Art Talk

Language reality and image

2011-07-13T02:09:00.000-07:00

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life. ~Henry Miller

The big question for those researching the languages of representing reality is why do some suggest that the motivations behind art and science represent conflicting impulses, while others see the two approaches as integrally related? Model-making is an essential feature of all human thinking and applies to obtaining both a scientific and an artistic understanding of the world. In both activities, the "abstraction ladder," leads from observations of a material reality to simpler models made visible using the 'languages' of numbers, diagrams, poetic descriptions and pictures. Through abstraction, art as picture making today is becoming increasingly complex and referential; aspects of culture and our ecological identity are constantly being brought to together, by either implication or association, in landscape. The conjunction of these processes in the work of Susi Bellamy, implies a new way of cross-discipline thinking, which needs clarification through the critiques of artists and/or scientists if none is provided by the artist herself.

As soon as a person starts to think she starts to criticize. Human nature is inclined to comparison and discussion, particularly now that we live in an age when the public have come to expect the artist to constantly review her relationship with images. This is usually achieved using abstract forms. The objective is to create a personal language for articulating a sharper reality of relationships between people, environment and the psyche. Explanation of a work of art involves discovering a meaning and its significance to the human condition. An important part of the critics' role is to discover and write about the intended and perceived meanings the work may have for the viewer. This is particularly important when reviewing Susi Bellamy's work because she has been for the past two decades always in the territory of experimentation. There she has engaged with research into pictorial representation aimed at the blurring of direct human references in order to reconstruct a more thoughtful relationship between people's inner and outer worlds.

From time to time she has immersed herself in the skills of representational art to create traditional still life and portraits. But her real motivation has been to apply old master techniques and palettes to create abstract metaphors of topographical mindfulness. In this endeavour she grapples with the historical procession of art in order to re-conceive, experience and revise it as a personal language.

Since the 17th century exotic shells were a favourite item in still life paintings, often in combination with large bouquets of flowers. Many would say that Susi Bellamy has picked up this historical thread of realism to explore the way randomness and precision, which come together in shell pigmentation, may give rise to pleasing patterns.

Every artist has to find a way of describing the inner truth of things. This is the unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its subjective uniqueness and differentiates it from other things. Then there comes the definition of a route to transmit it as a mental wholeness to others in the hope that it will be seen as more than a pleasing image. The term 'inscape' was invented by the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, to describe inner truths of things in conjunction with the term "instress." By "inscape" he means the unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it from other things, and by "instress" he means either the force of being which holds the inscape together or the impulse from the inscape which carries it whole into the mind of the beholder. He also uses the term to mean ‘the stress within’, the force which binds something or a person into a unit.

It is possible to trace Hopkins’ ideas on the nature of perception to his early encounter in 1872 with the writings of the medieval author, John Duns Scotus (c.1265-1308). Scotus was a Franciscan friar born in Duns, in the Scottish borders, and studied and taught at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Paris. He, in turn, had taken the germ of the ideas from Peter Lombard's ‘Sentences’. Peter Lombard was an Italian theologian (c.1100-c.1160-64) who wrote his book of 'sentences' in about 1150. Arranged in four parts, it discusses all aspects of theological doctrine systematically in a long series of questions. A key phrase in Scotus which seems to have been developed by Hopkins was:

‘By grasping just what things are of themselves, a person separates the essences from the many additional incidental features associated with them in the sense image… and sees what is true… as a more universal truth.’

We can take from Hopkins the essence of probing a divide between descriptive science and spirituality. For example, on 13 August 1874 he wrote;

‘ The laps of running foam striking the sea-wall double on themselves and return in nearly the same order and shape in which they came. This is mechanical reflection and is the same as optical: indeed all nature is mechanaical, but then it is not seen that mechanics contain that which is beyond mechanics’

Modern neuropsychology is investigating these two aspects of seeing and communicating because it is at the heart of both our feelings of 'belonging' and 'alienation'. In the poem "Ad Marian," Hopkins impersonates the inscape of the month of May in a pre-Christan spirtitual setting as Spring's daughter. In so doing, we see the inscape as an archetype of the Mother of all humankind, who is as vital "as Dew unto grass and tree." The poems remind us that the female principle of fecundity is ever present in the landscape. It is significant therefore that Susi Bellamy during a period of residence in Italy came to focus on the re-construction of 13th and 14th century icons of the Madonna. Her starting point was the extensive collection of Madonnas in the Venice Accademia Galleries, where they are stranded high and dry from the sea of faith which produced them seven centuries ago. What she has produced are powerful and disturbing contemporary icons of motherhood in which the naturalistic facial features of Mary and her child are enfolded in a complex expanded decorative collaged cosmos. Their instress emphasises the truth that a noisy unruly world can't take away the persona and its relationships with the processes of nature. They are most essential for each of us. These Madonna inscapes should be reassuring to anyone in the midst of a world of trivial productions that is threatening to remove what is most essential to their individuality.

Susi's choice to manipulate a powerful Christian icon is not the beginnings of cultural disavowal but an attempt to make visible and readable what for most people in the West has become withheld from comprehension and symbolisation. She has made the surfaces of the paintings visibly deeper and each Madonna is the equivalent of a mental 'big bang'.

The decorative random, yet ordered, matrix constructed from mass-produced paper patterns produces a deep cosmic depth in which many narratives are possible in the mind of the viewer. Her pictures, like the works that led up to them, are really toolkits for meditation on our affair with consumerism, which today pervades everything we are.

Every day, we move through landscapes that are the historical results of local economic processes of programmed randomness. Susi began painting on the premise that there are many ways to combine abstract language with the stylistic forms of figurative painting to reveal intermediate hidden truths of mental picturing. This is evident in her many 'halfway away/half way back' effects, which are the outcomes of moving up and down the ladder of abstraction on a quest to capture and transmit more than is visible to the naked eye. This has involved the controlled use of randomness to enable works to form freely. The Madonna pictures came after a period when she was engaged in producing formless but dynamic 'plasmas' which explored combining chaos and order of liquid paint on tilted canvas. In the end, order prevailed in which areas of colour were arranged like rows of classified rocks and vibrant microcosms constrained within golden ribbons. The Madonnas and their characteristic colour palette seem to emerge from the end point of this phase where entities coalesced like technicoloured polished sections cut through meteorites.

This emphasises that Susi's consistent probing approach to reveal inscapes has been based on the adoption of a distinctive, vibrant palette echoing the false digitised colours used by astronomers to delineate the complexity of galaxies and the birth and death of stars. In this respect, they are miniature expressions of cosmic thinking. Another development of randomness-with-order, was her printmaking carried out in the Florentine print workshops, which served Picasso and Henry Moore. In these experiments rows of darker, angular, horizontal structures divide up a landscape format, like inscribed stone walls. These are inscapes where the instress could focus on compartmentation as symbolising either 'belonging' or 'exclusion'.

Regarding the expressive power of her work, an ambiguity of meaning is one of its most definitive characteristics. At one time you may imagine you are looking at a section of Hadrian's Wall in the empty Northumbrian landscape. Another time, the same picture may appear as a piece of crumpled patterned fabric. A jagged mass of blue might be a transient break in a threatening sky implying a forthcoming natural disaster, whereas its incidental feature was the surface of a lighted swimming pool overlooking a deep Tuscan valley in twilight. Here, as in most of her work, Susi literally harnesses randomness and makes it operate on the entities selected for exploration. Many people like her paintings, probably because, as just another species, and the result of natural selection, we seem to gladly embrace fractal and chaotic structures and work on them to discern some kind of order. In the ever-threatening world in which our biological evolution occurred, such behaviour would confer a survival advantage by reinforcing a sense of place.

With her early background in fashion journalism it was inevitable that Susi would become interested in the relationship between the frame and the picture. In contemplating a picture, the frame is generally taken for granted. It is a fait accompli, and most of us may be unaware of how powerfully the frame can influence our perception and enjoyment of the picture within. It was in Florence that she studied the classical proportions, abstracted sculptural ornament and muted patina of Renaissance and Baroque frames. Florentine frame-making is part and parcel of the family histories of master carpenters who still ply a trade as old as the Madonna icons.

The marriage of picture and frame may be harmonious or discordant, enhancing or depressing, or somewhere in between. In Susi’s view, most private and public collections contain pictures the true impact of which has been compromised by their frames - often in an insidious way - for decades or even centuries. Susi is adamant that the artist should devote much thought to the way a frame can enhance the 'performance' of an image. Her frames possess a timeless quality, not necessarily related to a specific period of interior decoration.

In all her works, Susi has produced modern icons for meditation on the birthing moments we all have when suddenly becoming aware of a new arrangement of the natural or built environment. This is a pointer to the fact that for many modern artists the instress of human adaptation to environment is a steady process of being at one with the physical laws of the universe and the random events they produce. Humanity is not the one-off supernatural project of an omniscient being.

The opening up of windows on non-religious spirituality happened for Susi Bellamy when she gave up strict control over the application of paint with a brush to dribble and paste directly onto the canvas. The actual shapes, patterns and textures were largely determined by the random dynamics of the material and her process: the viscosity of the paint and the speed and direction of its flow on the canvas. An important random factor in the making of Madonnas was the availability of commercial patterned papers. This is simply to say that throughout her career Susi has been firmly in the territory of artistic experimentation, intent on making various kinds of paintings as alternative solutions of equal worth rather than attesting to a life-long process of relentless technical development. Her consistent aim has been to render visible 'inner' or 'immaterial' phenomena. In this respect, she sits firmly at the forefront of part of the contemporary art scene, which is a play of language, reality and image. As art and science continue to bump up against each other, new images are constantly required to express new models of reality and Susi's diversity of artistic style becomes a deliberate stylistic principle of cross-disciplinary research.

Associative play makes a good painting

2010-09-07T03:26:00.000-07:00

In a famous letter to the French mathematician Jacques Hadamard, Einstein confesses:

“The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities, which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images, which can be voluntarily reproduced and combined… The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously, only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.

What follows is an account of a project to investigate the idea that abstract paintings tap into a fundamental, primitive part of our existence - the part of us that experiences life without words, beyond language, and transcending definitions.

The making process

Einstein’s letter is a reminder that an important thing that art does is to externalise the minds of maker and viewer. The artist guides us to the threshold of being by placing before us pictures representative of his or her morals, experiences, emotions and values. The hope of the painter is that they are enough like our own to reassure both maker and viewer of their authenticity and that they have a legitimate place in the wider world. A picture articulates the experiences of our very existence, such as matter, light, time and order, because they are recognised as microcosmic representations of the world. This is the short answer the question, what is art? It also introduces related questions that can be investigated in terms of two central problems of how and why paintings are made. These questions are:

Does painting proceed along the lines of musical composition where a particular structure is taken as a theme that is repeatedly varied and each variation is a valid entity? Or is making a painting like a process of scientific experimentation where all possibilities of placing lines, shapes and colours have to be examined before one particular arrangement is taken as being ideal?

The truth of the first proposition is a self-evident because from its beginnings, representational painting has been bound up with the existence of unity in the art of individuals and of schools. The second proposition is less obvious, but is best investigated from the philosophy of abstract art, which involves the interdependent visual processes of invention of an image and its reception. An appropriate point to start an analysis of the second proposition is at the forefront of abstract art, where art and science come together as a struggle with the concept of the marked surface as an evolved aspect of being human. Gerhardt Richter, who has an outstanding presence in the contemporary world of abstract art summarises the ‘making’ and ‘viewing’ aspects of his craft as follows:

“ ‘What’ is the hardest thing, because it is the essence; ‘How’ is easy by comparison. To start off with the ‘How’ is frivolous, but legitimate, Apply the ‘How’ and thus, use the requirements of technique, the material and physical possibilities, in order to realize the intention. The intention is to invent nothing, no idea, no composition, no form, and to receive everything; composition, object, form, idea, picture” Gerhardt Richter.

This leaves open the question of feedback from viewing the surface of the canvas to the artist and viewer. This was answered by Robert Rauschenberg (1975) as follows.

A good painting is one that is misunderstood for a very long time. When you get understanding or if you can remember what you are looking at, well. Then there is no need for it, it’s finished. When the painting starts looking like the way you remember it, well. Then that’s the end of that painting. And like the reason I’m interested in all those changes, actual changes, something that exists, and like I found out recently that scientists use the term ‘real time’, then it will have a presence that’s related to that particular moment, and the fact that you are the one that’s experiencing it”

Both Richter and Rauschenberg were influenced by John Cage, the legendary musician/ composer/artist who befriended both artists in Paris in 1949, encouraging them to approach their art without preconceived ideas. Cage was a prolific lecturer, particularly in New York City, and his famous "Lecture on Nothing" (1949) advocated "nonintention" on the part of artists, and a receptiveness to and acceptance of ordinary life in the previously "hallowed" halls of the fine art world. This contributed to a pivotal shift away from Abstract Expressionism and geometric abstraction; in sound (music) and colour (in art). In 1986 Richter himself described his abstractions as a search for something "which I could not plan, which is better, cleverer, than I am, something which is also more universal"

Based on the above quotations, the first part of our project is to make pictures, which involve starting with nothing. There are no ideas, and therefore no target composition or forms. We make marks in a random process that adds form, colour, line, texture, pattern, resulting in a composition. This allows us freedom and flexibility to express our world viewers and inner realities. To achieve this baseline it is necessary to return to the basic human behaviour of making marks. Any training in art must be renounced and the picture maker must simply rely on access to a surface, pigments and applicators. Our process involves randomly applying paint to the canvas in response to what the maker sees emerging in the picture plane. The response is made with hand gestures, such as picking up a tube of paint and spreading it e.g. with finger, brush or piece of crumpled paper, or adding collage components. Composition, object, form and idea are then perceived as a sequence of outcomes as the painting progresses, each merging into the next. We end the making process when a memorable ‘something’ exists.

The viewing process

The second part of the project is to use our abstract pictures to elicit responses of viewers, on the supposition that it is through its texture, structure and matrix that an abstract painting detaches itself from all privileged conventions of perceptual cognitive and semantic experiences. In this sense, it is a test of the viewer to make it legible. Here we are in need of objective criteria that others might learn from and apply.

Here we are dealing with what it means to be human and live socially with the concepts of:

· aesthetic preference i.e. the degree with which people like a particular visual stimulus or not, how much they prefer it to another, or how they rate its beauty,

· aesthetic judgment i.e. the valuation of a certain visual stimulus.

· and, aesthetic appreciation i.e. the human capacity to divide the world into beautiful and ugly things, to prefer a blue car to a red one, and to like blond men more than others.

The first two concepts are dependent on education and other cultural influences. But it is likely that aesthetic appreciation is a general genetic endowment that:

“was present at least at the time of our species’ birth, though it probably built on pre-existing cognitive and affective processes. It led the first Homo sapiens to decorate their bodies and to make necklaces, enabled our upper Paleolithic ancestors to create breath-taking murals on cave walls, drove Michelangelo to sculpt David, and allows us to admire all of this. But it also allowed our ancestors to avoid settling in resourceless environments, feeling attracted by sick-looking people, and it allows us to avoid living in bare-walled houses, and wearing brown with red’.
http://www.tdr.cesca.es/TDX/TDX_UIB/TESIS/AVAILABLE/TDX-0404108-112455//tmnr1de1.pdf

Every painting, abstract as well as representational, is open to all sorts of meanings, but at the same time all paintings point beyond themselves. The "meanings" often referred to as being the paramount criterion of "high art" revolve around historic, philosophic, and religious dimensions. Religious images of a sensory reality are expressed in Christianity for example, in saints and their lives, but projections of a non-religious extrasensory reality can better be addressed through abstract painting. Richter speaks of this transcendental side to abstract painting. When we look at a picture representing a material subject our response is to dwell on the subject matter to feed our material understanding of it and its cultural context. Our response to an abstract work of art, which is not produced in response to a predetermined objective, is to dwell on its spiritual richness to feed our own aesthetic thoughtfulness. To the viewer of the painting, references to the real world may be seen and where one individual can make out and 'see' the information or an idea with, another viewer may have a completely different experience seeing the work in a completely different way.

A link between the work of many of the artists emerging in the 1990’s is that the work lives purely through its audience, in other words the art takes place within the interaction between the viewer, with his/her body of knowledge, and the art object, as information structured in a particular way by the artist, whereas unseen, it remains simply structured information and ceases to be art.” Jackson Pollock, one of America's most famous abstract painters of this era described the response of one of his viewers as follows:

"Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was."

It is left to the viewer to relate to the paintings within their own framework of expectation and understanding. In the final analysis the seemingly impersonal method we have chosen for this investigation leaves our work fundamentally open to interpretation, so that it is free to mean anything and nothing at the same time. This is perhaps its real significance - that it is at once both an affirmation and a calling into question of the meaning of art.

Here are some pointers to gaining meaning from abstract works.

One way to gain meaning is to look at abstract art in the same way that you would listen to music. This is how one educational website described this approach to elicit meaning.

“When you listen to music, you don't try to hold on to the notes - you let them wash over you. Let your eyes wander over the painting the way the notes of a symphony wash over your soul. Let your eyes play with the painting, slipping around corners, following the twirls, twists and turns, dipping in and out of the surface. Let your eyes dance around the piece. Rather than trying to figure out what the painting looks like, just allow yourself to be taken in by the painting. See what emotions, sensations or memories emerge. Let your eyes relax and travel around the piece without expectation. Examine the colours, forms, materials, surface, and how they interact with each other. Take your time. Let the painting "speak" to you”.

Regarding scientific studies, Kurt A Bruder has investigated how viewers verbalize their experience of paintings in order to interactively manufacture meaning. This sense-making process is consequential not merely for the viewers' understanding of the artwork but for their conception of the world, and of themselves and others in it. Perhaps most significant, viewers employ artwork as a material and symbolic resource in the ceaseless interactive fabrication of their own identities. Bruder’s study explored the talk of viewers as they encountered paintings in an art gallery. An inductive analysis of conversations recorded between viewers and one of the researchers resulted in the identification of three categories of art talk: Evaluation, Attraction, and Storytelling. Further, the authors distinguish two design features governing this kind of talk, Narration and Reification.
http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/abs/10.1525/si.2000.23.4.337

Marcos Nadal Roberts carried out research into the complexity and aesthetic preference for diverse pictorial stimuli and found that people tend to base their rating of the complexity of visual stimuli on different aspects, depending on their sex and the kind of stimulus. His results suggest that there are three main categories of response:
(i) those related with the amount and variety of elements,
(ii) those related with object recognition and scene organization,
(iii) and (iii) asymmetry. These three aspects of complexity seem to be related in different ways to general ratings of the complexity and to ratings of beauty of visual stimuli,

Finally, the analogy with music is worth taking further. It is claimed by Abraham Walkowitz that music is the ideal of all art. Abstract painting "dwells in the realm of music with an equivalent emotion. Its melody is attuned to the receptive eye as music to the ear." According to Jerome Ashmore, "pure music and non-objective painting are alike:

· in their richness of purely aesthetic experience, that is, as an experience of sensuousness;
· in ignoring physical objects as models for representation;
· and alike in being a stimulus to something analogous to mystical experience.

The mystical experience provides an illusion, which is accepted as a genuine insight into part of the basic character of the universe, an insight 'felt' to be much more 'real' than any provided by physical objects.

However, in order to be an equivalent experience to listening to music, a picture as a production has to be presented as a sequence of images on the way to an end point. These intermediates would then be somewhat analogous to musical movements. They would be entities that have to be viewed in a certain sequence. Richter has photographed the various stages on his way to making some of his abstract pictures. These have been described as a rhythm of becoming and passing away. Each one in the sequence differs both in terms of the style of the marks and textures and hence they do not form a unity in the sense of traditional composition. Each is a state of a temporal continuum that is stored as a snapshot. By looking at them in sequence the viewer is reliving the ‘score’ of Richter’s creativity.

The education resource

The following six pictures are presented as a resource for downloading or eliciting written comments about aesthetic preferences.

1 (original size 20cm X 20cm)

2 (original size 20cm X 20cm)

3 (original size 20cm X 20cm)

4 (original size 20cm X 20cm)

5 (original size 20cm X 20cm)

6 (original size 20cm X 40cm)

Zig zagging into abstraction

2010-08-30T13:28:00.000-07:00

1 The scope of romanticism

Edmund Burke's 'Inquiry into the Origins of the Sublime' published in 1757 marked the birth of the literary Romantic Movement as an expression of fear. It is based on Burke’s the proposition that:

'what soever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, is a source of the sublime',

from which he deduces

'the sublime effect of darkness, or destructive power, of solitude and silence and the roaring of animals'.

Seven years later Horace Walpole dreamed that he was in the hall of an ancient castle, and on the uppermost banister of the staircase saw a gigantic hand in armour. When he awoke he wrote the first horror story, 'The Castle of Otranto'.

Not long before, in painting, this sentiment of the sublime had been expressed in Giambattista Piranesi’s Carceri etchings of 1745. Piranesi was born in 1720, the son of a Venetian stonemason, and was trained to become an architect. For thirty years he was diverted to draw the ruins of Rome with relentless accuracy; but he never ceased to find them terrifying and oppressive.

The ‘Carceri’ or ‘Prisons’ folio exists in two different forms. The first was largely designed in 1745 and published in 1750. A new edition (in fact the third) appeared in 1760. To this edition Piranesi added a couple of plates, and reworked most of the others. In some he added only a few details, but others were transformed. In most cases there was considerable gain in power and intensity, and it is from the 1760 edition that the Prisons are generally known. The frontispiece of the second edition itself offers an example (Fig 1). A large toothed wheel occupies the foreground, a pointless and sinister bridge crosses the middle of the scene, and a vertiginous catwalk appears high above our heads. This zig-zag of crazy diagonals is added to all the plates in the second edition, and thereby increases our sense of frustration. Every time our eye undertakes a journey, it is sent back, sharply and painfully. There is never a smooth transition between the two points and the zig-zag appears almost as an abstract form in many drawings of the 1760s.

In the two plates, which he added to the Prisons in 1760, he has gone all out to make them effective by filling them with reliefs representing what were to become the standard Romantic symbols of fear such as lions and bound captives, and has even included a scene of torture. We recognise the fears and frustrations of Piranesi's prisons immediately. In this context, the factories and communications infrastructures of the nineteenth century, which so often achieved a Piranesian confusion and gloom, become the prisons of industrial society. They were the visible aspect of the economic bondage of men and women who passed their days in frustrating journeys, leading only to incomprehensible work. John Gay captured this in his photograph of the zig-zag superstructure of Liverpool Street Station (Fig 2).

