The Artistic Urge from Prehistory to the Present.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was heavily influenced by Cy Twombly. Richard Marshall states that, Twombly was one of the few artists that Basquiat cited as an influence and “his impact is apparent in his numerous loose, scratchy and scribbled works” (Marshall 1996:35).

Marshall, R, D. (1996) ‘Jean-Michel Basquiat and His Subjects’ In Navara, E (ed) Jean-Michel Basquiat. Paris: Galerie Enrico Navara.

Basquiat has appropriated the imagery of arrows and grid formations from cave art. Lucy Lippard refers to them as calendar grids and they may have been used for marking the passing of time.

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

Marshall suggests that Basquiat had a fascination with rock art and directly borrowed images from African cave drawings.

Bernard Blistene states that Basquiat sought to go back to the origins. He suggests that his work could be “regarded as the modern equivalent of this form of cave art”. He suggests that he uses an “instinctive sense that guided the hand of the first men” (Blistene, 1997:9).

Blistene, B. (1997) Jean-Michel Basquiat: Works on Paper. Paris: Foundation Dina Vierny Musee.

Marshall suggests that Basquiat began as a graffiti artist and was attracted to rock art as it is an early form of graffiti. Both Twombly and Basquiat use writing as a visual language. This is in the same vein as ancient writing such as Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Oriental calligraphy and ideograms from other ancient cultures.

In 1924 Andre Breton began automatic writing and in 1961 Maurice Merleau Ponty wrote the surrealist manifesto highlighting the act of drawing and writing as a liberating graphic mark making which was considered to put the artist in touch with his unconscious.

I am very inspired by Cy Twombly who was influenced by Breton and Merleau Ponty.

Nicola Del Roscio argues that Twombly creates a direct link between his hand and his nervous system. She states that it should not only be compared to the automatic drawing of the surrealists but also to the poetic theory of ‘projective verse’ defined by Charles Olson, whereby the heart is connected to the line by the breath.

Del Roscio, N (2002) Writings on Cy Twombly. Munich: Schirmer-Mosel.

Harold Szeeman suggests that Twombly’s markings are “eruptions of raw psychic energy” (Szeeman 1987:9).

Szeemann, H. (ed) (1987) Cy Twombly: Paintings, Works on Paper, Sculpture. Munich: Prestel-Verlag.

In observing the works of Cy Twombly it is therefore important to refer to psychoanalysis.

Newton suggests that psychoanalysis sees the primitive and archaic level of the psyche as always latent, waiting to manifest itself, this requires at least the temporary overthrow of the rational grip of consciousness. He states that the very act of creativity itself involves the primitivist impulse, the desire to integrate the raw unacknowledged contents of the artists psyche.

Newton, S, J. (1996) The Politics and Psychoanalysis of Primitivism. London: Ziggurat Books.

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.