John Grande (2004) state that, new technological innovations are increasingly pulling us away from direct experience with nature into a virtual world.

Smith, E, L and Grande, J, K (2004) Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists. Albany: State University of New York Press.

•Lucy, R Lippard (1983) suggests that the contemporary notions are of novelty and obsolescence whereas prehistoric notions were of natural growth and cycles.

Lippard, L, R. (1983) Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory. New York: The New Press.

I think that my last piece of art work needs some varnished areas. I also think that it would have benefited from some colour and texture in the preparation of the canvas.

I have just started my next piece of work in the studio. I used emulsion and acrylic paint aswell as black powder paint, ink and pencil in the preparation stage. I drew into the wet emulsiuon paint with pencil, using my left hand. This is a technique used by Cy Twomby. Twombly drew with his left hand in the dark in order to imitate the direct simplicity he found in childrens drawings and primitive art. I have also used my fingers, Cy Twombly thought that using his hands in a painting directly linked him to the art of prehistory.

Varnedoe, K. (1994) Cy Twombly: A Retrospective. New York: The Museum of Modern Art.

I chose to work on a large canvas so that I could be immersed in it and use the full extension of my body in mark making. The large canvas is also better for emulating a wall or rock surface.

I like the way the shadow from the window plays out over the canvas in the first image, it looks like a primitive stick man.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=682737681760868&set=a.549192351782069.122521.284381244929849&type=1&theater

My most recent painting completed in the studio. In it I have included images from ancient cave paintings as well as archaic symbols. This painting was a excercise in mark making. Following Jackson Pollock, I have used the canvas as an arena in which to act. The marks are instinctual and it has been interesting to see the images that have come to light. I’m not sure if it is really finished, I may have to come back to this one later.

My favorate artist at the moment is Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was also influenced by cave art. He used primitive forms and symbols to describe the state of the world as he saw it. Although his body of work was completed in the 80’s, from what I have read I believe I have similar opinions to him about the structure of the world we live in.