Kenneth Clark's reaction to Piranesi's etchings was to imagine he was able to enter the picture and experience the problems of illogical navigation.

'You must go up the stairs to obtain a permit, then take it over to one of those little round towers to be stamped; unfortunately this office is closed, and you are instructed to go up to the top gallery, but in doing so you have taken a wrong turning and have infringed the regulations, so you must come down and visit the office of the security officer'.

In other words, to Clark the Carceri represented how we are imprisoned by the frustrations of bureaucracy in the modern world.

Fig 1 The Carceri (1760)

Fig 2 Liverpool Street Station (John Gay)

In his essay of 1911 entitled ‘The Ruin’, the German sociologist Georg Simmel writes:

"Architecture, is the only art in which the great struggle between the will of the spirit and the necessity of nature issues into real peace, in which the soul in its upward striving and nature in its gravity are held in balance." In the ruin, nature begins to have the upper hand: the "brute, downward-dragging, corroding, crumbling power" produces a new form, "entirely meaningful, comprehensible, differentiated."

This tells us that Piranesi in his depictions of ruins was really introducing us to the aesthetics of a random visual gain of entropy as the creativity of Ancient Rome’s architects crumbled away, whereas Gay was showing us, through the random meaningless cropping of the outcomes of a precise engineering logic, the fascination of the zigzag, an abstract motive common to both. The latter are actually responses to a picture’s spiritual richness and may be defined as its capacity to stimulate thoughtfulness on big questions of life, such as, What is art?. In both cases, the pointless ruin and the part-structure taken out of its functional context, both make the point that romanticism, in its literary, musical or graphic expressions, now means being a staunch individualist, believing in the rights of other individuals, and expressing deep, intense, and often uplifting emotions. Charles Baudelaire was able to articulate this important aspect of modernism in the mid-19th century when he wrote:

"To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art -- that is, intimacy, spirituality, colour, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.”

2 Cortical abstraction

With the development of abstract art, Romanticism has now freed human imagination and skills from trying to capture reality, although all they were doing was to depict a particular type of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture. Nevertheless, the award-winning artists of our day no longer respond to materialistic objectives. They no longer have to hunt for earthly motives before painting. Art has developed to become spiritually creative but in a non-religious sense. To display the spiritual beauty of an intense yellow it is no longer necessary to paint a lemon, or search the sky to contrast it with a lovely blue. Forms and colours can be organised at will into the given space of a canvas. The aim is to enrich this space by following the inner workings of the mind beyond the pretence of make-believe. In this, the hand is guided to a form-ideal by random thoughts that bubble up in the mind, apparently from nowhere.

The systematic search for a new non-objective form-ideal as a mental process emanating directly from the cerebral cortex was set in motion by the painter/theorist Wassily Kandinsky. His described his cortical response to the world semi-scientifically, as follows:

“As soon as we open the door, step out of the seclusion and plunge into the outside reality, we become an active part of this reality and experience its pulsation with all our senses. The constantly changing grades of tonality and tempo of the sounds wind themselves about us, rise spirally and suddenly collapse. Likewise, the movements envelop us by a play of horizontal and vertical lines bending in different directions as colour-patches pile up and dissolve into high or low tonalities”.

Behind this statement lies the contemporary desire, promoted vigorously by the Dada group, to liberate art from academic stereotypes derived from the classical tradition.

The first production of a fully non-representational artwork was the assembly of objects entitled ‘Three Standard Stoppages’ by Marcel Duchamp in 1913. It illustrated Duchamp's fascination with the concept of chance and his interest in mathematics. This complex construction incorporates a number of complicated elements, all inside a wooden box:

1) Three pieces of thread, each one-meter long, glued on Prussian blue canvas cut into three strips These canvas strips are glued to three glass panels.
2) Three wood slats, shaped along one side to match the curved paths taken by the threads
3) A black leather label with "3 STOPPAGES ETALON/ 1913-14" printed on it in gold lettering is attached on one end of each canvas strip.

The following notations was printed on the back of each canvas strip, where you can see them through the glass that the canvas is mounted on:

"A straight horizontal thread one meter in length falls from a / height of one meter. (3 Standard Stoppages; belonging to Marcel Duchamp. / 1913-14)."

In other words, Duchamp included a detailed description of the making process within the artwork itself, which opened up discussions about the role of process and non-compositional chance operations in artistic creativity.

Kandinsky, in his probing of abstraction, was soon concerned with extending reality from familiar first appearances. In October 1907 he had met Rudolf Steiner, founder of anthroposophy, and Steiner’s highly personal ideas about spirituality and mysticism moved Kandinsky to investigate the non-objective artistic expression of his own mental state. For example, the ‘non-substance’ of Monet’s ‘Haystacks’ stunned him. It was also the time when he became involved with the new scientific concepts of reality. At the forefront of Kandinsky’s views about painterly universes was the discovery of how to split the atom. This brought about the collapse of all his certainty about the absolute and unequivocal solidity of what is real. Barriers to the senses were now to be breached through art. Here, his particular artistic lodestone was the synthesis of sound and colour he discovered whilst attending an operatic performance of Lohengrin by Wagner at the Bolshoi.

His provisional conclusions were presented in an essay ‘Point and Line to Plane’, which was published in 1926. This presented the mature flowering of ideas first written up in 1910 entitled ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’.

The use of line in nature is an exceedingly frequent one, and appears in countless phenomena of the mineral, plant and animal worlds. The schematic construction of the crystal is a purely linear formation. A plant in its entire development from seed to root (downwards), as far as the beginning of the bud (upwards), passes over from point to line and, as it progresses, leads to more complicated complexes of lines, to independent linear structures, like the network of the leaf or the eccentric construction of evergreen trees. The attachment of the leaves around the shoot takes place in the most exact manner, which can be expressed with a mathematic formula-numerical expression and science has represented this with a spiral-like diagram. The organic linear pattern of the branches always emanates from the same basic principle but exhibits the most varied placements (e.g., among trees alone: fir, fig, date palm, or the most bewildering complex configurations of the liana and various other snake-like plants). Some complexes are, moreover, of a clear, exact, geometric nature and vividly recall geometric constructions made by animals, as, for example, the surprising formation of the spider's web. On the other hand, some are of a” free" nature and made up of free lines; the loose structure reveals no exact geometric construction. Both types of construction are found in abstract painting.

Kandinsky’s pictures also consistently fulfil Gauguin’s call to abstraction by using colour enigmatically:

“not to draw, but to create musical sensations that issue from colour itself, from its own character, from its mysterious, enigmatic inner force”.

In the 1920s Mondrian, was developing an investigation of these universals of human reason applied to configuring the human body at the same time that Kandinsky was exploring the dynamics and laws of human instincts motivated by ‘inner necessity’. With the elimination of figurative associations and intelligible geometrical relations of line and colour, the viewer is robbed of all rational and literary aids to interpretation and is thrown back on purely emotive responses; on the psychological sensibilities, sensual responses and spiritual beliefs of the spectators own inner world.

According to Sandro Bocola, Kandinsky’s artistic cannon can only be grasped directly, sensually and intuitively because it is rooted in the biological principle of homeostatis. As expressed in psychoanalysis of Kandinsky’s time, pleasure is interpreted as the outcome of an instinctual process. Instincts, the body’s relationship with the unconscious, are regulated according to Freud by the pleasure/unpleasure principle. Central to this, Freud describes a concept he called the ‘id’ as a reservoir of psychic energy, the pool of biological drives that arise from our basic physiological needs for food, water, warmth, sexual gratification, avoidance of pain, and so forth. Freud’s drives are our instincts, and he believed that they power and direct all of human behaviour. The id in Freud’s scheme is an unconscious force. It has no link with objective reality. Consequently, the id responds to feedback from bodily needs to discharge tensions that comes by stimulating behaviours that satisfy bodily needs. Psychologically it can be said the id seeks only its own pleasure and cannot abide frustration or deprivation of any kind.

With regard to artistic creativity as a homeostatic mental activity, a material or mental vision activates a need for its physical expression as a work of art where all its elements are harmonised. This is the inner necessity, which defines the bodily needs for action. It gives rise to mental tensions that are only neutralised by the creation of a harmonising balance in the completed work of art. The creative force is an expression of an ability to think in plastic images. The German expression for this process is ‘gestaltungsfaehikeit’, which in English is covered by the phrase- ‘faculty of plastic configuration’.

There are four basic routes to the fulfilment of a painter’s artistic needs for expression according to whether the intention is to:

· Recreate the visible (realism);
· Reveal the relations of parts (structuralism);
· Express inner reality (romanticism);
· Evaluate the meaning of inner reality (symbolism).

Although each mindset is exclusive in any production process, a painter can move from one mode to another. Kandinsky was a realist before becoming a symbolist. Picasso, for example, was first a symbolist, then became concerned with structure, and eventually returned to symbolism.

3 Rules of placement

Kandinsky used the absence of external objectivity as the logical starting point to research the rules governing the correct placement of visual elements on the canvas in order to evoke predictable emotional responses in the viewer. To follow Kandinsky’s process, a painter has to cease looking for a meaning in his subject. To open a two-way channel of communication between painter and viewer, certain arrangements and positions of points, lines, angles, and particular colours are utilised to carry definite universal meanings. The scientific objective of Kandinsky’s mission was to unravel this code to reveal a theory of painting utilising only its basic graphic elements without which a work of art cannot come into existence.

Kandinsky’s basic elements were those that all previous theories of painting had to deal with, namely:

· Point
· Line
· Plane
· Colour
· Texture

He developed the idea of point as the ‘proto-element’ of painting. He believed that the systematic study of the role of point in nature, music and other art, and the combination of point and line, should reveal a unique visual language for communicating inner feelings. Painting and music, for example, would share a common language of the emotions. Starting with point, his innovation was to codify the contributions that each of the basic graphic elements of a painting has in isolation and then to examine their reciprocal effects in combination without attempting to reproduce reality. His method was to create a dictionary of graphic elements independently of the composition and then examine their additive effect in the plane of the canvas as the ‘grammar’ of an abstract composition. The mental impact of seeing involves the transmission of light waves between painter and observer, and he invented a new descriptive language based on the nouns and verbs used to describe the impact of sound waves and things in motion. Thus, a point has ‘a sound’, and a line exhibits ‘a tension for movement’. Regarding the effects of his pictures on viewers he said;

“The spectator is also too accustomed to look for the ‘meaning’, in other words an exterior relationship between the parts of the picture. Our era, materialistic in life and therefore in art, has produced a spectator who does not now how to simply put himself in front of a painting, and looks for everything possible in the painting but does not allow the picture to work an effect on him’

What counts he said, is “the effective contact with the soul”. However, it is significant that he cross-referenced this analysis with views of real objects, both man-made and natural. Some of his examples have been reproduced in the following figures (Fig 3 A-F).

Fig 3 Classification of real objects

A. Example of the visual impact of ‘discrete points): section through a root nodule made by nitrate-forming bacteria in a pea root (enlarged 1000 times)

B. Example of the visual impact of points created by the meeting of lines at an angle; pagoda of the ‘Dragon Beauty’ in Shanghai (built 1411)

C. Example of the visual impact of lines in combination; holograph of a radio tower seen from below (photo of Moholy-Nagy)

D. Example of the visual impact of curved lines; trichite crystals and a crystal skeleton

E. Example of the visual impact of complexes of lines in movement; swimming movements of algae created by flagellation

F. Visual impact of lines and points in combination; line drawing of a histological section of ‘loose’ ligament tissue of the rat

Nature was an important source of his basic graphic elements. He backed his arguments with examples of bone structure, branching of trees, the progressive circular pattern of development in plant shoots, and the galactic clusters of stars.

What are we to make of this in relation to his avowed approach of non-subjectivity and predictability in the spectator’s response? First, he was merely starting from nature to range freely beyond in the invention of forms suggested by its diversity. Second, they were elements chosen as parts of an imagined whole. Third, his basic elements would not normally be selected for graphic communication except by scientists or engineers wishing to make a narrow professional point. In this sense, there is randomness in Kandinsky’s choice as to what part of the picture ‘whole’ carried his mental message, which in any case does not require knowledge of the whole. An element is primarily a highly personal metaphor to help communicate the artist’s mental universe. In the history of art, the only parts of nature that had, up to then, been selected in this way were headless human torsos with partly severed limbs. Here the sculptor was trying to get a response to the curves produced by muscles and fatty connective tissue without the distractions of the essential linearity of the standing human body and its powerful interactivity with the viewer through facial expression and display of limbs.

4 Towards a language of planes

Kandinsky based his fundamental approach to the ‘language of painting’ by trying to define the visual messages emanating from different arrangements of lines on the basic plane of a canvas. This raised the important question of distinguishing between ‘top’ and ‘bottom’. There are associated unresolved questions about whether we respond differently to square, rectangular, circular and ovoid canvases. Also, is there a fundamental difference between the left and right halves of the basic plane, no matter what is placed there? (Figs 4-6).

Fig 4 Tensions and contrasts in the basic plane

Fig 5 Horizontal, vertical and diagonal positions produce contrasts in tension

Fig 6 Position of forms influences the ‘sound’ of the composition

The effects of some of Kandinsky’s compositions on the viewer are strongly influenced by rotating them through so that bottom becomes top (Fig 7).

Fig 7 Kandinsky: Illustrative composition in Point and Line to Plane

A. Kandinsky: Illustrative composition in Point and Line to Plane turned through 90 degrees.

B. Kandinsky: Illustrative composition in Point and Line to Plane turned through 180 degrees.

Finally, Kandinsky opened up the problem of including multiple planes within the basic plane. What is the influence of their shape, surface structure; colour and gradients of tonality? Artists were exploring photography at this time and it was being used to address the problems of creating depth by superimposing semi-transparent planes. This was a particular concern to the Futurists who were also merging compositional planes and superimposing multiple images to convey movement and noise. Kandinsky experimented with semi-transparent planes under the influence of contemporaries and friends, notably Feininger and Klee.

5 Selection of pictorial elements

An important characteristic of Kandinsky’s methodology of abstraction is that a process of selection from a universal dictionary of graphic elements provides the vocabulary for composition. Kandinsky did not incorporate naturalistic elements into his work with the logic of their reality. His pictures, the representational ones as well as his experimental abstractions, were built up like a jigsaw, each piece having a correct fit when it ‘looked right’, or ‘appeared interesting’ (Figs 8-12).

Fig 8 Kandinsky. Linear structure of the picture ‘Little Dream in Red’ (1925)

Fig 9 Kandinsky’s painting’ Little Dream in Red’

Fig 10 Kandinsky. Riegsee Village Church (1908)

Fig 11 Improvisation 28 (2nd version, 1912)

It is left to the observer to decipher his lines squares and circles, to crystallise a personal mental state. In his later paintings, homemade animalicules from the microscopic world of biologists appear, often cased as if they are specimens in a museum. If possible, scientists often make painterly decisions when choosing a particular field of a microscope to support a scientific model. However, the real world of aquatic biology, which spawned Kandinsky’s animal-like forms, is closed to most people, and it is not necessary to know anything about it for a spectator response to his pictures.

At this point in his life we are probably seeing a process of evolution from motifs of an East European medieval world of thick embroidery and jewels that dominated the fine structure of his first paintings (Fig 12).

Fig 12 Kandinsky. Russian Costumes (1902)

He also invited the adoption of real materials as aesthetic elements, and said that painters should paint with everything. Collage was invented by Picasso and Braque to provide elements of texture and graphics to enhance the messages of the paintbrush. According to Kandinsky, collage alone can make an image, and reality then becomes painting.

In his systematic approach to composition, Kandinsky was the first to paint for ‘art’s sake’, and try to create a language that incorporated scientific certainty into the production of paintings. His point of view was that his paintings owe their creation to a process of discovery without intentional design. He approached this task with sincerity but his words remain obscure. His texts are not easy reading; vagueness of terminology and a tendency toward mystification stemming from his absorption of Rudolph Steiner’s idiosyncratic ideas, are indications that he was not always sure of what he wanted to say. His own pictures have not produced a school of teaching but his precepts have been widely adopted. In particular, his influence can be seen in the contrasting works of Hans Arp and Georgia O’Keefe, who were Kandinsky’s contemporaries.

We are primates who have evolved great visual acuity, which is expressed in powerful pattern-finding abilities. As picture-makers, for better or worse, we have to remain satisfied when things ‘look right’. In this sense we recognise our own personal synthetic totality. What is involved in the process is rightness achieved pragmatically. A rightness of the possible with no justification from necessity of any material object of any kind. It remains questionable whether this innate potential for abstract picture making can be trained. With regards picture-viewers, this condition of ‘looking right’ requires research by investigating the responses of people to a range of compositions. Kandinsky was aware of this, although he only made one attempt to carry out attitudinal surveys. This was his idea for a questionnaire, which asked teachers and students to look at the combining of forms (triangle, square, circle) and primary colours (yellow, red, blue). This might have revolutionised art education, but his scientific curriculum was too personal to be widely adopted. Also, Kandinsky’s repertoire of basic forms essentially came from his interest in landscape graphics. In this respect, his compositions are mostly without depth and their reading depends upon following a map of interacting lines and spaces rather than the merging of closely positioned shapes to make a holistic impact. It may be that the gaps are too large for most people to make an interesting gestalt, which suggests many lines of investigation regarding Kandinsky’s belief that a painter could and should be aiming for a predictable response in his viewers.

6 The science of art

Times have moved on and the current focus of the investigation of art as the outcome of a hard-wired mental creative process is the abstract work of Gerhard Richter. In his wall-size abstract pictures, Richter builds up cumulative layers of nonrepresentational painting Paint is applied with expansive gestures so that the sweep of the artist's arm is deliberately emphasized. His gestural painting carries an implication that the artist's actions express his emotions and personality; just as in other walks of life gestures express a person's feelings. Richter tells us and demonstrates that his paintings evolve in stages based on his responses to the picture’s progress as incidental details and patterns emerge. To maintain this momentum Richter uses blurring and scraping to veil and expose prior layers. These were techniques used by English watercolourists of the 18th century to who saw their task as selecting from a landscape what nature had to offer. By chosing to use these techniques from a non-representational start to develop a dynamic structure resulting from changing texture and depth places his production process firmly between scientific and expressive conceptions of painting. It is clearly the personal working out of a sequence of mental responses in response to previous coloured and textured patchiness. To begin the process he puts down a simple colour form relation. Periodically he evaluates progress through discovery without intentional design:

“…. after a while I decide that I understand it or have seen enough of it and in the next stage of painting I partly desroy it partly add to it; and so it goes on at intervals, ‘til there is nothing more to do and the picture is finished”.

The elements and structures of colours that constitute the painting are applied with brushes, squeegees and putty knives layer by layer, with existing layers being superimposed or completely extinguished by new ones. Thus, his creativity steers a deliberate path between the application of paint as an accident and successive acts of composition, which follow as mere chance encounters between materials and structures. In this context, Richter’s finished works are suspended between utter meaninglessness and the chance constellations of marks and colour patches that he decides are acceptable because they look right. Richter’s straegy for discovering an image that terminates this unfolding is a rhythm of becoming and destroying.

Richter’s own descriptions of making a picture, which he sometimes records as a series of snapshots on the way to its completion, are important because they document the creative pathway for those interested in the scientific investigation of the sources and operations of artistic creativity.

From a scientific perspective, making marks on surfaces is the essence of being human. It's what we do with anything that can contrast with the surface we choose to mark. Rub a rock with a harder rock and you have the beginning of engraving. Pick up a burned stick and drag it across a cave wall and you are drawing. Stir some water into the black ashes of a fire lit for survival, drag a wad of dried grass through it, and you're painting. Surface outcomes of this marking activity from its primeval origins we describe as ‘graffiti’ and ‘works of art’.

Viewers are also impelled to read meaning into these marks according to their evolved primate cerebral behaviour patterns, which are conditioned by their education. Such was the documented response of one of the guards at New York’s Museum of Modern Art to Barnett Newman's abstract painting Vir Heroicus Sublimis (Heroic Sublime Man). This is a 17-foot-wide bright red canvas divided by five thin vertical stripes ranging in colour from white to maroon and black. The guard, Alec Sologob, could not discern how the Newman work provided, in the words of the official museum guidebook, 'direct, intimate contact' with the viewer’ as well as an 'affirmation of Newman's somewhat mystical sense of the human condition with all its tragedy and dignity.'

In the guard’s words:

"I don't see it. . . . With Cézanne or Bonnard, there's intimate contact because you can feel yourself walking into the painting, into that wooded area with the men chopping firewood. With [Andrew] Wyeth you always find something new. In Christina's World you see the details in her hands, you find cracks in the wooden boards of the house, you get a marvellous sense that this really is her world. . . . But this Newman has never looked to me like anything. This is a blank wall with stripes, and I don't like the colour red to begin with."

Here we have the responses of two viewers who are day by day in contact with modern art, a guard and a curator, about what ‘marks on a surface’ mean to them. Each sees and evaluates the outcome of the process of making of marks according to the expectations instilled by their education and both views are valid. From Newman’s point of view, his marks are presented as evidence of what was accepted by academia in the 1990s as a valid end point of the marking process classified as ‘abstract art’. The artist was confirmed by the minority gallery culture as being at the forefront of a millennium of behaviour change in both makers and viewers, a sequence defined academically by a relative minority of people in the curatorial profession as ‘the advance of European art’. This has inevitably left the bulk of ‘uneducated humanity’ bemused.

Regarding the existence of ‘un-educated majorities’, in an article titled "Is There a God?" commissioned, but never published, by Illustrated magazine in 1952, Bertrand Russell wrote:

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

A minority is a sociological group that does not constitute a dominant voting majority of the total population of a given society. A sociological minority is not necessarily a numerical minority — it may include any group that is subnormal with respect to a dominant group in terms of social status, education, employment, wealth and political power. Therefore, in this cultural sense, the aim of every artist is not to conform to the history of art but to release himself from it, in order to replace it with his own history. A making of marks becomes art when its production, perception and reception are grounded on certain ‘truths’ that through education and group cohesion have become common to maker and viewer.

7 Evolution of mark making

There is no doubt that life is carried forward because molecules of DNA, which constitute the genes, embody a coded history of life’s genealogical past. In this respect we are part of nature in everything we do, from stepping on a bus to painting a house. Like all other living things our behaviour is governed by a chemical coding of our genes, which is a record of successful long-term interactions with the environments of our ancestors, near and in the distant past. It is a biochemical memory that remembers the body’s responses of growth, reproduction and behaviour that have been responsible for survival. In this respect, the body of a plant, animal or microbe represents a kind of prediction that its future environmental experiences will, to a general extent, resemble those of its ancestors. Animals, especially those with brains, are particularly good survivors because the nervous system also has a remarkable picturing ability for remembering what is the most useful way of responding to short-term variations in the environment. As a computer model, the brain (hardware) and its networks of memory cells (the software) have evolved to continuously scan the environment, and use memories of good and bad responses to keep short-term survival strategies up to date. The genes model the basic aspects of the environment that change very slowly over generations. The brain produces models of survival as day-to-day interactions between perception via the senses and a mental representation of environment that triggers the correct response. This interplay between changes in the environment and their representation as virtual images in the central nervous system allows us to move through a mental world of our brain’s making, and produce neuromuscular responses that aid survival. Since brains are also products of natural selection, ancestors, near and in the distant past, also carried virtual worlds of their contemporary environments in their heads. Brains are a particular expression of DNA tasked with the role of recording lifespan-events as pictures to help predict the immediate future.

We describe these virtual worlds as ‘patterns of thought’ and the process of perception that generates them as ‘reading the environment’. This faculty of ‘graphicity’ is a vital process of comprehension. We become interested in shapes and colours that do not fit into the known. In this we prefer intriguing suggestions to actual representation. For example, a trail of footprints occurring together with disturbed vegetation and dung deposits is read intently by a hunter as the pattern of his prey. It is comprehended as a detailed mental map of events over a wide area that points to the course of action necessary if the hunt is to be successful. According to Steven Dawkins it seems plausible that the ability to perceive the signs and generate such pictures might have arisen in our ancestors before the origin of speech in words. If the thought-picture could be represented as an arrangement of shapes and signs, constructing an environmental model in the head is a helpful way to communicate, and coordinate what has to be done in a social group. Such mental imagery could be an educational resource to help group cohesion and promote social evolution. This seems the likely origin of art, which depends on noticing that something can be made to stand for something else in order to assist comprehension and communication. Dawkins suggests that it could have been the drawing of mind-maps in the sand that drove the expansion of human evolution beyond the critical threshold of communication that other apes just failed to cross. It may be pertinent that ceremonial sand-pictures of native Australians function as maps. They are patterns created by an individual ‘dreamer’ through the two-dimensional spacing of symbols standing for people and local topographical detail. The fact that these patterns are closely associated with ‘dreaming’ is significant. Dreams are set up by our simulation software using the same modelling techniques used by the brain when it presents its updated editions of reality. These aboriginal maps of the dreamtime were community properties. Their role was to codify the neighbourhood and its use by the community in the form of a locally accepted non-representational pattern of relationships. The collection of pictographs reinforced the existence of a tribal territory and its natural resources by incorporating stories about its occupation by the group’s ancestors. The pictures, now being made permanent works of art on cloth and hardboard for the Australian urban consumer culture, had a social function to maintain a subculture of understanding by reinforcing comprehension of group identity and space. Rock art of North America, which consists of pictographs constructed from circles, spirals and lines, also seems to have its origins in dreams, and a significance in carrying messages about origins and group identity across generations. Reaching from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego there is tremendous variety in all aspects of indigenous art from prehistory to the arrival of Europeans, differing region by region, era by era, and often tribe by tribe. There are representations of flora and fauna, men and gods, earth and sky; symbols of clan and tribe, religion and magic; formal designs from the primal to the highly intricate. They appear in examples of basketry, weaving, pottery, sculpture, painting, lapidary work, masks, drumheads, weapons, apparel, beadwork, goldwork, blankets, ponchos, and may other forms.

All this tells us is that at the heart of being human, we enjoy nothing more than the demand made on us by a mark-maker a to use our own ‘imitative faculty’, our imagination, and thus share in the creative adventure of an artist. The greater the artist’s skill to induce ambiguity into a work, the greater the viewer’s pleasure in unravelling the puzzle. In other words, our pleasure rests on the mind’s effort in bridging the difference between surface marks and reality.

Neurophysiological illusions; perspective and colour

2010-05-16T06:43:00.000-07:00

Art has always been meaningful and symbolic even when depicted with a collection of objects on a flat picture plane, which lacks visual accuracy. The issue of manipulating a flat surface to create the illusion of three dimensions was addressed in Europe during the Renaissance, when some artists conducted careful observations of nature and even anatomical dissections to try to better understand the world around them. But it wasn't until the early 15th Century that the Florentine architect and engineer, Lippo Brunelleschi, developed a mathematical theory of perspective. In a series of optical experiments he analysed and experimented with visual lines of sight emanating from points of perception. In this way Brunelleschi was able to understand the science behind perspective, the visual system that attempts to represent three-dimensional space on a flat surface. Perspective works because it is a visual "illusion". It depends on the way our eyes see something and the way our brains organize that virtual space, adopting perspective to give the illusion of depth. Brunelleschi's discovery was applied for three centuries as the norm of European art to picture the human imagination. The aim for the most part was to imitate tangible visual reality.

Art is distinctively a product of the faculty of the mind, which perceives the image of one thing in the form of another. Each person has the ability to think in two ways - judicially and creatively. The judicial function of the mind is to provide and analyse facts, to pass judgment on any incoming data about reality through the senses. In contrast, the creative aspect of the mind deals with the unknown, within the arena of possibility. In this connection, an artist demands a parallel fact or fancy, of which the first furnishes a suggestion. Human imagination has that extra power that allows us to peer beyond the ordinarily material world and explore deep into the abstract worlds of mathematics, science, metaphysics, etc. In art, from the middle of the 19th century it was colour which began to carry the imagination into the making of images. A key influence on this process was Goethe's book , 'Theory of Colours' published in 1810, from which the following two quotations show the ideas that artists began to respond to..

"When the eye sees a colour it is immediately excited and it is its nature, spontaneously and of necessity, at once to produce another, which with the original colour, comprehends the whole chromatic scale".

"The chromatic circle... [is] arranged in a general way according to the natural order... for the colours diametrically opposed to each other in this diagram are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye. Thus, yellow demands violet; orange, blue; red, green; and vice versa: thus... all intermediate gradations reciprocally evoke each other; the simpler colour demanding the compound, and vice versa".

Goethe's writings on colour, although not scientific, were assimilated by one of his contemporaries, JMW Turner, who was also immersed in theosophy. Theosophy is the name used for any system of philosophy which starts from a supposed knowledge of God, and proceeds to formulate laws of the universe on the basis of revelation or of direct knowledge. Usually the claim of a supernatural revelation is made, though this is not essential, and usually, also, theosophy is mystical, holding that systems of truth are revealed through states of mystic feeling. Turner together with Anton Mesmer, the hypnotist and healer, the astronomer William Herschel, the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, and the German idealist philosopher George Hegel, adopted and nurtured a world view which accepted the notion that the cosmos shapes human destiny. According to art historian Charlotte Douglas, the shift to abstract art in the early 20th century was prompted by a need for new dimensions of consciousness using forms suited "to serve as a passport to and report from" the so-called higher spiritual realms. As an early participant in this approach to creativity, Turner was a master of capturing the intangible in paint, increasingly pushing his subjects to the point of vaporisation.... the physicality of a snowstorm, where liquid becomes unyielding, sky becomes sea. His painting doesn't necessarily have to reproduce real life in specific detail. In this respect, Turner invented a way of using colour to provide atmospheric depth to the surface of his pictures- "land becomes sky. He revelled in those situations, where recognisable detail was only achieved by a fleeting intensity of focus, as if it were an apparition." Cornelia Parker (Tate online).

Goethe's 'Theory of Colours' contains some of the earliest published descriptions of visual phenomena such as coloured shadows, refraction, and chromatic aberration. Turner studied the book comprehensively, and referenced it in the titles of several paintings, one of which, Shade and Darkness- the Evening of the Deluge, painted in 1843, is just about as abstract a landscape as would be produced today.

Turner: (1843) Shade and Darkness - the Evening of the Deluge

Oil on canvas, 78.5 x 78 cm; Tate Gallery, London

In traditional European art, both form and colour are "right" or representational. The artist starts with form and the form determines the colour. Colour follows form; the artist cannot start with colour. The traditional artist cannot use colour alone as a means of expression. In the early 20th century, art underwent momentous changes from this old norm. Artists became increasingly interested in non-naturalistic representation, departing from the traditional use of form and colour. From 1904, the Fauve artists, including Henri Matisse (1869-1954), André Derain (1880-1954), Raoul Dufy (1877-1953), Henri Manguin (1874-1949), Maurice Vlaminck (1876-1958) and Georges Braque (1882-1963), began to portray familiar objects with "unfamiliar" colours. It was the use of colour as a starting point for creativity and a narrative thread of the imagination that produced the second revolution of European art. Perspective gave way to colour!

Matisse in particular liberated colour so that it is was no longer determined by form. His colour looks for a sensation that represents his subjective imaginative vision and state of mind. Therefore, his images would be, for most people, unnatural or non-representational. Even today, for the spectator, Matisse's form may seem right but his colour may seem wrong, because it is not used to convey likeness, but rather sensation. As Matisse put it, "When I put a green, it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky."

At first glance, the viewers of Matisse's work sense the intensity achieved by colour. Using his intuition, Matisse created the effect of a spring sky with complicated colour combinations and luminance. However, in choosing his colour combinations he was, mechanically almost, using the colour wheel popularised by Goethe. Altering the colours of a subject helps to alter the tone of the painting, and bring about a targeted emotional response from the viewer. In many cases, too many colours actually overwhelm viewers, distracting from the subject matter. To avoid this, Matisse used a limited colour palette.

In scientific terms, Matisse's paintings work on the brain like a black and white photograph. Although the photograph in tones of black and gray lacks colour, our brains are able to recognise the depicted elements as natural because our minds react to the unnaturalistic colours using one visual pathway. Even if we perceive the colour as wrong, to other visual pathways that are solely monochromatic, the scene seems more right.

Discussing colour in terms of right and wrong helps us to understand Matisse's work. Even so, it is important to remember that Matisse never discusses his work in these terms. For him, it does not matter whether colour is right, because the choice of colour reflects his subjective inner vision. Therefore, colour is always right to Matisse, since it responds to his artistic perception. The paintings done by Matisse, particularly 'French Window at Collioure' done in 1914, was picked out in the 1950s by North American artists, notably by Mark Rothko, as a starting point for the New York school of ‘abstract expressionism’.

Mattise: (1914) French window at Collioure

The Russian, Malevich, in his painting made in 1913 entitled ‘Black square on white field’, carried colour abstraction to its ultimate geometric simplification. Critics called his creation a "dead square" and a "void", as well as "the greatest by far among the fairground tricks of instant culture." To Malevich, however, this simple square symbolized a "full void," in that it showed how painting could fulfil itself unaided by any reference to a specific external reality. For him the square represented what he called Suprematism: "the supremacy of pure feeling" in and of itself. Malevich removed specific subject matter by shifting away from representation and mimesis towards the purity of mathematical geometry. "The square = feeling, the white field = the void beyond this feeling." It reads two ways, either a black square on top of a white ground or a black hole surrounded by a white border. Every object has a static facade and an inner dynamic, he believed. This hard-edge geometric abstraction is the forerunner of the later 1960s movement, Minimalism. The way in which Malevich does away with any representation of the material, physical world in this visionary, non-objective art parallels the way in which the Russian revolution will do away with the hated old order.

Malevich (1913) Black square on white field

Envisioning a new reality on a higher plane represented Malevich’s life as a devout Christian mystic. For him, spirit and feeling rule over matter. The painting was a statement of Suprematism: "To the Suprematist, the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth." Malevich's black hole set a new threshold for painting. Malevich knew about the European avant-garde through two sources: Shchukin's collection of Matisse and Picasso, which he assemble in Russia, and through Marinetti, the author of the Italian Futurist manifesto, who made two trips to Russia, in 1909-10 and 1914. From that point on, until Stalin established an official style of Soviet Realism in 1932, Russia was the most progressive country in the world in terms of modern abstract art.

Another founder of abstract art around this seminal time, Piet Mondrian, was an avid reader of theosophy, who once said he learned everything he knew from the founder of modern theosophy, Madame Blavatsky. He joined the Dutch Theosophical Society in 1909, when his work began its gradual evolution from representation toward the abstract. The shift was heralded in his landscapes: wide expanses of beach and sea; forest scenes that highlight the vertical thrust of trees from a horizontal expanse of earth. Mondrian's preoccupation with the tension between vertical and horizontal was later depicted in the haunting abstract cruciform patterns of primary colours that would become his trademark. According to Mondrian's own notebooks, the patterns represent the struggle toward unity of cosmic dualities and the religious symmetry undergirding the material universe. A strong believer in the theosophical doctrine of human evolution from a lower, materialistic stage toward spirituality and higher insight, Mondrian wrote that the hallmark of the New Age would be the "new man" who "can live only in the atmosphere of the universal." For him, all art would converge on geometrical arrangements of primary colours.

Mondrian (1912) Trees in blossom

This was also the route to abstract art taken between 1896 and 1913 by Russian born Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944). His path from figurative landscape painter to the modernist master of abstraction led to the creation of what he claimed was the first truly abstract paintings. He only become an artist in his thirties after viewing one of Claude Monet's series of 'Haystacks' at the 1896 exhibition of Impressionist paintings in Moscow. The physical landscape and the haystack were immaterial to Kandinsky. Indeed, he failed to recognise the haystack in the painting. Instead the colours and composition suggested a new direction for this lecturer of law who decided to study art in Munich:

"...suddenly, for the first time, I saw a picture ... And, albeit unconsciously, objects were discredited as an essential element within the picture."

Kandinsky considered Goethe's theory "one of the most important works". It led him to consider art as a spiritual expression, in line and colour, of pure imagination and feeling. Like music which is also an abstract creation, a painting need not have a basis in the material world.

Kandinsky wrote the following to J. B. Neumann in a letter from Neuilly-sur-Seine, dated 4th August 1935:

'When I left Moscow in December 1921 several of my paintings, some of them very large ones, remained in the custody of the Museum for West-European Art. Among those paintings is my very first abstract painting from the year 1911 (this was the first abstract picture that was ever painted in our time). Unfortunately, I do not even have a photograph of it. At that time [i.e. 1911 I was dissatisfied with the picture and, therefore, did not number it, did not inscribe it on the back as I otherwise always used to do, and did not even note it in my handlist. But when I saw it again after years I was very pleased with it. It is a very large painting, almost square, with very agitated form, and a large circle-like form at the upper-right.

When I became a German citizen all those paintings were declared to be Russian state property, and I could not get them back .. Should it be possible to have a good photograph made of the first abstract painting I should be delighted.'

Kandinsky (1913) Composition 7

A century later, we are now firmly in a world inhabited by artists who are no longer dominated by perspective and where colouring is used to reassert the picture plane with flat forms which destroy illusion and reveal their spiritual truths. This allows the abstract artist to use synonyms for describing the mystical space his or her picture has revealed. These synonyms are, paradoxically, more concrete in subjective attributes such as 'depth of feeling', 'penetration into knowledge', 'revelation' or the 'unfolding of veils, which have obscured what is behind them. The depth of their creations penetrates deeper into the mind than the illusion of perspective can ever produce.

The following powerful statement of what the shift from perspective to colour meant to artistic creativity was made by Adolf Gottleib and Mark Rothko in 1943.

"We feel that our pictures demonstrate our aesthetics beliefs, some of which we, therefore, list:

1. To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.

2. This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.

3. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way-not his way.

4. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.

5. It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.

Consequently if our work embodies these beliefs, it must insult anyone who is spiritually attuned to interior decoration; pictures for the home; pictures for over the mantel; pictures of the American scene; social pictures; purity in art: prize-winning potboilers; the National Academy; The Whitney Academy, the Corn Belt Academy; buckeyes; trite tripe; etc".

This statement is still valid to describe the artistic breakthrough that began at the beginning of the 20th century, when a few artists realised the limits of representational art to raise picture making to the same level of emotion and intensity as music and poetry. To achieve this, painters still apply colour to canvas with the objective of communicating to someone else how the world is. The difference with the Renaissance tradition is that the message is coded through the medium of abstract coloured forms in a flat picture plan. In making these forms the artist is expressing basic human emotions such as tragedy, ecstasy and doom. After receiving the message, the viewer’s world has changed because of his/her idiosyncratic emotional response, which is a neurophysiological phenomenon, sometimes expressed in tears, which we hardly understand.

Mark Rothko (1961) Untitled

Deconstructing landscape

2010-03-31T00:49:00.000-07:00

"Primordial feelings are those feelings that make me want to paint. I get up in the morning and I want to paint. Before I go to bed I am either painting or am tired of painting. Even when I am relaxing, watching television or listening to the radio, I am doing a third thing that is more important. People walk in and wonder how can I watch the TV and listen to the radio simultaneously. It is because I am doing a third thing. I am concentrating on painting. I get used to the noise. It does not bother me. It makes me focus internally. I move in and out of it but my mind is always still. It is like being in a trance where thinkiing is not disturbed. Noise also is a companion." A. S. Boghossian Ethiopian painter.

Each artist goes through a journey of learning how to articulate what is inside of her. For example, it could be 'pointedness', 'volume' or 'colour'. It could be emotions, feelings, graphic renderings of nature or organic images. Whatever the internal focus the artist is struck by it when she sees it. This could be said about any aspect of human creativity that takes over the mind. Whatever is achieved is imperceptible and extraordinarily slow in coming. This is basically why artists and scientists tend to doubt their achievements and wonder whether they make a contribution to society. Thinking as a process is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. The difference between artistic and scientific creativity is that art can only retain its radical autonomy by allowing the spectator a 'free' space of interpretation. In order to interact with abstract landscape art we have to adjust our idea about scenery in terms of a mental expression of mood and history, well laced with a desire to get to the spiritual heart of things.

Since Picasso and Cezanne we have been taught to make and see art with our minds, not our eyes. Even Claude Lorraine and his 18th century followers in their realistic depictions of semi-rural Italian scenery were actually constructing personal spiritual takes on reality and legend. Their aim was to produce imaginary scenes of the mind, depicting a strain of poetic fantasy that delighted in myth. Also, we should remember that pre-Impressionistic, photographic Constable saw clouds, particularly in his sketches, as an expression of the infinite cosmos and not simply as a versimilitude of weather. Turner in his 'Rain Steam and Speed', transformed notions of time, space and physical matter'.

Surrealism developed in the 1920s with the aim of showing something that is there, but not yet visible to everybody. Artists thought they had achieved this by discovering worlds of fantastical images, altered realities and the oddest encounters of people and objects. Their vision transfigured tangible material reality into something completely new; discovering how to approach a spiritual dimension of matter by arranging objects and people in ways that challenge the viewer's understanding. Basically they were trying to say things that are not contained in the component parts of the picture, such as reveries, allusions or associations.

What we wish to view or express graphically is really always based on metaphors of our state of mind at a particular time and in a certain geographical place. Because of Surealism, avantguard, abstract 'landscape artists' now have to really struggle for a personal mental clarity of expression to produce a picture of a reality that has never before been seen. The deep blend of intense emotion and physical sensations requires the artist 'knowing' before 'seeing' in order to to express a personal obsession . This kind of abstraction from what is optically perceived will often produce an outcome that requires textual clarification before a viewer can become truely interested in the work of art and come to an understanding. Ideally, this gloss should come from the artist, but it is more often a figment of the mind of a critic who stands before the work as a self-appointed intermediary. Without an interpretation in words, abstract landscape can easily become impossible to decipher.

To express a total view of a scene requires the artist to combine the ideas of 'environment', with its emphasis on function, and 'landscape' with its focus on form. This way, the artist can play the role of a participant in the narrative as well as an activator of its creation as a two-dimensional image. The painter Ben Nicholson expressed this multifaceted definition of creativity as setting up a group of objects 'to see what we can do with them; make them into not like they are but something else; lets draw lines round them; draw lines out from them and so on'.

This can lead to works that are multiple viewpoints in parallel, with many layers of meaning.

For the painter Peter Lanyon in 1964, whose work telescoped time in an overlap of different times, views and subjects, landscape painting was about transforming the environment as a source for looking forward, not an echo of the past:

"The real place of the painter today in a landscape tradition is in the creation of works which transform the environment and fill people with images to understand the immense range of human curiosity particularly in the sciences, Landscape then is not any longer tied specifically to 'nature' as the country, but infuses a painting with a sense of the forces beyond human scale'.

Lanyon's place pictures are very difficult to understand without knowing his life story and the actual places where he painted and why he painted. Regarding the important issue of the viewer wanting to know what goes on in the artist's mind, what is needed is not a cut and dried answer- it clearly defies that- but rather an extension of a viewing experience. Widening the scope of the meeting between viewer and maker at the canvas could be an important way of answering the question.

Some paintings are ideas and others are experiences or imaged landscapes from actual experiences. In the following ‘interface experiment’ an artist and her viewers are both working with ideas which makes them concentrate on the process of creativity rather than the final product.

The method was for viewers to deconstruct one of Susi Bellamy's pictures (Field of Dreams) so that artist and viewers could both articulate a shared experience taking place between the end of the artist's experience and the beginning of the audience's experience. At this point the viewers are actually turning a work of art into another work of art.

Susi describes her picture as being a representation of the 'field ' of her lifehistory, expressed metaphorically as a landscape; a stratified sequence of sedimented memories from the different places that have influenced her development as an artist. The geological idea of 'weathering' comes to mind with respect to the power of dreams to provide only a partial view of the past, which is exposed to the loss of memories, producing isolated peaks of experience and lacunae in event sequences.

To be continued....

'Field of Dreams'; Susi Bellamy

Art and spiritual intelligence

2010-02-04T11:32:00.000-08:00

Spirituality is the innate human need to connect with something larger than ourselves, something beyond our ego-self or constricted sense of self. It may be defined as having two components: the vertical and the horizontal. The vertical component is something sacred, divine, timeless and placeless a Higher Power, Source, Ultimate Consciousness or any other language the person prefers. Spirituality creates a desire to be connected to and guided by this Source. The horizontal component is being of service to our fellow humans and to the planet at large.

Cathedrals and temples are places where these two components of apiritual connectivity are made available to a thoughtful public.

Danah Zoharhttp://www.dzohar.com/ coined the term'spiritual intelligence' and introduced the idea in her 1997 book ReWiring the Corporate Brain: Using the New Science to Rethink How We Structure and Lead Organizations. Later, together with Ian Marshall she developed the concept, which was introduced in 1999 at The Masters Forum. In the year 2000, Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall published a book, SQ: Ultimate intelligence. In 2004 the authors upgraded the concept with notion of Spiritual Capital and demonstrated the crucial link between SQ, SC, and sustainability. By their definition Spiritual Intelligence is the intelligence with which we access our deepest meanings, purposes, and highest motivations. It is the intelligence that makes us whole, that gives us our integrity. It is the soul's intelligence, the intelligence of the deep self. It is the intelligence with which we ask fundamental questions and with which we reframe our answers.

The word "spiritual" in relation to the intelligence has no necessary connection with organized religion. A person may be high in SQ but have no religious faith or belief of any kind. Conversely a person may be very religious but low in SQ. The word spiritual in the Zohar/Marshal concept comes from the Latin word spiritus, which means, "that which gives life or vitality to a system.
Zohar and Marshall introduced 12 qualities of SQ. They derive these principles from the qualities that define complex adaptive systems. In biology, complex adaptive systems are living systems that create order out of chaos, they create order and information and defy the law of entropy. They enable us to adapt to a changing environment and in this sense they are central to the establishment of a sustainable global culture.

Those principles are:

Self-Awareness: Knowing what I believe in and value, and what deeply motivates me;
Spontaneity: Living in and being responsive to the moment;
Being Vision- and Value-Led: Acting from principles and deep beliefs, and living accordingly;
Holism: Seeing larger patterns, relationships, and connections; having a sense of belonging;
Compassion: Having the quality of "feeling-with" and deep empathy;
Celebration of Diversity: Valuing other people for their differences, not despite them;
Field Independence: Standing against the crowd and having one's own convictions;
Humility: Having the sense of being a player in a larger drama and of one's true place in the world;
Tendency to Ask Fundamental "Why?" Questions: Needing to understand things and get to the bottom of them;
Ability to Reframe: Standing back from a situation or problem and seeing the bigger picture; seeing problems in a wider context;
Positive Use of Adversity: Learning and growing from mistakes, setbacks, and suffering
Sense of Vocation: Feeling called upon to serve, to give something back

Zohar and Marshall dealt with questions such as how we have SQ and how it functions in the human brain. Using some of the most recent scientific research available, their work draws on a body of new neurological, psychological and anthropological studies of human intelligence, as well as studies of human thinking and linguistic processes, to provide scientific evidence for SQ. First, they cite research carried out in the 1990s, by neuropsychologist Michael Persinger and neurologist V.S. Ramachandran at the University of California , on the existence of a 'God Spot' in the human brain. This built-in spiritual centre is located among neural connections in the temporal lobes of the brain. These neural areas light up on scans taken with positron emission tomography whenever research subjects are exposed to discussion of spiritual or religious topics, or when talking about what is deeply meaningful to them. Subjects report experiences of profound peace, unity, love and spirituality. Such temporal activity has been linked for years to people who suffer from temporal epilepsy, seizures, or people who take LSD. Ramachadran's work is the first to show it active in normal people.

The 'God Spot' does not prove the existence of God, but it produces spiritual behaviour necessary for people to be nice to each other. In other words, it is the generation of electrical impulses in this region that provides a biochemical basis for spiritual intelligence. It is by means of this region of the brain that we function mentally as animals suspended in webs of significance held by thoughts about the making or contemplation of particular objects. Each object functions as a spiritual anchor or centre of focus for creating personal imaginative universes such as temples and cathedrals. Spaces and vistas are organised by design for the propagation of ideas of morality in the building through allegory. Allegory is a figurative mode of representation conveying a meaning, other than the literal teaching of a lesson, using symbolism. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation. An allegory does not have to be expressed in language: it may be addressed to the eye, and is often found in realistic painting, sculpture or some other form of mimetic, or representative art. Simply put, an allegory is a device that can be presented in literary form, such as a poem or novel, or in visual form, such as in painting or sculpture. A practical application of spiritual intelligence within the corporate cathedrals also involved the creation of bishop saints as icons of authority and the provision of guidance towards conduct that will lead us to the good. It also lead to spiritual guidance through church law, the art of the sacraments, pastoral texts and music. From this perspective, the periodic rebuildings, refurbishments, and extensions of cathedrals were motivated by the desire to increase and update the 'theatre of allegory' of the living church. However, we can say that in their everyday lives most people perceive spiritual intelligence through the placement of cultural products or signs within a multiplicity of complex religious, social, ethical, aesthetic and mythological structures.

West Front Wells Cathedral J Crook

Paul Binsky in his book 'Becket's Crown' argues that no commentary on the Living Church can match for spiritual exhilaration the extraordinary, and widely read, sermons on Canticles by St Bernard. A canticle is a hymn taken from the Bible.

"One of these (no. 62) catches the mystical sense of Wells's realization of the Living Church in its medieval West Front as a work of art. In this respect, it serves to demonstrate the astonishing sympathy of Cistercian poetics with Gothic imagery. The sermon in question is on Canticles 2: 14: my dove in the clefts of the rock, in the nooks of the wall (columba mea in foraminibus petrae in caverna maceriae).

The dove is the 'bride', i.e. the Church. Thus the wall, maceria, is not a mass of mere stones but the communion of saints; the nooks or clefts in the wall have been left behind by the fallen angels, and these imperfections are to be filled spiritually by the vivi lapides (the just) of I Peter 2: 4-5; indeed the guardianship of the angels is like the wall in the Lord's vineyard. The Church's desire for union with God is consoled by the memory of the Passion of Christ in the past, and the contemplation of her welcome among the saints.

Through the clefts in the wall flowed Christ's ransoming blood. The Church joyously explores the crannies, the many and varied resting-places and mansions (mansiones multae) which are in her Father's house (John 14: 2), in which God lodges his children according to their just deserts.
The clefts are a sign of the Church's desire for completeness, but they are made too by thought and desire, because the holy heavens, living and rational, will look on mortals lovingly and hear their prayers: everyone may hollow out a place in this heavenly wall.

Now one can see the patriarchs; now the prophets; now one can mingle with the assembly of the apostles, now join the chorus of martyrs. With the quickness of devotion we can run up and down the dwelling-places and ranks of the blessed orders of the angels, as far as the cherubim and seraphim. God takes delight in these nooks, from which ring out the voices of thanksgiving, the voices of wonder and praise.

The hollows in the rock are the means of self-incorporation into God, for while one divine happiness consists in the contemplation of the heavenly city with its multitude of heavenly citizens, the other is concerned with the divinity of God himself, the rock, into which by contemplation worshippers penetrate: the task is difficult, but the rewards sweet.

The sermon uses several familiar ideas: the communion of saints as the living stones of the Church; the act of contemplation, of spiritual penetration and ascent; the Church as the penetrable body of the wounded Christ and so on.

The language of the nooks vacated by the rebel angels which are to be filled by the just elucidates the terms foramen and caverna (foramina being a contemporary term for the holes in shrines by which access was gained to the relics of the saints). It offers a commentary on the spiritual potential of the Wells Front as a cliff face and a punctured and inhabited wall. It is into these foramina that one delves to disclose to oneself their secrets, for they are a means to union with God. Wells's sonic quatrefoils are literally those holes from which ring out the sounds of thanksgiving, wonder and praise.

Contemplation, visualization and interpretation become one, for Bernard's extraordinarily vivid powers of ideation are founded upon an exhilarating scanning process, the dove hovering and swooping across the wall surface to see the company of heaven lodged within it, in a sort of flight of the mind.

The depth and specificity of this Cistercian discourse on the wall and nook should not delude one into supposing that it represents anything like a positive source for the Wells accomplishment. Too little is known about the readership of Bernard's sermons in the West Country or about its Cistercian culture in general. Wells Cathedral, having history but no cult, had no obvious hagiographical context within which such ideas might have been the basis of its design".

Oneness through contemplating many

2010-01-20T08:27:00.000-08:00

Art always and everywhere has been a medium through which people have sought to express their religious beliefs, or a vehicle through which societies have sought to have their religion represented. This has resulted in many styles and raises the question of defining oneness through the contemplating the many particularly as there is general agreement among cognitive scientists that religion is a basic outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved early in human history. Some have suggested that religion is genetically "hardwired" into the human condition and its various revelatory expressions are varied responses to different environmental imperatives. One controversial idea, the God gene hypothesis, states that some human beings bear a gene which gives them a predisposition to creative episodes as religious revelation. Indeed, when we look at the history of religions, we see that they cannot be detached from revelation as an expression of human creativity. However, there is disagreement on the exact mechanisms that drove the evolution of the religious mind. The two main schools of thought hold that religious behaviour evolved due to natural selection and has selective advantage, or that religion is an evolutionary byproduct of other mental adaptations. New religions appear and serve as complements to previous religions. For instance, in the case of Islam, its revelation and source material is found in the Bible. The Christian religion is based in the Jewish Old Testament. Religion evolves with cultural diversity and works through the changing condition of time and nature, as well as through the changes in human knowledge.

Today, cultural diversity is important, not in and of itself, but because it allows us to expand our horizons, to compare and contrast different values, beliefs and lifestyles, and make judgements upon them. Therefore, diversity is important because it allows us to engage in cross cultural dialogue and debate that can help create values and beliefs that are more universal, and generate a much needed collective language of universal citizenship. But it is precisely such dialogue and debate, and the making of such judgements, that contemporary multiculturalism attempts to suppress in the name of 'tolerance' and 'respect'. For example, it has been said that multiculturalism in the United Kingdom is an authoritarian, anti-human outlook. Its effects are political because true political progress requires not recognition but action, not respect but questioning, not the invocation of the 'Thought Police' but the forging of common bonds and collective global struggles against poverty and injustice.

In his book 'Religion, Art, and Visual Culture', Brent Plate presents a view of cross-culturalism through the act of seeing. What we learn is that seeing is a culturally constructed process, and religious icons are one of many contexts that guide how we see and interpret the world around us. We are all exposed through religious art to the power that an object has on a viewer. That power comes from the painter who has been sacralised to paint what he thinks about questions such as How do humans see the cosmos? What does it mean to see "religiously"? How does visual culture affect the way religions are practiced? Consequently, how might an understanding of the role of visual expressions of religiosity affect the way we move towards a collective language of universal citizenship? What do visual arts have to offer in making this synthesis which written scripture cannot? And what does religion tell us about the meanings of visual arts in ways that art history cannot? These question were dominant themes of the art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy, who believed there was an unchanging 'primordial and universal tradition' that was the source from which all religions were born. The geographical source was located in the Middle East and the production of devotional objects was primarily a craft of believers. The images have the dual purpose of reminding believers of their religious narrative and acting as conduits for supernatural power to flow into the material world. In this sense, icons are religious tools, which fits the idea that causal beliefs emerged from the use of every day utilitarian tools. The manufacture of complex tools requires creating a mental image of an object that does not exist naturally before actually making the artifact. Furthermore, one must understand how the tool would be used, which requires an understanding of causality. Accordingly, the level of sophistication of stone tools is a useful indicator of causal beliefs and the selection of mental abilities to make them may have led to the production of religious icons as symbols for veneration. Communing through prayer or gesture with an icon, a person would partake of holiness, of the divine condition.

The use of symbolism in religion is a universal established phenomenon and it is common for religious practices to involve the creation of images and symbols to represent supernatural beings and ideas. Because supernatural beings violate the principles of the natural world, there will always be difficulty in communicating and sharing supernatural concepts with others. This problem can be overcome by anchoring these supernatural beings in material form through representational art. When translated into material form, supernatural concepts become easier to communicate and understand. Due to the association of art and religion, evidence of symbolism in the anthropological record is indicative of a mind capable of religious thoughts. Art linked with symbolism demonstrates a capacity for abstract thought and imagination necessary to construct religious ideas. It was the is translation of the non-visible through symbolism that enabled early human ancestors to hold beliefs in abstract terms.

Some of the earliest evidence of symbolic behavior are associated with Middle Stone Age sites in Africa. From at least 100,000 years ago, there is evidence of the use of pigments such as red ochre. Pigments are of little practical use to hunter gatherers, thus evidence of their use is interpreted as symbolic or for ritual purposes. Among extant hunter gatherer populations around the world, red ochre is still used extensively for ritual purposes. Upper paleolithic cave art provides some of the most unambiguous evidence of religious thought from the paleolithic. For example, cave paintings depict creatures that are half human and half animal, an example of anthropomorphism commonly associated among shamanistic practices.

The Great Goddess of Asia Minor is the oldest true Goddess known to have an iconic image, predating the goddesses of the Sumerian and Egyptians by at least 5,000 years. While there have been Goddess figurines found which date to 30,000 years ago, they come to us without knowledge of their origin or character of the Goddess they represent.

A figurine of the Great Goddess Cybele found at Çatal Hüyük, dating to 8,000 years ago, depicts a mother squatting in the process of giving birth while flanked by two leopards. In later centuries, the leopards would be changed to lions--the metamorphosed Atalanta and Hippomenes, though leopards were considered to be female lions by the ancients. Her worship was originally combined with that of the Bull of Heaven, which is also prominently displayed at Çatal Hüyük. The priestesses of Cybele (Kybele - cave dweller) would, through a transformation by the Greeks, be confused with and eventually known as the Sibyls. The worship of the Sacred Bull throughout the ancient world is most familiar to the Western world in the biblical episode of the idol of the Golden Calf made by Aaron and worshipped by the Hebrews in the wilderness of Sinai (Exodus). Marduk is the "bull of Utu". Shiva's steed is Nandi, the Bull. The sacred bull survives in the constellation Taurus. The bull, whether lunar as in Mesopotamia and Egypt or solar as in India, is the subject of various other cultural and religious incarnations, as well as modern mentions in new age cultures. The Bull and the Mother together have a claim to be the font of what Coomaraswamy called the primordial and universal tradition of expressing the oneness of the divine.

Making a Little Bang: The art of poetic transfiguration

2010-01-07T06:45:00.000-08:00

"How, in the contemporary period, can we evoke the imagery that communicates the most profound and most richly developed sense of experiencing life? These images must point past themselves to that ultimate truth which must be told: that life does not have any one absolutely fixed meaning. These images must point past all meanings given, beyond all definitions and relationships, to that really ineffable mystery that is just the existence, the being of ourselves and of our world." If we give that mystery an exact meaning we diminish the experience of its real depth. But when a poet carries the mind into a context of meanings and then pitches it past those, one knows that marvellous rapture that comes from going past all categories of definition. Here we sense the function of metaphor that allows us to make a journey we could not otherwise make, past all categories of definition."

Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That

Collage and collection

The corner of a room or the surface of a canvas is an open space and an invitation to creativity. It's a room to manoeuvre a collection of materials such as the contents of tubes of paint, a piece of stone or scraps of coloured paper. It's a space with situational potential, neither circumscribed by media nor by the display of a particular identity.

Collage is an abstract system of representation and model of illusion with situational potential. The outcome is a complex mental expression of the human propensity to collect things and make pleasing arrangements of them. Making a collage exemplifies the poetic expression of taxophila more clearly than other forms of artistic activity. In particular, it is an incisive way of interfering in reality by wrenching objects out of the context in which they were created and transfiguring the collection in two-dimensions to create a self-referential whole with new meaning. In other words, these images point past themselves to the belief in an ultimate truth. An origin belief, also called a myth, is any story or explanation that describes the beginnings of humanity, earth, life, and the universe (cosmogony). Such beliefs can be derived from many different venues including scientific investigation, metaphysical speculation, or religious belief.

To believe in something is not the same as knowing something. Intrinsic to the concept of belief is an implication that there is an opposite to belief, disbelief. Not everyone will believe something is true, but all sane and rational people will acknowledge an observable fact. It is a common error of human beings to allow belief, to allow a mental construct accepted on faith, to become so important, so obsessive, that it is taken as the same thing as fact. Indeed, there are many emotional reasons why a person might be driven to do this, but it still remains that any belief is purely mental whatever it's origin, and the mind can be mistaken. In order to be able to cope with life, we have to have facts to make decisions on. But mixed into these facts that we learn... and take on faith are real... are also many examples of nonsense and arbitrary belief, promoted as fact, by fanatical individuals. Fanatics are driven to promote their beliefs because of the conflict that occurs for them whenever their beliefs are challenged. To stop the feeling of conflict, the fanatic becomes compelled to convince everyone that their belief is fact, or, failing that, to destroy those who threaten the belief. When there are no facts to support a belief, the belief is provision.

This essay describes the rationale of making collages, which express a European's view of belief in an ultimate truth using Eastern artistic representations of spiritual forms to assemble a poetic mindmap of human relationships with the cosmos. Human figures are taken from Hindu and Buddhist religious contexts and transfigured by combining them with other forms to add a breath of human nature to change meaning. The collages are windows for viewers to reveal new beliefs by opening routes to understanding beyond present meanings.

Cognitive researchers are increasingly turning their attention to understanding how our emotional being has evolved as both a primary and necessary part of our rational being. The importance and significance of the ways in which emotion and reason are both integrated in the aesthetic dimension of the arts may become more relevant to the perennial question, not only of what makes us human, but, being human, of what makes us what we are.

Creating new myths

Another way of looking at ‘the being of ourselves and of our world’ is that each time you desire to travel beyond your present country you must say to yourself. Am I thinking and listening in the right language? Otherwise communication with its inhabitants is hopeless. Similarly, transfiguring images in art is also necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon within them, however familiar, because as Henry David Thoreau put it; we have only to be

"... a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance . . .”

To perceive freshly, with fresh senses is to be inspired. This is the route to create new myths.

Campbell’s fundamental belief was that all spirituality is a search for the same basic, unknown force from which everything came, within which everything currently exists, and into which everything will return. This elemental force is ultimately “unknowable” because it has existed from a time before human animals evolved with their words and knowledge. So this basic driving force cannot be expressed accurately in words or pictures. It can only be referred to through spiritual rituals and stories which use metaphors couched in the various stories, deities, and objects of spirituality we see in the world. For example, the Genesis myth in the Bible is not a literal description of actual events, but rather a story with a poetic, metaphorical meaning. It should be examined for clues concerning the fundamental truths of the world and our existence. Therefore, poetry, myth and spirituality are all bound up together as transcendent bridges and pathways towards the fundamental truth of how the universe was created. A process of transfiguration is required to make new myths and their icons for bypassing organisational dead ends. Campbell expressed this process as "following your bliss." He derived this idea from the Upanishads of Hinduism to keep to a personal track in order to pitch yourself beyond current mythology.

“Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: sat-chit-ananda. The word "Sat" means being. "Chit" means consciousness. "Ananda" means bliss or rapture. I thought, "I don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being." I think it worked”.

He saw this idea not merely as a mantra, but as a helpful guide to the individual committed to the ‘hero journey’ that each of us walks through life:

“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time”.

Campbell was fascinated with what he viewed as basic, universal truths, expressed in different manifestations across different cultures. Accordingly, Campbell believed the religions of the world are various, culturally influenced “masks” of the same fundamental, transcendent truths. All religions, including Christianity and Buddhism, can bring one to an elevated awareness above and beyond a dualistic conception of reality, or idea of “pairs of opposites,” such as being and non-being, or right and wrong. Indeed, he quotes in the preface of The Hero with a Thousand Faces; "Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names."—which is a translation of the Rig Vedic saying, "Ekam Sat Vipra Bahuda Vadanthi."

In his four-volume series of books The Masks of God, he tried to summarize the main spiritual threads common throughout the world while examining their local manifestations. His idea was that many of the belief systems of the world which expressed these universal truths had a common geographic ancestry, starting off on the fertile grasslands of Europe in the Bronze Age and moving to the Levant and the "Fertile Crescent" of Mesopotamia and back to Europe and the Far East, where it was mixed with the newly emerging Indo-European Aryan culture.

Philosophy of blending

The aesthetic act of pasting objects and papers to a surface has been practiced in various folk arts for centuries, including twelfth-century Japanese text-collages decorated with paper foils, African tribal emblems, fifteenth-century Persian and Turkish cut-paper designs, German weather charms and lace valentine greetings, as well as eighteenth-century butterfly-wing collages. Collage as a fine art medium, however, emerged with the cubist pasting and gluing experiments of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in France in 1912. These various activities all involved transcribing and mapping of various objects across mental spaces to make a physical arrangement on a flat surface. This process is covered by blending theory.

In Conceptual Blending theory, one works with mental spaces, which are schematic representations of knowledge and relationships i.e. an organizing frame or mindmap. So, the mental space of driving would contain knowledge about vehicles, their components, the functional relationships between human actions and resultant activity (steering, braking,...). One can take diverse mental spaces dealing with different subjects and "blend" them. For example, in the computer desktop you deal with folders, trash bin, files, and with activities like copy, move...etc. Here the source mental spaces are that of the regular office and the computer display. The blended output is the metaphorical organization of computer data in terms of concepts derived from the office. In general terms, one can incorporate any number of source mental spaces, link their functional counterparts, and derive a target blend. Creativity is said to result, when the blended space contains emergent structure (organization) not present in the source mental spaces. A prosaic spiritual example is the blending of a mass-produced Madonna hanging from the rear view mirror of a taxi with the interior of the mass-produced taxi to transfigure the vehicle’s space into a spiritual microcosm of passenger and driver.

An aesthetic experience has been defined as "the vast, submerged continents of nonconscious thought and feeling that lie at the heart of our ability to make sense of our lives." One problem in applying blending theory to aesthetic experiences is identifying the principles that determine what gets selected for the various mappings across mental spaces to occur. One of the theory’s most significant achievements is the principled way in which it shows how new iconographic meaning can emerge from old information. Iconography refers to an intentional (not arbitrary) relation between the elements of the art medium and the mental images or ideas expressed through them.

In this context of ‘medium’, ‘forms’ and ‘ideas’, Joseph Conrad says: "A poem must not mean / But be." His idea is that:

"...work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the manifold truth underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life, what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential-their one illuminating and convincing quality-the very truth of their existence....My task which I am trying to achieve is power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel-its is, before I make you see. That-and no more, and it is everything".

What makes art special is not the cognitive processes that enable us to understand our world and our lives, but how they are exploited in order to put us in touch with the conditions of our emotional and sensuous experiences as participants in the world we share. No less than studies in the natural and the social sciences, analytical studies in the arts are crucial if we wish to understand and map the human cognition. The development of abstract art played a key role in this.

Abstract art

In the early twentieth century Western artists took the view that naturalism had killed the spiritual both in art and in man. 'We must destroy the soulless, materialistic life of the nineteenth century', said Kandinsky, and 'we must build the life of the soul and the spirit of the twentieth century.' He spoke of the nightmare of materialistic ideas that had degraded life into a monstrous, senseless play. In his book ‘On the Spiritual in Art’ he commented angrily in on contemporary art:

`Rooms hung with canvasses, on which elements of 'nature' all represented with paint: animals in light and shadow, standing near the water or lying in the meadow, beside a Crucifixion of Christ painted by an artist who does not believe in Christ; thorn flower pieces, or human figures, standing, sitting or walking, often nude; lots of nude women, sometimes foreshortened from behind, apples on a silver tray, a portrait of old Mr Such-and-Such, a sunset, flying geese, portrait of Baroness X, flying ducks, a lady in white, cows in the shade with fierce yellow patches of sunlight, a lady in green. . . . '

This is language at the end of an era. His view was that art had become senseless and useless. The great Christian-humanist culture of the time before the Enlightenment had broken down. In the contemporary exhibition which Kandinsky describes we are moving amongst the ruins.

How is he going to achieve a new, spiritual, truly human art:' First of all by making art into art. He said:

'I have heard a well known painter saying “When you are painting, take one look at the canvas, half a look at your palette, and then at the model. It sounded right, but I soon found that I had to proceed quite differently; ten looks at the canvas, one at the palette, half a look at nature.'

The artist must express himself, the times in which he lives, and the 'eternal', what belongs to all times and to all cultures. This, the objective—what I have called the universal- has to be shown by means of the subjective.

`The strife of colours, the sense of the balance we have lost, tottering principles, unexpected assaults, great questions, apparently useless striving, storm and tempest, broken chains, oppositions and contradictions these make up our harmony.'

Soon after Kandinsky wrote these words he turned to abstract painting and said 'Abstract painting sheds the skin of nature, but not its laws, the cosmic laws.'

He was looking for a restoration of art through the abstract placement of line and colour, hoping to regain something that was lost in the nineteenth century, the universal, the deeper structure and law of reality. Art was given a high place in this quest to give form to a new life, a life of the spirit. We know that Kandinsky was highly influenced by the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, a kind of westernised, 'demythologised', eastern way of religious thinking.

Marc, an artist friend of Kandinsky, who started with a kind of impressionistic painting just after the beginning of the century, gradually came to a less naturalistic art in which the general or universal became uppermost over the particular (almost always choosing animals as subject-matter), and ending with an almost abstract art, different and yet akin to that of Kandinsky. He tells us:

`I found man to be ugly animals are much more beautiful . . . but in them too I discovered so much that I felt to be appalling and ugly that my representations of them instinctively, out of inner necessity, became increasingly more schematic, more abstract. Each year trees, flowers, the earth, everything showed me aspects that were more hateful, more repulsive, until I came at last to a full realization of the ugliness, the uncleanness of nature.'

Elsewhere in his letters he says that abstract art meant for him the search to let the world itself speaks rather than our soul being moved by the sight of the world. 'The longing for indivisible Being, for liberation from the sense-deception of our ephemeral life, is the main objective of all art.'

So this generation of artists, at the beginning of the 20th century, was looking for a solution to the problem of regaining truth and reality. They were looking for absolutes, the principles that governed life and art and perception, the deep reality of human life, the truth of things behind their appearance. Art, in conformity with art theory in its long development from the Greeks through the Renaissance and romanticism, still had the task of revealing this 'eternal truth', i.e. that which is more than the eye can see. The work of art has to show deep human values, just as a mediaeval Madonna or, at a later date, a humanistic allegorical painting did. So we can understand Marc when he wrote in a famous article in Der blaue Reiter that the true artists were striving 'to create in their work symbols of their time that will belong on the altars of the coming spiritual religion, behind which the technical aspects will disappear'.

This deep-felt reaction against the materialism of the nineteenth century which dissolved all reality, as it were, leaving man with his perceptions alone, searching for true prehuman absolutes and distrusting (or even disgusted with) reality, led to abstract art, an art that was truly and solely art, and at the same time spiritual, conceptual and 'absolute'.

This commitment to abstraction lead ultimately to the art of Rothko. Rothko's vision of myth as a replenishing resource for an era of spiritual void had been set in motion by his reading of Carl Jung, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Thomas Mann, among others. He developed his philosophy of the tragic ideal into the realm of pure abstraction. He thereby opened up the possibility for mankind to transform a Christian cradle of mythic imagery into a new set of images, no longer dependent on tribal, archaic, and religious mythologies.

Poetic universes

Beverley Adams in her introductory essay to the concept of 'a poetic universe' used this notion to describe the activities of art collectors. The essay came from a view of the Diane and Bruce Halle collection of Latin American art that is neither chronological nor thematic. Inventive works by some of the most significant Latin American artists of the 20th century and those showing promise for the 21st century were presented in A Poetic Universe, which opened March 11, 2007 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Adams as curator of the Halle Collection, organised the exhibition, which featured nearly 60 works from 1945 to 2005 that incorporate such unusual media as cow bladder, ficus root, vinyl mattresses, and sea sponges. She claimed that collectors, like artists, have the potential to propose universes of their own, comprising diverse, often incongruent things. The collection itself becomes a work of art because the assembled objects are artistic arrangements of artefacts, each of which takes on a new poetic meaning in relation to its neighbours. The external logic of applying rigid categories is a personal superimposition.

The artist's microcosm, and the universe of the collector's display, both consist of fragments of other's worlds. The collector's singular obsession is manifested through the assembly of different artists' works; sometimes, as is the case with the Halle Collection, the range of these works extends over an enormous expanse of time and space. The processes of an artist creating microcosms and a curator creating universes have much in common. Both combine the plodding of construction and the possibility of poetry because artefacts and collections both result from design and chance, ambition and accident. They interact with a logic that differs from the one imbued in the individual objects when they were first made. The act of collecting does not override the meanings built into the works. Instead, the new context provides another layer of meaning.

Aesthetic evaluation of ‘little bangs’ enables us to determine the extent to which a given work of art successfully simulates the conditions of being iconic of reality. Aesthetics may thus be understood both in its philosophical sense of exploring the conditions of our sensuous and emotional experience and in its artistic sense of appreciating the nature of art in all its forms.

A major theme of the following set of collages is 'man made into god'. The first pictures took as a starting point the royal paintings of Jodhpur, which were included in the exhibition Garden and Cosmos at the British Museum in 2009. The major theme is the final set of seven paintings in the exhibition by 18th century court painter Bulaki. They depict a process of intense meditation whereby priests, described as mahasiddhas of the Nath sect, hover above a wavy field of colour representing the cosmic ocean, and pass through a series of sages to become gods.

From the contemporary point of view, Hindu temples act as a safe haven where ordinary mortals can feel themselves free from the constant vagaries of everyday existence by dissolving the boundaries between man and divinity. This is achieved by contemplating on a personal conception of the deity based on an individual cultural rooting. We have lost the divine who resided amongst us (Krta Yuga), which is the same as saying that once man was divine himself. Man lost the divinity within himself. His intuition, which is nothing but a state of primordial alertness, continues to strive towards the archetypal perfect state where there is no distinction between man and god (or woman and goddess). In this context it is interesting to observe that the word ‘temple,’ and ‘contemplate’ both share the same origin from the Roman word ‘templum,’ which means a sacred enclosure. Indeed, strictly speaking, where there is no contemplation, there is no temple. The Hindu Temple sets out to resolve this deficiency by putting into practice the belief that the temple, the human body, and the primeval sacred mountain and cave, represent aspects of the same divine cosmic symmetry.

The three ways of obtaining release from an earthly life to become divine are the yoga of knowledge, the yoga of action and the yoga of devotion.

The yoga of knowledge involves intellectual and psychological techniques developed by Hindu holy men to control their actions and analyse their unconscious. They remove the obstructions to recovering the nature of their true selves. The true self is shown to be nothing other than Brahman, or God. The goal of all knowledge, therefore, is the experience of union with the divine.

The yoga of action requires that duty be done with no thought for oneself or for the benefit or suffering that one experiences in fulfilling it. Through the performance of one's duty as a dedication to the supreme god, a kind of inner purification takes place, resulting in divine union.

The yoga of devotion, the most common path, requires that prayers, the chanting of scripture and meditation on the image of god be undertaken with such intensity that inner obstructions are burned up and god is revealed within consciousness. All that is required is willingness to surrender oneself completely in devotion to god.

Regardless of which path is followed, the end is the same: the discovery of the true nature within oneself of a spiritual soul (atman) which is at one with god.

Another series of man-god collages focuses on depictions of the Buddha. For the first 600 or so years after his death, the Buddha and his teachings were represented in art by symbols such as the wheel, footprints, or empty thrones.

Human representations of the Buddha started to emerge from the 1st century AD in northern India. These depict the Buddha wearing monk's robes and a serene facial expression. He is shown standing or seated in a lotus position, and he often cradles a begging bowl or makes the gesture of fearlessness. For Buddhists, the correct depiction of the Buddha is important because they believe that a properly rendered Buddha image is an actual spiritual emanation, which possesses supernatural qualities. Although the Buddha is not a god, Buddhists seek to communicate with the supernatural world through Buddha images, making offerings to them and praying before them. Western Catholic art of the saints serves the same purpose

The two main centres of Buddha creation have been identified as Gandhara in today's Punjab, in Pakistan, and the region of Mathura, in central northern India. One Buddhist statue from Mathura has been dated to 81 AD. A sculptured head of a Buddha from Afghanistan has been dated to the 1st or 2nd century.

Gandharan Buddhist sculpture displays Greek artistic influence, and it has been suggested that the concept of the "man-god" was essentially inspired by Greek mythological culture. Artistically, the Gandharan School of sculpture is said to have contributed wavy hair, drapery covering shoulders, shoes and sandals, acanthus leaf decorations, etc. This iconic art was characterized from the start by a realistic idealism, combining realistic human features, proportions, attitudes and attributes, together with a sense of perfection and serenity reaching to the divine. This expression of the Buddha as a both a man and a god became the iconographic canon for subsequent Buddhist art.

Buddhist art continued to develop in India for a few more centuries. The pink sandstone sculptures of Mathura evolved during the Gupta period (4th to 6th century) to reach a very high fineness of execution and delicacy in the modelling. The art of the Gupta School was extremely influential almost everywhere in the rest of Asia. By the 10th century, creativity in Buddhist art was dying out in India, as Hinduism and Islam ultimately prevailed, but it went on to be developed in new and unique ways in China, Japan, Thailand, and other South and East Asian countries. Did a changing cultural context change the representation of Buddha? In the case of Christian mythology, we can ascribe the transformation of pictures of Mary the mother of god over many centuries to profound changes in Western culture. Madonna and Child depictions all stand for something supernatural, something above and beyond ordinary experience. In the thirteenth century they are posters telling people to go to Mary with their troubles. One can follow almost all the different stages in Mariology just by looking at the historical sequence of these paintings.

For instance, in the fourteenth century one sees a new type emerge, the Madonna of Humility, where we see the Madonna sitting on a cushion on the ground, often offering her breast to the child. This is a marked change from the Madonna as Queen that we see in the earlier periods, and specifically in Romanesque times. Later, after the fourteenth century, the portrayal becomes more natural, with more attention to details like the hair, the chair, and the background that often becomes a landscape. And in the Baroque period she sits on clouds, high above us mortals, often accompanied by adoring saints. They are setting us an example, the painting tells us. So the important thing is that it is precisely the artistic qualities of the composition that pass on the message not just what we know or think about the Madonna ourselves. This is true for other Christian themes, such as a Crucifixion, an Adoration of the Magi, or a Resurrection. Always the artist was not concerned with historical events as such and not with archaeological accuracy, but with dogma, with a credal statement in a well-defined, traditional, compositional scheme. The styles might change as an outcome of the relentless effort of Western artists to depict material reality but the basic ideas remain.

The process of transfiguring the Eastern man-god iconography to make the following collages is something like learning another language so you can listen intelligibly. This is because the original depiction sometimes locks up truths, which were once well, known, but have been forgotten. In other cases the story from which the original was taken holds the germs of truth which, though they were never plainly discerned, the genius of its framers caught a glimpse of it in a happy moment of divination. Kandinsky's take on this is:

"In practical life... one will hardly find a person who, if he wants to travel to Berlin, gets off the train in Regensburg! In spiritual life, getting off the train in Regensburg is a rather usual thing. Sometimes even the engineer does not want to go any further, and all of the passengers get off in Regensburg. How many, who sought God, finally remained standing before a carved figure! How many, who sought art, became caught on a form which an artist had used for his own purposes, be it Giotto, Raphael, Durer, or Van Gogh!"

The man-god collages are poetic transfigurations. They meet the modern criteria for a poem to be an autonomous object that may or may not represent the real world but is created in language made distinctive by its complex web of references. Postmodernists look on poems as collages of current idioms that are intriguing but self-contained — they employ, challenge and/or mock preconceptions, but refer to nothing beyond themselves. Any poetic universe, such as a picture collection or collage, has its own alphabet, its own geography, its stars and coordinates. A collection is a personal cosmos that might make sense or be whole only to the individual who built it, but is, in truth, never quite complete. From this point of view an artistic composition of materials and objects collected and pasted upon a surface, often with unifying lines and colour, may be described as a poetic microcosm, which gains significance when added to a collector’s universe. It is an assembly, composed of both borrowed and original material. The art of creating such microcosms produces works of art made from pieces of other things and arranged into a new whole. Constructing a poetic microcosm of things in the picture plane is a view of a collection of objects that are neither chronological nor thematic. The assembly of things to be attached to a canvas focuses instead on provisional and improvisational relationships that appear as the collection grows to a point where the artist feels the picture is complete. The affinities between a collage's visual, conceptual, ideological, and historical aspects, or those that are forced by proximity, provoke an ever-expanding web of associations. An exhibition of art may be visualised as a personal universe. It is a 'big bang' composed of numerous 'little bangs' of individual artistic creativity, each of which may be taken as an altarpiece for spiritual journeys we would otherwise not undertake.

Creativity: an artist's journey

2009-09-08T10:01:00.000-07:00

I see the world in a visual way. Through art and my pursuit of aesthetic contemplation I look at the world around me in a very different way to other people. As an artist, you find your own specific way of interpreting beauty. As a child I was fascinated by the world of fashion photography and poured over my collection of Vogue magazines from an early age. I spent many happy hours creating fashion images and putting them in scrapbooks – my early passion for collation and organisation. And probably one of the greatest influences was my uncle, Frederick Salter, a renowned Welsh artist, who inspired, nurtured and most importantly, spent patient hours painting with me as a child. Now I find myself inspired by the place in which I live (we have moved many times around the world), vistas of landscape and the history of artists who came before.

After a very uneventful A’level in art, which offered no interesting surprises or particular talents I opted for a career in fashion styling (motivated by my childhood passion), which led me behind the camera of many great photographers and there I was able to unleash my creativity. The procedure I adopted was after having an idea for a fashion shoot, I then went ahead and produced the pages of the magazine, working closely with the creative team. But I was always the most excited at the other end of the photographic process – editing, cropping and selection of the final prints.

When I moved to the USA with our first child, Jack, I was no longer able to work and felt I needed to fill the creative gap left by my leaving the magazine world. At a more mature age I was ready to go back to art and painting. In Wilmington, Delaware, I took up drawing classes at the art museum, followed by painting classes…….and the rest is history. I haven’t stopped painting in 15 years (I will always remember when it happened because the reminder is whatever the age Jack is!) and my work has evolved over the years.

I started the painting process with still-life. Arranging coloured bottles one in front of another I juxtaposed these bright glass vessels and began to work on personal compositional preferences. Colour moved into my work almost straight away – almost too vivid to begin with. Even the landscapes that followed echoed the bright palettes I had admired in those amazing American art museums of works by Matisse, Bonnard and Van Gogh. At the time – they were the limit of my knowledge of art history.

Another move, this time to Suffolk, in England, tamed my palette and got me interested in these wide landscapes consisting of stratas of sky and land along a flat coast. It was here that I learnt the technique of dragging the brush across the canvas and leaving dry-brush marks that revealed the colours painted underneath. Peter Burman, a local landscape artist, was my teacher and in his classes we always produced an alla prima painting within a few hours – spontaneous and fresh without too much time to dwell on perfection. I think this type of process enabled me to approach a painting without too much fear or trepidation.

After a further two children we found ourselves living in Northumberland and it is here that I enrolled on a fine art degree affiliated with Sunderland University. Having continued to paint the wonderful northern hilly landscape of Hadrian’s wall country with its wide vistas and big skies, I began to experiment with the traditional landscape composition using my newly acquired skills on the computer and butting up one landscape against another. The landscapes evolved into stratas – layers of land and sky. My canvases got bigger and the techniques I was using were achieved by using larger scrapers, trowels and spatulas. By experimenting on paper first I could see what effects could be achieved, often using acrylic first and then covering with a wash of oil paint bathed in turpentine to even out the colour tones.

By this time I was looking at Gerhard Richter, Richard Diebenkorn, Peter Lanyon, Ivon Hitchens with my tutor and mentor at Newcastle College, Tom Moore.

And it was Tom Moore who encouraged a series of paintings of city landscapes of Newcastle where I concentrated on urban redevelopment turning scaffolded buildings into art. Using masking tape and acrylic paint I carefully achieved the symmetry of the buildings on wooden panels and explored the use of dry brush techniques which has inspired me for future city scape paintings including my Ponte Vecchio and San Gimignano works in Florence.

A project entitled ‘Chance and Order’ was set for the degree course and it was then that the Plasma Series emerged. By this time my knowledge of art history had greatly increased and I was spending any free time going to contemporary local exhibitions and any time we had a holiday abroad. My points of reference enhanced my painting vocabulary. Francis Bacon was one of my inspirations for the Chance and Order series. I loved the way he sent busy, amorphic figures against smooth, evenly painted backdrops – and his use of colour, in my mind, was both original and surprising.

Working with a friend in his studio in Northumberland, I chanced upon the garage next door where they were spraying the underside of cars with a pebbly black paint. I stencilled this spray paint on a canvas and then starting experimenting with enamel paint, pouring the paint on the surface and then letting it drip from one side to the other in an almost gridlike pattern. This was the start of my process-led work and has been a genre of working for me now for many years. Eventually I managed to develop a technique to isolate the enamel paints in the centre of the canvas (after Bacon) and marbled the colours together until an amorphic shape appeared that pleased me. This physical action of manipulating the canvas to create a form that pleased me was both random and controlled.

Another move, this time to Florence in Italy, led me to fully express all the influences that have been gathering over the years and has really been the icing on the cake. How could you not be inspired by the crumbling palazzo walls, the Renaissance paintings with their rich oil colours and use of gold leaf and the countryside and climate of the Tuscan region. The strata landscapes are still there but they have evolved. More use of gold leaf in the plasmas and landscapes and a series of collaged Madonnas using Florentine wrapping paper. My most recent work, inspired by a brief visit to the Natural History Museum in New York, involves recycling and cutting up old work into pebble shapes and presenting on evenly painted boards and cemented with resin. This work also has a reference to the wonderful marbling and pietra dure of Italy. My Florence. My view. My history.

I am now able to see a pattern in my creative life where I jump from realism to abstract landscapes to photography to collage and then the whole circle starts again. It keeps me creative and I so enjoy the inter-relation between the different media. They inspire and feed of each other as if there is a parasitic feeding going on where one image emerges and evolves from another.

Susi Bellamy

See a selection of Susi's pictures in chronological order.

An essence of Indian art

2009-08-17T06:01:00.000-07:00

It is well known that sharing impressions of a work of art with friends will reveal that each of them had perceived an entirely different "story" from the experience. Inevitably, this will lead to a discussion of what the artist really had in mind when she responded to the creative impulse. It will also raise questions as to whether or not a codification system could be discerned. Codification is very obvious in Indian temple arts as instruments of worship, where devotional sculptures for example offer a powerful religious experience through their aesthetic and symbolic authority. The codification of art-making is reflected in medieval artists' manuals (sastras), which dictated both the form as well as the emotional authority and aesthetic experience (rasa) of a work of art. These manuals are responsible for maintaining over the centuries the principal iconographic forms in the three traditional religions of the Indian subcontinent, Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism. The response to the created forms is explained through rasa, the "organ of intuitive feeling/ perception". Rasa is an aesthetic pleasure and a "gustative process", both the substance, vibration or quality of what is apprehended/felt and the body/mind system that apprehends.

Historically, the adherents of rasa theory believed rasa, to be the meaning of a creative statement, even though they may have had different ideas about the definition of art. Rasa is roughly translated: "as emotive aesthetics". It is one of the most important concepts in classical Indian aesthetics, having pervasive influence in theories of painting, sculpture, dance, poetry, and drama. Rasa theory argues that the presentation of emotions is the proper object and domain of artistic discourse no matter what the medium of expression. Bharata, an Indian sage from the first millennium set out a theory of art and its philosophy based on rasa. In 'Natyashastra', his pioneering work on Indian dramatics, Bharata mentions eight rasas. He says Rasa is produced when 'Vibhaava', 'Anubhava' and 'Vyabhichari bhava' come together.

Vibhava is the medium through which an emotion arises in an actor e.g. a child riding a stick and enjoying it as if he were actually riding a horse.

Anubhava comprises all the physical changes arising due to the vibhavas e.g. changes in facial expression and body language.

Vyahicari bhava encompasses the transient emotions eg.weeping with joy.

We respond to all the arts with feeling. The language of feelings is not a private language; it is more a social system of symbols, a language game that is understood by those who have learned its conventions and usages. For example, emotions treated in a poem are neither the projections of the reader's own mental states nor the private feelings of the poet; rather, they are the objective situations abiding in the poem as its cognitive content ready to be extracted by the educated reader. Rasa is understood as residing in all the situational factors presented in an appropriate language.

A poet chooses to express a theme because he sees a certain promise for developing its emotional possibilities and exploits it by dramatizing its details.

In general, viewers ignoring the codification system of a work of art have the impression that because they cannot grasp the explicit meaning of the piece they are certainly missing its aesthetic content. In fact, both contemporary and traditional arts become coldly "exotic" when they rely too much on explicit meanings.

According to Indian theorists of performing arts, expression may be literal, metaphoric or metonymic and suggestive, the latter being the domain of "pure poetry". A theory of suggestive expression was elaborated in the context of Kashmiri shaivism, a complex philosophical system at the confluence of several religious trends, among which are tantrism and sufism. The theory was initiated by art philosopher Anandavardhana during the 9th century and fully developed by Abhinavagupta in the early 11th century.

Anandavardhana's premise states that artistic production is primarily a recombination of existing elements. However, novelty is not so much a matter of finding new primitive objects or combinations. Even the same performance watched several times may be perceived as "new" if certain conditions are met. A necessary condition for experiencing rasa is a sufficient degree of imprecision, an incompleteness of the codification triggering the imagination (kalpana) of each auditor, thereby yielding a "second creation" (bhavana) within the field of the "unspoken". Anandavardhana makes it clear that this process is not the outcome of a semantic operation.

This ancient Indian theorising on aesthetics is centred on the psyche of individual artists as a counterbalance to the categories of caste from which they come. The latter deny the existence of anything like humanity. But art is produced by individuals who share certain traits in common although belonging to different castes. They are individuals defined arbitrarily by emotions such as Shringara (erotic), Hasya (comic), Karuna (pathetic), Raudra (furious), Vira (heroic), Bhayanak (terrible), Bhibhatsa (odious) and Adbhuta (marvellous). These are spelt out by Bharata in his Natyashastra as they refer to performance art.

Clearly, such a scheme required elucidation. And that came with later theorists, such as Anandavardhana in the 9th century, who stressed the vibrations of a work (dhwani) as the basis of its aesthetic appreciation. The word 'dhwani" literally means "suggestion in an aesthetic sense' and was developed into an elaborate theory by Anandavardhana. Dhwani thus became the celebrated classical focus of Indian literary criticism, dealing with the aesthetic significance of words and their subtle undertones. Later, the 11th-century writer Abhinavagupta related dhwani to the activation of remainders of past experience called karma. Karma itself is the accumulation of "life roots" (vasana), a profound dissatisfaction linked to every action in itself. This quality of vibration in art brings us closer to penetrating the objective nature of the aesthetic qualities of an artwork, on the one hand, and of the changing impact of its rhythms over time on the other. It is precisely these vibrations, our assessment of them and the manner in which they are produced that basically reflect not only our individual aesthetic appreciation and taste, but also its evolution over time and space. Anandavardhana's theory ought to have replaced Bharata completely but the reverential nature of thought in a stagnant Hindu society has simply superimposed the one on the other.

A good model for analysing the impact of an Indian dhwani experience in a contemporary Western setting are the pictures in a recent British Museum exhibition (Garden & Cosmos, 2009) from the court of the Maharajah of Jodhpur. A highlight of dhwani at the end of the exhibition was a set of seven one metre long painted folios representing 'cosmic oceans' composed in a narrow landscape format. The paintings are attributed to the Muslim court painter Bulaki and dated to 1823. They display a novel arrangement of ancient iconography, part of a project in which, from the 1750s, the Maharajha's painters set out to convey the cosmology written in manuscripts by Nath scholars that had never been previously illustrated.

The basis of Nath religion is various systems of tantric yoga, which are aimed at the transubstantiation of the human body into a divine immortal form. The word Nath is derived from the name of god Shiva and its literal meaning is 'lord'. The folios depict vast swirling waters upon which are floating three Nath adepts (mahasiddhas) who have reached the highest level of meditative attainment with one hand raised in the gesture of explication. Their repetitive god-like iconography consists of jewelled kundal earrings, triangular black hat, golden halo, and orange patterned robe. They are arranged in a 'hidden' inverted triangle that signifies the female principle in yantra diagrams. They gaze into this triangle

The adept to the left always sits on the shoulders of a strange green, scaly-skinned figure riding a black antelope. Animals, symbolizing or complementing the energy or character of deity, came to be integral to Indian iconography and were always depicted with the deity. In this context, Vayo, the wind god, sits astride an antelope. In Vedic times Vayo formed the Hindu triad of nature gods together with Agni (fire) and Surya (sun). In later Hindu times he was degraded to become an atmospheric god restricted to the north-west quarter of the compass. He is the King of the Gandharvas, spirits who inhabit Indra's heaven and sing and dance there to entertain the Gods. One of Vayu's many exploits include breaking off the head of Mount Meru, a mythical mountain, and creating the Island of Lanka, now Sri Lanka.

On five of the picture folios, beneath the lower central mahasiddha, are the symbols "om," fish, snake, swan, and tortoise. "om" is the ultimate sacred syllable; the mahasiddha Matsyendranath was born as a fish; the snake stands for the latent female energy (Kundalini Shakti) which the mahasiddha must awaken to achieve omniscience; the swan (hamsa) represents release from samsara (the cycle of rebirth) and is the vehicle of the goddess Saraswati; and the tortoise is the support of the earth. The triad of figures may represent the spiritual development of a mahasiddha from priest to god.

The Baluki folios, in which the figures occupy only about a quarter of the picture area, have a striking modern look and without a storyline they also have an air or mystery, which the large expanse of a turbulent calligraphic cosmic ocean and the slight variations between the figures and their symbolic labels tend to reinforce. However, despite this diverse iconography, in the absence of the reference text the overall compositional code cannot be revealed. It has been suggested that artists may have listened to Nath stories to produce the folios that were subsequently sequenced as manuscripts. In which case it is unlikely that the literary context will ever be known. Without a script we are left with Picasso's claim that a painting is never done, and we find here, too, the deep roots of our own peculiarly modern and pervasive sense of the mystery of art, the sense that it ever eludes us, and that our own obsessive detective investigations of it will remain incomplete, they will never be finished.

As a postscript it must be added that dhwani is too important as a social idea to be confined to the art world. For example, we cannot perceive the full significance of the Anglo Indian art historian and critic Ananda Coomaraswamy's philosophy of Indian nationalism without perceiving the aesthetic impact of the theory of "dhwani" on the cohesive role of Indian art. Coomaraswamy reflected on the significance of art motifs and their symbolic meanings which emanated from India's cultural craft base. In this respect it has been said that Coomaraswamy's approach to nationalism combined the patriotic spirit of Mazzini, the intellectual freedom of Emerson, and the aesthetic insight of Anandavardhana.

http://www.indiavideo.org/text/bharata-muni-1073.php

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11924/11924-h/11924-h.htm#THE_PLATES

http://livingheritage.org/akc_quotes.htm

http://www.tamilnation.org/hundredtamils/coomaraswamy.htm

http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Mysticism

Inventing a symbolic language

2009-08-10T07:24:00.000-07:00

The cultural model of Indian temple sculpture made a remarkable entry into an innovative line of English art through the London meeting between Eric Gill and Ananda Commaraswamy in 1908. Gill, an engraver and self-taught sculptor, quickly assimilated the two cultural characteristics of Indian sculpture, namely its convexity and linearity. Using for the most part female members of his family circle as nude models, this Indian influence resulted, on the one hand, in the proliferation of black and white line engravings, and on the other sculptured forms expressed as convexities.

Gill marked out his stone reliefs before carving with outlines that indicated the depth to which each part should be cut, by half an inch, an inch, and so on. Then he cut backwards from the front skin of the stone, removing material layer by layer, by following the outlines drawn on the stone. It was a methodical and logical procedure which produced direct yet rather heraldic images. David Kindersley, an apprentice letter-cutter who joined Gill's workshop in the mid1930s, recalled how Gill worked with sureness and clarity:

"His attention was remarkable in degree and duration . . . No tool was ever forced beyond its capacity. All stages were in process at once over various parts of the carving, the projections always being a stage ahead so that, for all the world, it appeared a simple question of removing a series of skins of differently textured stone. Strength and firmness of form were assured not only by the clarity of his vision but in no small degree through his technique. All form for Mr Gill was of a convex order. Concavities were the result of the meeting of two convexities."

Through his eager assimilation of the essence of Indian temple art, Gill was able to unite his innate aptitudes for the crafts of engraving and sculpture, in one seamless process of creativity. His engravings are flattened sculpture and his sculptures are puffed up line-engravings.

Eric Gill occupies a unique place in British sculptural life of the twentieth century. He was born on 22 February 1882 in Brighton, the eldest son of twelve children of Arthur Tidman and Rose Gill. Eric Gill described his father as 'an Anglican parson, formerly a Dissenter', and his grandfather and great-uncle were Congregationalist missionaries in the South Sea Islands. The strong sense of vocation displayed by these three close male relatives was inherited by Gill, who appeared to feel from early manhood that he had a divinely appointed task to do. This task was to communicate his vision of art as a vehicle for the splendours of spiritual life. And in order to do this, Gill began to produce figurative sculpture that was uncompromising in its sacred message.

Gill came to believe passionately that things had gone wrong with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, and the introduction of inhuman machine production of buildings, clothing, furniture, food and utensils. In the centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution, there was no special thing called art. Art was making in general and anyone who made anything would, if the word had existed, have been called an artist. Art was simply the ways of men with things; it was human work . In this sense, Gill was already pre-adapted to take up the cultural inheritance of Indian art, which for the most part is the product of anonymous sculptors and painters.

An entry in Gill's diary for 10 January 1908 records that he attended a lecture at the Art Workers' Guild, London, given by Dr Ananda Coomaraswamy on Indian Art. Gill added the accompanying phrase 'a most splendid paper'. This appears to be the first time that Gill became aware of Coomaraswamy, and it seems he was immediately impressed by the man and his knowledge. At the end of his life, Gill wrote in his Autobiography:

"There was one person . . . to whose influence I am deeply grateful; I mean the philosopher and theologian, Ananda Coomaraswamy. Others have written the truth about life and religion and man's work . . . Others have understood the true significance of erotic drawings and sculptures. Others have seen the relationships of the true and the good and the beautiful. Others have had apparently unlimited learning. Others have loved; others have been kind and generous. But I know of no one else in whom all these gifts and all these powers have been combined. I dare not confess myself his disciple; that would only embarrass him. I can only say that I believe that no other living writer has written the truth in matters of art and life and religion and piety with such wisdom and understanding."

Coomaraswamy was born in 1877 in Sri Lanka of a Tamil father and an English mother. He studied botany and geology at London University. The Home Office in London appointed Coomaraswamy Director of the first mineralogical survey of Ceylon from 1903 to 1906, and after completing this work, he travelled for the first time to India at the end of 1906. His time in Srilanka and India stimulated an abiding interest in the arts and crafts of those countries and their spiritual basis. In 1907 Coomaraswamy moved into a medieval building, the Norman Chapel at Broad Campden, restored for him by C. R. Ashbee who lived and worked a couple of miles away, at Chipping Campden. Ashbee had formed his Guild of Handicraft, a group of workers occupied in the arts and crafts, in the East End of London in 1888. In 1902 he took his ideas and his workers to Chipping Campden, an attractive and neglected Gloucestershire village, in order to test his theory that a rural life was better for the production of art and craft work than an urban one. Ashbee looked at the position of the worker and his occupation in the arts and crafts world, such as silversmithing or printing, in terms of the social well-being of the individual and of society as a whole. Coomaraswamy allied himself to Ashbee's ideas and ideals, but substituted the spiritual for the social. Coomaraswamy purchased William Morris's press and used it to publish in 1908 the first book on the arts of his native Srilanka, 'Medieval Sinhalese Art'. This was followed by The Indian Craftsman in 1909, Indian Drawings in 1910, and several articles in the Burlington Magazine between 1910and 1916 on Indian art, later published in book form as 'Rajput Painting and The Dance of Shiva', the latter reviewed by Gill. In 1917

Coomaraswamy left Britain to take up a post as Keeper of the Indian Collections at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, a position he held until his death in 1947.

Coomaraswamy was important for Gill for two reasons: firstly because he examined the relationship between man's work and his leisure, and secondly because he examined the relationship between the sacred and the profane. Also he provided Gill with a phrase that virtually became Gill's motto, and is thought by many to have stemmed from Gill himself, so perfectly does it chime with his aesthetic -

'The artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist'.

Gill was able to test his own Christian-based ideas against those of a Hindu, and thus gain a broader spiritual base, although many ideas were held in common. Coomaraswamy was looking for a new metaphysical system for man's work and life at just the same time that Gill was, but Coomaraswamy's aesthetic parameters were much wider. He offered a deep and first-hand knowledge of Indian and Srilankan arts and crafts to a British audience anxious to learn more. And Gill was in the forefront of those thirsty for this knowledge. An appreciation in Britain of Indian arts and crafts had first emerged in the late 1870s, spearheaded by the artists William Morris, Edward Burne Jones, John Everett Millais and Walter Crane. These men were only too aware of how the arts and crafts in Britain were being attacked by increasing industrialisation and they wished to focus attention on the same position occurring in India. From 1908 Coomaraswamy took up this cause with passion. Then in the Spring of 1910 the India Society was founded, with its headquarters in London. Among the founding members were Coomaraswamy, Walter Crane, W. R. Lethaby, Roger Fry and William Rothenstein, all of whom were colleagues of Gill and significant supporters of his emergent sculptural practice.

In 1908 Coomaraswamy published The Aims of Indian Art and in this book cited William Blake as a most significant example of a Western artist who worked in an imaginative rather than a naturalistic manner. This way of thinking and working allied Blake to the aesthetics of Oriental artists. Blake was for Coomaraswamy a great and original spiritual thinker and artist and assumed for him the role of a bridge between Eastern and Western art. It is not inconceivable to imagine that Gill wanted to inherit Blake's role. In 1910 Gill designed a tombstone based on one of Blake's illustrations to Robert Blair's poem 'The Grave', the dramatic composition of 'The Reunion of the Soul and the Body'. And in 1917 Gill based his wood engraving of The Last Judgement on Blake's colour print of God Judging Adam. Gill, like Blake, believed in social and spiritual reform, and sexual freedom. They both abhorred the negative power of industrial mechanisation. It has been said that Coomaraswamys complex erotic life was a feature of his personal philosophy.

Gill's belief that the ascetic and the sensual could be amalgamated stemmed from his burgeoning knowledge of Indian art and Hindu theology. In 1913 Coomaraswamy published his 'The Arts and Crafts of India and Ceylon' and a section of his chapter on Indian sculpture provides a most useful gloss on these two beliefs. Coomaraswamy had been describing how sculptures of spiritual figures were made more impressive if they were created in a voluptuous style:

". . . in the best of Gothic art there are traces of a conflict, a duality of soul and body. If in many works of ancient Greece there is no such conflict, this is because the body alone is presented: but in the best of the Indian sculpture flesh and spirit are inseparable . . .

In nearly all Indian art there runs a vein of deep sex-mysticism. Not merely are female forms felt to be equally appropriate with male to adumbrate the majesty of the Over-soul, but the interplay of all psychic and physical sexual forces is felt in itself to be religious. Already we find in one of the earliest Upanishads -

'For just as one who dallies with a beloved wife has no consciousness of outer and inner, so the spirit also, dallying with the Self-whose-essence-is-knowledge, has no consciousness of outer and inner'. Here is no thought that passion is degrading . . . but a frank recognition of the close analogy between amorous and religious ecstasy . . . It is thus that the imager, speaking always for the race, rather than of personal idiosyncrasies, set side by side on his cathedral walls the yogi and the apsara, the saint and the ideal courtesan'.

Hinduism

What can we learn from hinduism

The spaces between: geology and art

2009-06-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

In the blog ‘accretionarywedge’. a geologist has written that his subject is a science riddled with aesthetic values. It “is a science driven in many cases solely by imagination and creativity, which then leads to an artistic representation or recreation of a time we’ll never visit, a place we’ll never see with our own eyes, or an organism that was only partially preserved". Not only does he believe that geology is riddled with aesthetic values, but many geologists also yearn to see geology within ‘traditional’ art, literature, music, etc. These are the yearnings for understanding that reside in conceptual spaces between a material object and its mental representation.

These spaces which link art and the Earth sciences—geology in particular—have not been widely recognized, yet both areas of human creativity have impinged on each other in the following ways.

-earth sciences phenomena as a source of artistic inspiration;
-geological illustrations as art;
-the use of geological materials in earth art;
-and geological investigations of the material basis for art objects.

All of these areas give us a glimpse of the great complexity inherent in the natural world, helping us appreciate the beauty and order of things. This, in turn, makes us aware of our place in the long-term material flux of a dynamic planet. Its then a short step to begin thinking about our own daily lives in a wider spiritual context. Beyond that, the study of geoscience in everyday life can give us an enormous amount of information of practical value while revealing much about the world in which we dwell. The earth sciences are, quite literally, all around us, and by learning about the structures and processes of our planet, we may be surprised to discover just how prominent a place geoscience occupies in the aesthetics of our daily lives and even our thought patterns.

Greg Wessell, co-curator of an exhibit called The Fusion of Geology and Art at the Two-Wall Gallery in Vashon Island, Wash., says the physical world is never that simple, it's never “just” anything, for behind the geological discoveries and findings and insights is a simple concept of beauty in the complexity of the system that creates folds, striations and cracks.

"Geologists by nature have to think in ways that engineers and others don't,” Wessell said. “They have to be able to picture complex processes in time and space using parameters (such as the concept of geologic time) that are largely outside human experience. So, it helps to be imaginative and creative ... putting all these disparate pieces of information together to construct a working model and then being able to tell others about it."

Wessell's picture of cross section with dropstones in soft sediment and accompanying soft-sediment disturbance was accompanied with the statement "Her life was like the sediment in a pond; criticism from her parents made a big splash on the surface and a permanent crater in the mud below."

His picture A lesson from stratigraphy was accompanied by the phrase: "Everything you say and do makes an impact, but the impact may not be measurable to you."
Carol Nelson was stimulated to produce a series of abstract paintings inspired by the colours and textures of the Grand Canyon. "The view is straight down from the south rim. The colours of the water constrast with the warm canyon walls"
Geologists have the ability to represent the geology they see in the field on drawing paper or canvas--an inherit ability and one that was used extensively in the classical (pre-computer) period in geology. Artists, on the other hand, tend to see a scene from the composition, light, and perspective, which includes the geology. This contrast prompted three geologists of the Kansas Geological Survey to explore how well Kansas geology is represented by artistic works of several indigenous Kansas artists. For example in Gove County, there are chalk remnants forming spectacular outliers. The Monument Rocks are perhaps the best known.
Monument Rocks in Gove County, by J.R. Hamil (watercolor)

What does not seem to have been explored artistically is a tract of landscape from the point of view that it expresses a unified biogeological system embedded in the local culture, with notional spaces linking biology, geology and culture. In this connection, art is fundamentally produced by acting upon two main principles-a principle of form, derived fom the organic world, which is the universal objective aspect of all works of art; and a principle of origination peculiar to the human mind. The latter impels us to create and appreciate the creation of symbols, phantasies, myths which take on a universally valid objective existence only in virtue of the principle of form. Form is a function of perception; origination is a function of imagination. These two mental activities exhaust, in their dialectical counterplay, all the psychic aspects of aesthetic experience.

But art has other aspects-biological and social. Indeed life itself, in its most secret and essential sources, is aesthetic in that it only is in virtue of the embodiment of energy in a form which is not merely material, but aesthetic. Such is the formative principle discernible in the evolution of the universe itself. It would seem that the more the scientist is able to reveal of the nature of the physical structure of the world, the more he relies on numerical harmonies which are aesthetically satisfying. Fundamentally, the geologist, no less than the artist, should be ready to accept a view of planet Earth that finds that the cleavage between the aesthetic and the extra-aesthetic domain of experience, no less than that between the scientific and the extra-scientific explanations, is the cleavage between the metrical and the non-metrical, rather than that between the concrete and the transcendental.

European sedimentary basins (PaintShop Pro image)

In philosophy of mind the general claim is made that the mental supervenes on the physical. The term 'supervenience' is used to describe a kind of dependency relationship, typically held to obtain between sets of properties. The value of a physical object is sometimes held to be supervenient upon the physical properties of the object. Kendall Walton's analysis of various aesthetic properties takes this idea further and suggests that the 'supervenience bases' of artworks extend well beyond their physical boundaries to include the artists' intentions, the actual or apparent processes that led to the formation of the works, the character of other contemporary or historical works, and the various categories recognized by the artistic community as a whole.

In aesthetics, such "wide" supervenience of artworks is generally accepted to support people classified as contextualists who believe that the study a work of art's non-perceptual hidden properties, such as its historical and cultural background, is necessary in order to appreciate it. For example, the beauty of Sueurat's La Grande Jatte might supervene on the physical composition of the painting (the specific molecules that make up the appearance), the artistic technique of the painting (in this case, dots), the figures and forms of the painted image (the behaviour of Parisians at leisure), or the painted canvas as a whole (the concept of a work of art in France at that time). On the other hand, formalists believe that the aesthetic appreciation of an artwork generally is a private affair and involves an attentive awareness of its sensory or perceptual qualities only, and does not require knowledge about its nonperceptual properties.

What does this hidden knowledge add to our appreciation of the picture? To Marcus Aurelius it was important to 'know' the hidden things of life.

"Observe and contemplate on the hidden things of life: how a man's seed is but the beginning, it takes others to bring it to fruition. Think how food undergoes such changes to produce health and strength. See the power of these hidden things which, like the wind cannot been seen, but its effects can be".

We know by a process of immersion. We enter a state of intellectual absorption in an action or condition. Popper says immersion is characterised by "diminishing critical distance from what is shown and increasing emotional investment in what is happening". The idea that the meaning of a work derives more from an audience's interpretation of it rather than simply the author's intent is central to much twentieth-century criticism.

One important way in which the experience of art becomes more than a private affair is in the form of art criticism. Art criticism is an interpretive portal between artist and viewers. In theory, art criticism assesses the aesthetic excellence of works of art, just as in the popular imagination the critic is first and foremost someone who judges. But a survey of visual art critics at American newspapers in 2002 ranked judgement well behind education as the perceived task of the critic. This change from making an aesthetic judgement to telling the story behind a work of art has come with modernism and a shift away from beauty as being the main goal of artists.

Supervenience also applies to scientific presentations. In biology, the building blocks of the cell do not alone account for the cell's development and functioning, which are subservient on environmental factors and chemical changes at the level of the cell as a whole. They work as a process to promote the expression of genetic potentials in a sort of "top-down" causation. However, the question may be asked to what extent this supervenience is necessary to appreciate the following photo-micrograph of a six-cell human test tube embryo as a subject of contemplation. Does it matter if the observer is ignorant of the subject matter altogether?

Similarly, the subject of the following watercolour is a key geological element in our knowledge of primeval processes that occurred 220 million years ago. These physical processes were responsible for the present physical appearance of a swathe of Britain, from Scotland to the West Country. Would knowledge of these processes aid contemplation of the picture?

Space in time

2009-06-10T01:11:00.000-07:00

For the purposes of this discussion, space is defined geographically and culturally and is coupled to the idea of people having 'a sense of place'. The term sense of place means different things to different people. To some, it is a distinctive visual characteristic that some geographic spaces have and some do not, while to others it is an emotional feeling or perception held about a space by individuals and groups. Both uses involve adopting a set of characteristics that make a space special or unique and promote authentic human attachment and belonging.

Spaces said to have a strong "sense of place" have an outstanding identity and character that is deeply felt by local inhabitants and by many visitors. But it is primarily a social phenomenon dependent on human engagement for its existence. Such a feeling may be derived from the natural environment, when the focus is on landscape, but is more often derived from a mix of natural and cultural features, and generally includes the people who occupy the space. In these connotations, strong pastoralist and anti urbanist philosophies have produced modes of codification aimed at protecting, preserving and enhancing spaces with an obvious sense of place. This is evident in spaces with anti-industrialist and anti modernist values, such as the British "Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty" and the American "National Historic Landmark".

Two important visual concepts to communicate a sense of place are imaginary 'time in space' and imaginary 'space in time'. These two overlapping emotional perspectives became the driving force of 19th century British art. Imaginary 'time in space' is exemplified by the Pre-Raphaelites, who were particularly fascinated by medieval culture, believing it to possess a spiritual and creative integrity that had been lost in later eras (Fig 1). 'Space in time' was employed by the 19th century painter Walter Langley, and others like him, to dramatise fields and quays with peasants and fisherfolk so as to glorify the imagined joys and tragedies of simple village life (Fig 2). This was the period after 1880, when the rediscovery of national identity and native traditions prevailed throughout the western world. Pictures of space in time were painted for urbanites as nostalgic reassurances of the continuity of less comfortable traditional ways of living. For the most part this picture-making was an incessant production system where standards were consistently maintained year on year, but there were no high flyers. In all cases, a lexicon of historical continuities was amplified and the visual disjunctions were filled in with painterly imagination. The pictures also served to add additional character to out of the way spaces that were beginning to serve an embryo tourist industry.

Cultural features may create a sense of place in a space that has no outstanding visual quality. Then the feeling of attachment may be strongly enhanced by the space being written about by poets, novelists and historians, or portrayed in art or music. It may also be created by knowledge of the roots of one’s ancestry. Here it is the power of human imagination projected onto a space that makes it special. These notional values serve to add scenic power to even the most prosaic landscape elements that elsewhere would go unnoticed.

Such ordinary places make up the plateau landscape of glacial clays occupying most of the English county of Suffolk, which is devoted to mile after mile of featureless intensive cereal production. There is no landscape protection here! These remote unprotected uplands have never had a tradition of landscape painting. The dust cover introduction to Norman Scarfe's book 'The Suffolk Landscape' published as a contribution to W.G. Hoskins' series 'The Making of the English Landscape' in 1972, encapsulated the relative pictorial dullness of the county.

"Sandwiched between the emptier, more open Nofolk and the more metropolitan Essex, Suffolk is famous for its calm landscape of estuaries and gently undulating cornfields, its associations with Crabbe and Britten, Gainsborough and Constable'.

These famous 'calming features' projected nationally by local poets, musicians and painters are actually confined to its borders with Essex and the county’s coastal ports and heathlands. However, the next sentences reveal a basis for considering spaces in the rest of the county as having a special 'personality'.

'The ingredients of this landscape are plainly part of an ancient story of settlement. How and when it all came about is examined here and broadly established for the first time. The distinctive, rather hidden personality of these lands..... derives almost everything from its makers, the South folk or 'Suffolk', the English of southern East Anglia'.

The first East Anglians were not motivated by areas of outstanding natural beauty but by fertile spaces empty of people with natural resources for survival and raising families. Their distinctive settlement pattern on Suffolk’s northern border with Norfolk is responsible for the ‘hidden personality' of a small space consisting of nine closely knit communities. They have a sufficient sense of place today for local people to refer to them as 'The Saints'. The clues to discover why these villages form a distinctive cultural unit are a single man-made feature, unique in the whole of Britain, and a remarkable pattern of dividing up the land, which is now only evident in old maps. Beginning with these two obscure features it is possible to create a distinctive personality for The Saints, which is coupled with the beginnings of East Anglian Christianity. The Saints then becomes a schematic plan or mindmap embedding a sense of place, and picturing it adds important notional values to commonplace streams, ditches and hedgerows of a tiny part of the British Isles which, for a few centuries, played an important role in the making of Englishness. This idea is being taken further as a wiki.

This post is a development of http://www.blything.wikispaces.com/

Fig 1 William Holman Hunt: 'A converted British family sheltering a Christian missionary from persecution by the Druids' (1950)

Fig 2 Walter Langley 'Never morning wore to evening, but some heart did break'

Fig 3 The southern thousand year old boundary of ‘The Saints’

What is real?

2009-06-03T03:33:00.000-07:00

Michael Karwowski in an article for ‘Contemporary Review (2005)’ defined art as dealing with the nature of reality as it affects man, and science as being concerned with the nature of reality as it affects matter. The article highlights the fact that the long-standing debate on differences and similarities between creativity of scientists and artists continues relentlessly.

This difference in the two ways of understanding how we function as human beings was stated clearly in Jean-Paul Sartre's novel La Nausee (Nausea), published in 1938. The narrator discovered a new reality whilst sitting in the park:

“The root of the chestnut tree plunged into the ground just underneath my bench. I no longer remembered that it was a root . . . Words had disappeared, and with them the meaning of things, the methods of using them, the feeble landmarks which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, slightly bent, my head bowed, alone in front of that black, knotty mass, which was utterly crude and frightened me. And then I had this revelation.

Faced with that big, rugged paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge had any importance; the world of explanations and reasons is not that of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explicable by the rotation of a segment of a straight line around one of its extremities. But a circle doesn't exist either. That root, on the other hand, existed in so far that I could not explain it. Knotty, inert, nameless, it fascinated me, filled my eyes, repeatedly brought me back to my own existence . . . I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a suction-pump, to that, to that hard, compact sea-lion skin, to that oily, horny, stubborn look."

Here is a dramatisation of the gap between scientific and artistic endeavour, which is particularly acute when considering both behaviours as the outcome of evolution to boost human social relationships. Perhaps an awareness of the dichotomy may be traced to Picasso’s inventions of methodologies for expressing nature non-representationally. It is significant that the non-representational scientist, Einstein, and the abstracting artist Picasso came of age at the exact moment in history when it was first becoming apparent that classical, intuitive ways of understanding space and time were not adequate. Each in his own way - Einstein with relativity and Picasso with cubism - was striving for a deeper, more satisfying way to represent space and time. In the most important cultural sense, they were both working on the same problem. Picasso enthusiastically embraced the media of photography and film to evolve as a cubist. In order to derive and present multiple presentations of a subject on a two-dimensional plan, he took thousands of photographs and literally sliced and pasted them together. This was part of his efforts to refine forms by abstraction and distortion from their context in order to convert them into luminous and mysterious entities. There seems little doubt that these artistic inventions were taken from the conventions of the realities perceived by African native artists, where faces are symbols, eyes, mouths, noses and genitals are placed for impact, not naturalistic representation, and human figures are flat planes and geometric shapes.

The origins of abstraction as a vital force in Western art may be dated to the spring of 1907 when Picasso was visiting Gertrude Stein at her Paris apartment. The story goes that Henri Matisse stopped by with an African sculpture he had just purchased. According to Matisse, the two artists were enthralled by its depiction of a human figure. Soon afterwards, Picasso went to the Trocadero Museum of Ethnology (now the Musée de l'Homme) with another artist friend, André Derain. That visit, Picasso later claimed, was pivotal to his art.

"A smell of mould and neglect caught me by the throat. I was so depressed that I would have chosen to leave immediately," Picasso said of the museum. "But I forced myself to stay, to examine these masks, all these objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose, to serve as intermediaries between them and the unknown, hostile forces surrounding them, attempting in that way to overcome their fears by giving them colour and form. And then I understood what painting really meant. It's not an aesthetic process; it's a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires. The day I understood that, I had found my path."

Abstraction as a biological behaviour, and thereby open to scientific explanations, was visited by Kandinsky two decades later in his early intellectual struggles with spiritualism, ethnology and children’s art as a consistent aspect of human development. He regarded it as a route to produce new understandings of nature and was trying to reconcile art making with human biology. Whilst retaining his fundamental antimaterialistic convictions, he drew on the theories of science and engineering in order to support his contention that there was a fundamental similarity between art and evolution. In the 1920s he had reached the following position:

“ Abstract art, despite its emancipation, is subject….to ‘natural laws’, and is obliged to proceed in the same way that nature did previously, when it started in a modest way with protoplasms and cells, progressing very gradually to increasingly complex organisms. Today, abstract art also creates primary or less primary art-organisms, whose further development the artist can predict on in uncertain outline, and which entice, excite him, but also calm him when he stares into the prospect of the future that faces him. Let me observe here that those who doubt the future of abstract art, are, to choose an example, as if reckoning with the state of development reached by amphibians, which are far removed from fully developed vertebrates and represent not the final result of creation, but rather the ‘beginning’.

This is a roundabout way of stating that making works of art is an evolved aspect of behaviour we describe as tool making. Paintings are refinements of ideas through the placing of lines, shapes and colours on a flat surface until they ‘look right’. The finished painting then becomes a tool to reinforce social communication within groups where the members share the same values and perceptions of environment. Over tens of thousands of years, the principle of using coded messages has remained. But the codes have developed from those close to real objects, to more idiosyncratic collections of pictographs, invented by talented individuals to turn their mental ideas into framed shapes and colours for sharing with others. The social aims behind the tooling of art also remain those of reinforcing group identity. Indeed, the most powerful evidence for art having this role is the fact that works, such as those of Kandinsky’s Blue Rider group, which were reviled by contemporary critics, now grace the walls of museums and are objects of group consumption through the commercial industry of museology. It is common to decry the astronomical prices paid today for abstract art. However, this is missing the point that this is evidence of the cultural position of art as the outcome of a fundamental evolved behaviour and one of the mainsprings of capitalist society.

The social role of art is only limited by the ability of the artist to match the levels of the public’s capacity to read their codes, where the common response is ‘I only like what I know’. Innovation, whether in science or art, has to overcome this threshold of innate social conservatism about how an acceptable reality can be depicted. It is not always a problem of education. Conservatism, in all things, has a survival value in holding back society from destroying its past before it has a firm platform of values for the future. As deep-thinking primates we cannot escape the need to seek new social arrangements as past values and structures disintegrate, through forces connected for the most part with advances in tool making. In this sense art movements are just one facet of social evolution, arising at an individual level, but with the potential to move society into a new cultural paradigm. Where yesterday’s mysteries become commonplace realities.

In the final chapter of his book, ‘The Art of Modernism’ published in the last year of the 20th century, Sandro Bocola makes the point that, at all times, artistic creativity runs with other cultural changes, which are mainly political and technological variations on past themes. In particular, he takes a stance that we are moving rapidly towards a global culture of capitalism, and cultural evolution is going to be increasingly bound up with electronic data processing and satellite communication of ideas. For Bocola, new methods, outputs and aesthetic norms associated with artistic creativity will emerge from computer networking;

“…. whose potential for art has hardly been explored and is far from being exhausted. These media, too, open up a variety of new creative possibilities, which- like photography and film- will probably influence future artistic developments and may even lead to the formation of new and hitherto unknown types of art”

We can be certain that this type of future will emerge, and will probably come sooner than we think. In particular, we can also be sure that the technology of digital imaging, which offers an unlimited capacity for everyone to command the entire process of image-making, from capture to display, will play a powerful role in broadening the social base of artistic creativity. A computer screen is the most potent interface with virtual reality ever created. This is particularly true for self-education of the ‘what happens if I do this’ type. We can only speculate how computer graphics would have accelerated Kandinsky’s intellectual development, and spread his ideas as an educator who questioned what is ‘real’ reality around the world at the speed of light.

Fig 1 'The Conductor': three superimposed sequential digital images

Fig 2 Models and artists: montage from a digital image

Beauty and the system of making art

2009-06-01T11:17:00.001-07:00

Art is the outcome of a system of emotional thought filtered from the environment, which illuminates the mind’s capacity for cognition and vision. It stimulates a person to think about correcting and perfecting an idea in order to express it intuitively in words or pictures. As a thought system it provides motivation to put technical skill at the disposal of experience to create an object or an idea for contemplation rather than action. The object or idea is an end in itself embodying supramundane values and meanings. Art is thus isolated within a symbolic frame. Inside the frame is the contemplatable world, where life must be lived for the sake of values, meanings and enjoyment put into the work of art by its maker and received from the work by its viewer. Although this relationship may involve the viewer paying for the art work, this is the inner spiritual world of the maker and viewer. Feedback from the maker contemplating his creation stimulates artistic development. Outside the frame is the liveable world, where life can only be lived for the sake of living materialistically, where our work is to be for possessions, and our being is for self-interest.

Beauty becomes attached to a work of art as it is viewed within its symbolic frame. It is not the object of making but an accident of making that happens to be strongly pleasurable to a particular viewer. In this sense beauty is a quality of the production system in the mind of the beholder. Also, like the art it is attached to, beauty as an aesthetic value, is an end in itself. Therefore, beauty becomes an idiosyncratic characteristic of objects or ideas and part of the system of thought which made them. Beauty thereby personalises the thought system to reinforce a perceptual experience of pleasure. This 'beauty/thought system' is a strong stimulus for contemplating an object or an idea. It is an amalgam of every possible type of human experience accumulated through learning, which can reinforce a mental response to objects and ideas. From this point of view there is no generally acceptable definition of beauty.

The beauty/thought contemplative system

In a world of mass production, it requires great effort to bring the two worlds of contemplation and work into one frame. Believing that this unity was the day-to-day life of medieval artists, many have tried to revive an historical religious attitude towards art and integrate craftsmanship with industry, art, religion and beauty. Eric Gill (1882-1940) was one such aspirant. A wood engraver, sculptor, typographer and draughtsman, he is regarded as one of the great English artist-craftsmen of the 20th century. His thought system as a maker of art involved a belief in social reform and the union of art and religion with flesh and spirit. He was the key personality in three Catholic art and craft communities and also a devoted family man. In this unified world he could truly say his work was to be, and to be was to work. At the same time he was a long-standing believer in sexual freedom and it is now clear that incest with his sisters and daughters was part of the thought pattern of Gill the artist and Gill the man. The following wood engraving of the Carpenter Father with the infant Son of God is a representative outcome of Gill’s thought system, which embraces the two worlds of work and contemplation. Gill’s tender, poignant engraving is based on a drawing made by his daughter Betty, and is a conceptual self portrait expressing Gill’s love for his daughter. All of this is the Gill contemplative thought system which produced the wood engraving, St Joseph.

At Joseph; wood engraving (1921)

Pictures before words?

2009-05-27T07:08:00.000-07:00

I shall take you on a journey. It is a journey of comprehension, taking us to the edge of space, time and understanding. On it I shall argue that there is nothing that cannot be understood, that there is nothing that cannot be explained, and that everything is extraordinarily simple… A great deal of the universe does not need any explanation. Elephants, for instance. Once molecules have learnt to compete and to create other molecules in their own image, elephants and things resembling elephants will in due course be found roaming through the countryside. Peter Atkins ‘The Creation’

Art and survival
There is no doubt that life is carried forward because molecules of DNA, which constitute the genes, embody a coded history of life’s genealogical past. In this respect, we are part of nature in everything we do, from stepping on a bus to painting a house. Like all other living things our behaviour is governed by a chemical coding of our genes, which is a record of successful long-term interactions with the environments of our ancestors, near and in the distant past. It is a biochemical memory that remembers the body’s responses of growth reproduction and behaviour that have been responsible for survival. In this respect, the body of a plant, animal or microbe represents a kind of prediction that its future environmental experiences will, to a general extent, resemble those of its ancestors. Animals, especially those with brains, are particularly good survivors because the nervous system also has a remarkable picturing ability for remembering what is the most useful way of responding to short-term variations in the environment. As a computer model, the brain (hardware) and its networks of memory cells (the software) have evolved to continuously scan the environment, and use memories of good and bad responses to keep short-term survival strategies up to date. The genes model the basic aspects of the environment that change very slowly over generations. The brain produces models of survival as day-to-day interactions between perception via the senses and a mental representation of environment that triggers the correct response. This interplay between changes in the environment and their representation as virtual images in the central nervous system allows us to move through a mental world of our brain’s making, and produce neuromuscular responses that aid survival. Since brains are also products of natural selection, ancestors, near and in the distant past, also carried virtual worlds of their contemporary environments in their heads. Brains are a particular expression of DNA, tasked with the role of recording lifespan-events as pictures to help predict the immediate future.

We describe these virtual worlds as ‘patterns of thought’ and the process of perception that generates them as ‘reading the environment’. This faculty of ‘graphicity’ is a vital process of comprehension. We become interested in shapes and colours that do not fit into the known. In this we prefer intriguing suggestions to actual representation. For example, a trail of footprints occurring together with disturbed vegetation and dung deposits, is read intently by a hunter as the pattern of his prey. It is comprehended as a detailed mental map of events over a wide area, that points to the course of action necessary if the hunt is to be successful. According to Steven Dawkins it seems plausible that the ability to perceive the signs and generate such pictures might have arisen in our ancestors before the origin of speech in words. If the thought-picture could be represented as an arrangement of shapes and signs, constructing an environmental model in the head is a helpful way to communicate, and coordinate what has to be done in a social group. Such mental imagery could be an educational resource to help group cohesion and promote social evolution. This seems the likely origin of art, which depends on noticing that something can be made to stand for something else in order to assist comprehension and communication. Dawkins suggests that it could have been the drawing of mind-maps in the sand that drove the expansion of human evolution beyond the critical threshold of communication that other apes just failed to cross. It may be pertinent that ceremonial sand-pictures of native Australians function as maps. They are patterns created by an individual ‘dreamer’ through the two-dimensional spacing of symbols, standing for people and local topographical detail.

The fact that these patterns are closely associated with ‘dreaming’ is significant. Dreams are set up by our simulation software using the same modelling techniques used by the brain when it presents its updated editions of reality. These aboriginal maps of the dreamtime were community properties. Their role was to codify the neighbourhood and its use by the community in the form of a locally accepted non-representational pattern of relationships. The collection of pictographs reinforced the existence of a tribal territory and its natural resources by incorporating stories about its occupation by the group’s ancestors. The pictures, now being made permanent works of art on cloth and hardboard, once had a social function to maintain a subculture of understanding by reinforcing comprehension of group identity and space. Rock art of North America, which consists of pictographs constructed from circles, spirals and lines, also seems to have its origins in dreams, and a significance in carrying messages about origins and group identity across generations. Reaching from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego there is tremendous variety in all aspects of indigenous art from prehistory to the arrival of Europeans, differing region by region, era by era, and often tribe by tribe. There are representations of flora and fauna, men and gods, earth and sky; symbols of clan and tribe, religion and magic; formal designs from the primal to the highly intricate. They appear in examples of basketry, weaving, pottery, sculpture, painting, lapidary work, masks, drum-heads, weapons, apparel, beadwork, goldwork, blankets, ponchos, and may other forms.

In the cave art of the European Palaeaolithic we may contemplate on the existence of the bovine quality in art which is 35,000 years old, and may conclude that since then there has really been no fundamental development in our imaginative and technical abilities to represent natural forms that are close to us practically, emotionally, and spiritually. Sometimes the whole body of an animal is contained in the shape of the rock. It was the rock that revealed its animal 'spirit'. Their common mental ground is specific material features, such as cracks and smooth, rounded surfaces, which are used to enhance animal features in the mind of the artist. Most of the paintings consist of collections of symbols arranged haphazardly on the surface, indicating that they were contributed at different times by several individuals. Occasionally they occur as if welded by one person into an overall composition. For example, the Chumash, who once inhabited the coast of southern California from Malibu to Morrow Bay, created painted compositions in which dozens of interrelated shapes were confined within a limited space. At Arrow Head Springs two rounded boulders with painted panels mark a Chumash sacred site on a steep slope overlooking Santa Barbara and the Channel Islands.

(001) 1,000-2000 BC Motif from a shelter cave in the Devil’s River drainage of Texas

(002) Arrow Head Springs Santa Barbara California Chumash Native American

Although the animal forms of Palaeolithic art have a high aesthetic profile, they are usually found together with abstract shapes, such as circles, spirals, and grids. These shapes emerge in the trances of modern spiritualists, and people with certain sight defects, where they are generated from particular regions of the brain. These findings have led to the belief that the rock faces played a spiritual role in the social life of prehistoric peoples. Beyond the rock face was their spirit world; the rock wall is a spiritual place where shamans sought power in a personal interaction at an important boundary between the living and material worlds. Trances have a practical purpose- healing people who are sick. In other words, in making art against stone, a spiritual healer was trying to understand what the brain makes us feel. We are essentially human when we use graphic ways of portraying other realities, and the Palaeolithic artist deep in a cave, or balancing on a rocky mountain-side, was expressing a mind identical to our own in order to serve his community.

An equally powerful biological imperative is to promote ‘self’. In the sense of the ‘selfish gene’ scenario, any behavioural characteristic that gives one’s own genetic endowment an advantage in passing to the next generation is subject to natural selection. From this aspect, art is also one of many behavioural expressions that allows an individual to be distinguished from the crowd. Piet Mondrian put it this way:

“Although art is fundamentally everywhere and always the same, nevertheless two main human inclinations, diametrically opposed to each other, appear in its many and varied expressions. One aims at the direct creation of universal beauty, the other at the aesthetic expression of oneself, in other words, of that which one thinks and experiences. The first aims at representing reality objectively, the second subjectively”.

The advantages of contributing to group identity by reinforcing the contemporary norms of representation (subscribing to locally agreed icons of beauty and meaning), and the cultivation of an individual output are not opposing principles of artistic creativity. They represent primeval skills of being able to help highlight group identity through mapping one’s social unit, and having the ability to produce new ideas about the environment which improve one’s own survival.

Words with pictures
Illustration is an art of visual communication. The combination of great artwork and wisely chosen ideas is the formula for an illustrator's success in communicating with pictures.Pictures play a very important part in our everyday life. Sight is our most widely used sense and as a consequence of this, pictures play a significant role in communication. A picture is neither subtle nor universal enough to take the place of words in the strictest sense of the meaning, but that does not mean that pictures do not have a biological role in communication, because many pictures do a superior job to words under certain conditions. The underlying problem is that to fulfil this condition, the pictures rely on the diversity of language and words to secure their meaning.

Gombrich, in his book Art and Illusion highlighted the biggest problem of communicating with pictures, and that is their inaccuracy. His claim is that the artist is psychologically susceptible to her own interpretation of the object she depicts. She sees where the lines are to be drawn and she makes the object conform to her own imagined stereotype. An artist learns a group schemata and a set of socially determined patterns when she learns to draw, and these will always, in the first instance, direct her to draw to those particular patterns and classifications. As Gombrich says, the `will-to- form' is rather a `will-to-conform', and ensure that the assimilation of any new shape conforms to the schemata and patterns an artist has learned to handle. The truth is twisted to fit the stereotype and the outcome is not always the accurate representation of the object.

With this being the case, it is hard to argue that pictures can accurately replace words. Words are specifically designed to convey accurate descriptions and meanings, whereas pictures are subjective and their accuracy is at the mercy of the interpreter. Pictures are only useful as a reminder of a frozen moment in time. A photograph of someone, is very quickly out of date, whereas language changes to suit time. A name can quite easily flash a better and more accurate image of the subject in the recipients mind, whereas a picture does no such thing. The importance of language is that it is communicable. Naming someone provokes a better image than an old photograph does and is just as instantaneous. The key to language lies in its wonderful subtlety and diversity. Picture communication can never say as much. Language is designed specifically with the purpose of communicating, whereas pictures are not. It is only because of spoken and written words, that humankind has progressed. Speech can be wonderfully diverse, but at the same time, its effectiveness lies in its economical use. Through language we can form relationships and communicate in other forms. According to this argument, pictures came after language because they needed vocabulary to find a purpose in communication.

Thoughts without a language are not truly thoughts, because they need language to define themselves. Helen Keller in her autobiography, remarked upon this, when she first realised the significance of language. When one day the word `water' was spelt out in her hand, while at the same time a cool stream was gushing over her other hand, the world of language was opened up to her. "...Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten -a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me...That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!...Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought."

It is easy to forget the significance of language. Real thinking, is only possible when we have the language there to convey it. `Water' for Helen Keller was no longer just an object of sense perception, it had a name that could be mentioned, conceived, remembered. Pictures only offer confusion unless they are qualified by language. To be able to communicate effectively the meaning of the picture, you have to place it in context. Whether this be a phrase on the picture saying; `danger', `vote Labour', or `support Manchester United' or just putting the picture in the place or the time, or next to the article that makes it relevant. We have passport photos and not composed paragraphs because it is a better form of communication under the circumstances of immigration control. Pictures add sparkle and colour to our life, but their use is entirely dependent on language.

The joy and necessity of language was wonderfully captured by Helen Keller, and just as the world would be a more insipid place without pictures it would be even more so without language. The creativity of words in poetry, novels and public speaking is sometimes harder, and less exciting, to reflect in pictures. Pictures have their place, they can convey messages quicker and make life easier and more exciting, but they are ultimately dependent on the social conditions created through language.

Cave paintings and representational carvings define the beginnings of "external long- term storage" of information. External storage has several qualities of interest.

It can be used by the individual as an extension of "working memory" for immediate use in thinking.
It provides long term storage, for retrieval at a later date.
It can be used to communicate to other individuals.

Before children learn to read and write, they do not know the difference between a line drawing and a letter. When an adult writes an 'A,' to a child it is simply another drawing. It is a picture, different than a face or a house, but it is still just another image drawn with a coloured pencil on white paper. Soon children learn that combinations of these letter-pictures mean more complicated things. When the drawings 'A-P-P-L- E' are combined, they form another picture, which we learn stands for the name of the fruit. Now the letter-pictures become word-pictures that can spark other images in our minds of the thing they stand for. We further learn that these word-pictures can be combined with other word-pictures to form sentence-pictures. To a child, there is no difference between words and pictures -- they are one and the same.

It is not clear how much thinking skills are helped by early drawing, or how much knowledge is conveyed. Communicating via pictures is potentially powerful, but would have been laborious with early materials, and not very portable. However, it seems likely that early drawing, combined with the communications abilities refined through use of speech, must have played a role in the development of early pictorial written languages.

When you carefully analyze a visual message, you consciously study each visual symbol within that picture's frame. The act of concentration is a verbal exercise. Without verbal translations of the signs within an image, there is little chance of it being recalled in the future. The picture is lost from your memory because you have learned nothing from it. Images become real property of the mind and remembered only when language expresses them. Linguistic experts do not need to argue that images have no alphabet or syntax because such assertions are true. The alphabet and the syntax of images reside in the mind, not in the picture itself. They are often placed there by the professional art critic. Consider, for example the exhibition of one of Damien Hirst's works 'A Thousand Years'. It is a glass and steel box in which live maggots feasted on a rotting cow's head, while flies, fed on sugar water, meet a violent end through their random encounters with the 'insect-o-cuter'. It is accompanied by the words "an examination of the processes of life and death; the ironies, falsehoods and desires that we mobilise to negitiate our own alienation and mortality"

On a more mundane level. there are strong indications that the status of images in mass communication is increasing. We live in a mediated blitz of images. They fill our newspapers, magazines, books, clothing, billboards, computer monitors and television screens as never before in the history of mass communications. We are becoming a visually mediated society. For many, understanding of the world is being accomplished, not through reading words, but by reading images. Philosopher Hanno Hardt warns that the television culture is replacing words as the important factor in social communication. Maybe shortly, words will be reserved for only bureaucratic transactions through business forms and in books that will only be read by a few individuals. On the human law of 'minimum effort', reading is losing ground to watching because viewing requires little mental processing.

Painting and planting flowers

2009-05-19T11:24:00.000-07:00

Flowers must have been our most intense source of the experience of colour for most of human history. Through the Middle Ages, cloth and buildings were drab. Stained-glass windows were intense visions. And then there were flowers. The richness of Dutch flower painting burst out from a delight in the depiction of impossibly sumptuous explosions of colour - vases piled high with paradisal flower presences, all seasons impossibly together, many of the flowers worth more in the market than the masterpieces that depicted them. Dutch and Flemish artists recorded in their still life paintings more than just a pleasing arrangement of objects for viewing. These works combined the tradition of the symbolic use of plants and animals, together with an interest in the sciences and the acquisition and display of rare and luxurious goods.

Albrecht Dürer's paintings of growing plants - specimens of grasses, cowslips, heartsease - give an intense visionary pleasure, simply because of the accuracy with which he recorded the crowding shape of the leaves, the exact yellowing stain of incipient decay. He saw the accidents of a particular plant and managed to make them into the essence of beauty as a process.

Shakespeare, contemplating the onrush of mortality and destruction, asked:

"How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea/ Whose action is no stronger than a flower?"

Flowers are tough, as well as fragile, and humans care about the relations between humans and flowers. Plants remind us of who we are, and what we have to lose. Like many people, I first met the idea of this kind of inner eye in Wordsworth's Daffodils, where he summoned up the golden brightness upon "that inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude". Blake said: "I can look at a knot in a piece of wood until I am frightened at it". A reminder of DH Lawrence's "big and dark" Bavarian gentians, "burning dark blue,/ giving off darkness, blue darkness", blue torches leading into the dark.

Observation and creativity are cornerstones of advancement in science but these often pass unnoticed when students hurry past, obsessed with the two other cornerstones-control and measurement. We have only to look at Japanese prints of flowers, to see something of the attentive creative care with which the Japanese artists isolated the essential forms of a peony, or an iris. What we contemplate is the brilliance of the relation of the work of the hand to what the eye sees. Manet's white peonies are swirls of gleaming white, and grey shadows and gold stains, and are delightful almost as abstract paintings. This is a thought about what light does to paint, with the surfaces of the flowers represented primarily as the impulse to paint.

A study of flower paintings must always bring one up against Georgia O'Keeffe, with her infolded sexual flower-flesh, her enveloping petals, and her quivering stamens. Art is always a reflection of the hidden design of universe. It by nature is a reflection of light, order, beauty, mystery, meaning, cohesiveness, oneness, and organic, joyful wonder. To the extent that we have the inner Eye of wisdom to see, art becomes a lens through which we know ever more clearly, aspects of spirituality, within and without.

The origins of 17th century still life can be found in European miniature painting of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, in which artists made intricate illustrations for prayer books and took great care to make the images appropriate in quality to these religious books. Increasingly, the artists paid attention to decorative details of flowers and animals used as symbols of spiritual ideas. Emblem books are another tradition of illustration where animals and plants were used symbolically. These contained poems dealing with moral and philosophical issues, often rooted in medieval spiritualism. The imagery found in the paintings on display can be interpreted using traditional medieval symbolic meanings. The caterpillar and butterfly represented life and rebirth; the bee, a social animal, indicated diligence and hard work.

Based upon ancient Greek ideas of the four elements, the salamander, popular in medieval bestiaries, represented the element Fire; the frog represented Water; flying insects such as dragonflies and butterflies represented Air; the fruit and flowers represented Earth. Usually, the artists used a mix of flowers from the different seasons, and other objects to evoke the five senses, in order to convey the idea of the passage of time, and eventual decay. The four distinct stages in the life cycle of insects-egg, larva, pupa and adult-symbolized inevitable change and the passage of time.

Flowers point to the briefness of beauty and are the essence of spirituality, which is a distinctly human trait whereby we yearn to belong to something greater than the self. We desire to inquire the source/nature of life and death, address humanity's most profound needs and concerns, acknowledge intangible forces in universe. Botany is in an excellent position to reflect on all this. How can we structure such a joint on-going reflection of the two-way interaction between the making of gardens and the painting of them?

Charles H. Smith's note entitled: 'An aggressive book review of Grant Allen's The Colour Sense: Its Origin and Development, printed in the Nature issue of 3 April 1879 provided the following condensed formula for this interaction.

"Insects produce flowers. Flowers produce the colour-sense in insects. The colour-sense produces a taste for colour. The taste for colour produces butterflies and brilliant beetles. Birds and mammals produce fruits. Fruits produce a taste for colour in birds and mammals. The taste for colour produces the external hues of humming-birds, parrots, and monkeys. Man's frugivorous ancestry produces in him a similar taste; and that taste produces the final result of human chromatic arts."

Interpreting ourselves through colour and carrying that into the garden takes some management and a few simple strategies. Judith Evans' first piece of advice is: forget the colour wheel and traditional theories of hue compatibility. Most colours and all their shades fall into three groups-warm, cool and neutral. So let's start with the neutral tones, which, despite their calm demeanour, are key players in all colour expression.

The idea of a painterly approach to gardening was the colour-controlled border, which was first developed in the 1890s by Gertrude Jekyll. Her idea was to use cool colours on the ends of the border and rise to a crescendo of hotter ones at the centre. Although she planted many single-hue gardens, Gertrude Jekyll understood this.

"It is a curious thing," she said, "that people will sometimes spoil some garden project for the sake of a word.... A blue garden may be hungering for a group of white lilies, but is not allowed to have it because there must be no flowers in it but blue flowers. I can see no sense in this; it seems to me like fetters foolishly self-imposed."

At the Central School of Design in Kensington, where she enrolled in 1861, as one of the first female students, to study painting, Gertrude Jekyll attended lectures by John Ruskin (Slade Professor of Art at Oxford), Ruskin's pupil William Morris (who also founded his firm of Morris Marshall and Faulkner in Bloomsbury in 1861), and Richard Dresser (a Fellow of the Linnaean Society and an authority on decorative arts). Jekyll also had lectures from the Principal of the School, Richard Redgrave, on the scientific principles underlying harmony in the composition of colours developed by Michel-Eugene Chevreuil (head of the dyeing department at the Royal Gobelins tapestry works in Paris).

Ruskin was a great advocate of the paintings of JMW Turner, whom he considered to be the greatest English painter, so Gertrude Jekyll was encouraged to study Turner's paintings. The drama of his subject material and, in particular, his use of colour to highlight that drama, had a profound influence on Miss Jekyll's art in general and on her garden design in particular, focusing her attention especially on the use of flower colour in planting design.

Through a mutual friend Gertrude Jekyll met Claude Monet in the early days of his garden at Giverny. Their passions for gardening and painting and their concerns about light and colour were similar. Monet's were recorded for posterity in his paintings and are visible in the restored garden at Giverny. There beginning in 1890, the painter created a garden in which colour was as carefully controlled as it was in those of Gertrude Jekyll. Monet, who like Jekyll was nearly blind in his old age, was an avid gardener. His flower borders consisted of loose rhythmic bands of colour that became the subjects of his remarkable late paintings directly recorded the gardens as he saw them, painting in the open air. The painter declared that he was "striving to render his impressions in the face of the most fugitive effects." Thus, he painted what he observed: objects which transformed light into colour as it resulted from the play of light.

Jekyll also developed the concept of garden rooms and the one-colour garden, but it was Beatrix Farrand in the United States (Dumbarton Oaks) and Vita Sackville-West in England (Sissinghurst)who made them famous.

Ferrand was the niece of renowned American novelist and garden historian Edith Wharton. Through the creation of the gardens at Dumbarton Oaks, Beatrix Farrand exhibited a distinctive American adaptation of a Mediterranean garden form. Farrand was closely aligned with the English Gardening Movement and Gertrude Jekyll's planting designs. Furthermore, one of the key points of Farrand's originality was in her use of plants. In part by their providing colour, texture, and depth, she specified the actual plants to be strong design elements in and of themselves, taking the view that in setting a garden she was painting a picture?

Sissinghurst's garden was created by Harold Nicholson and his wife Vita Sackville-West in the 1930s. Although the Sissinghurst property was derelict, they purchased the ruins and the farm around it and began constructing the garden we know today. The layout by Nicholson and planting by his wife were both strongly influenced by the gardens of Gertrude Jekyll. Vita Sackville-West's passion for plants was shaped by her love of old Dutch flower paintings and by the choice of species she saw on her travels in Europe and the Middle East. The romantic associations of flowers with the past, painters and faraway countries were to influence her choice of planting as Sissinghurst developed. The influence of the floral arrangements of the Dutch masters is evident in the abundance and romance of an unstructured tumble of flowers, relying little on form and foliage. Structure was given to the garden by the arrangement of a series of 'garden rooms' created as spaces for the painterly arrays of bedded flowers contained by walls and hedges. There are actually 10 gardens, separated by hedges, arches, and moss-covered walls draped with climbing roses. Each one is unique and secluded.

Sissinghurst has been a major influence on late 20th and early 21st century garden design. It is a model of the use of plants to create living canvases of colour, which are abstract arrangements not far removed from the creation of the abstract expressionists such as the American Hans Hoffman. Abstract painting and the colour controlled bed of flowering plants both deal with the problem of the synchronised development of both form and colour. In its final state the colour development over the whole canvas or bed leads to the creation of colour, or light, complexes. The aim of their makers is to create a total pictorial totality with no fragmentation of colour or texture.

Sissinghurst planting plan of the White Garden

Photograph of Sissinghurst White Garden

Water colour of Sissinghurst Cottage Garden

http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/erm070v1

http://www.canadiangardening.com/design-and-decor/colour/garden-colour-strategies-neutrals/a/1439

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA99/hall/Dumbartonoaks/garden_dum.html

Bridging seeing and knowing

2009-05-13T11:46:00.001-07:00

In the early 1970s John Berger and his colleagues reopened discussion about the relationship between what we see and what we know as being central to an understanding of the role of art in culture. In particular, the way we express our feelings pictorially is determined by what we believe. In the European Middle Ages the possibility of eternal damnation was a widely held belief, and Hell was depicted realistically. A picture of Hell formed in the mind of a medieval painter was reconstituted as a set of marks on a canvas or a church wall where it was composed of a well-defined arrangement of conventional elements. Although a highly personal figment of the artist's imagination, it would have been recognised by everyone as representing a tangible place. From this point of view there is no doubt that a picture can encapsulate the mindset of people in the past. Berger and his colleagues argued that no other kind of relic or text could offer such a direct testimony of belief across the ages. We can now see Hell as an irrational concept, which was communicated in examples of tonal painting, where colour is graded from the highest light to the deepest shades to depict material objects. Tonal painting is often described as 'true' painting. It is what the majority of the public demands as being familiar and comprehensible.

The opposite of tonal painting is 'abstract' or 'pure' painting. The choice of colours and their application to a two-dimensional surface with respect to position and texture, serves simultaneously a plastic and psychological purpose. Abstract Art does not try to imitate or express any external reality and is non-objective. Abstraction was introduced into serious art sometime in the early Eighteenth Century. It really got underway with Impressionism, which produced art devoid of any realistic, defined images. Impressionism aimed to depict nature in its truest form. The Impressionists were mostly interested in capturing changes in light throughout the day, from one season to another.

Abstract painting as an intellectual process was first defined by Kandinsky in his 1910 essay 'Concerning the spiritual in art'. He took the view that when an artist is turning an abstract idea into a picture in which material objects are more or less superfluous, real objects can be more or less omitted and replaced either by purely abstract forms or by 'objects' that have been completely abstracted from real forms. Always behind abstraction is the idea that abstract artists actually create forms that exist somewhere in the universe but on different scales. However, to an uninformed viewer an abstract work has to be taken and evaluated on its own merit as an arrangement of lines colours and textures. In the same year that he wrote 'Concerning the spiritual in art' Kandinsky, did his first abstract painting. Like many abstract artists, he saw himself as a spiritual as well as an aesthetic pioneer, feeling that abstraction was the best means available to artists for depicting an unseen realm of the mind. Without qualification he announced that the type of painting he envisioned would advance the new "spiritual epoch." In his book he describes the spiritual realm as a triangle in upward motion. At its apex stands a man whose vision points the way; within are artists, who are "prophets," providing "spiritual food."

In order to understand true painting, there are two points of reference. One is the dominant "realistic" reference. That is to say the painting is understood by relating it to the real world in some way. Its correspondence to a general standard of the nature of the material world allows a viewer to clearly identify the subject of the painting. The second point of reference is the internal design elements of the painting itself: lines, colours, mass, and so on. This second point of reference, however, is almost totally subsumed by the first. In contrast, in an abstract work of art there is no reference to the real phenomenal world; the standard of phenomenal reality has been abandoned. All that is left for a viewer to visually understand the painting is the second point of reference: the internal design elements of the painting itself that is, line, colour, shapes etc.

The majority view is that architecture and music are naturally admitted to be abstract arts, not required to 'represent' something, and subject to their own laws, whereas poetry, painting and sculpture are considered arts of representation. Ought this traditional distinction to be maintained or, aesthetics being universal, can all arts claim the same inherent autonomy as music and architecture? It does seem that abstract art was born from the very desire to emulate music and architecture, with a freedom and discipline of its own. Abstractors like Kandinsky, with his suggestions of music, and Mondrian, with his ideal of architecture, demonstrate the limitations and, at the same time, the achievement of abstract art.

It is useful to compare abstract art to music. Just as a tune is an arrangement of sounds in time, with no material meaning, so an abstract picture is an arrangement of shapes and colours in a flat plane. These pictures can be formal explorations of the principles of composition, where the artist is trying to get selected components to look 'right', just as one might when furnishing a room or arranging a spray of flowers. Abstract art can also express deep emotion. Often this is communicated by 'mark making' - rough or energetic strokes that reveal the physical energy used in their making; faint traces of colour evoke an ethereal mood.

In terms of the mindset of their makers, abstract pictures are sophisticated doodles. In their creation we have to distinguish between form in a physical sense and form in an aesthetical sense. The latter is the form of the work as a thoughtful creation of an attentive mind. Colour and form develop one through the other into a reciprocal compensatory relationship comparable to harmony and counterpoint in music, or direct brain-to-brain improvisation in jazz. Sound energy of music leaves player to enter the ear of the receiver. The energy put into a painting enters the mind as a clutch of different wavelengths of light. In the real world nature reflects ever changing patterns of light, and in a picture the artist creates streaks of light in fields and patches. A painter composes by manipulating light reflected from the picture surface.

Painting is always intuitively conditioned by the intellectual feedback from the flow of light from canvas to eye, and from the eye, via a sensitive, discerning and critical mind to an image in brain cells. The whole process has been described by the abstract teacher/artist Hans Hofmann as " a process of metabolism whereby colour transubstantiates into vital forces that become the real sources of painterly life". An abstract work of art provides a material microcosm that can please the viewer in terms of its novel arrangements of lines, colours and textures. These same arrangements can also provide doors and windows for the mind to add a personal meaning to the picture, which then becomes a storyboard for human communication. In this context we come pretty close to Leonardo Da Vinci's advice to painters that they should contemplate an old wall, firing their imagination on the basis of a shapeless surface. He said: "When you look at patches of colour on walls or walls made out of different sorts of stones, and you have to imagine a scene in front of you, you will see different landscapes with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, great valleys and groups of hills. You will also detect battles and rapidly moving figures, strange faces and looks, exotic costumes and an infinite variety of things to which you will be able to assign distinct and well-formed shapes" Discovering shapes in the glowing coals of a domestic fire exemplify the same response to abstract arrangements of materials and the energy the emit.

It has actually been discovered scientifically that famous works of abstract art achieve popularity, by using shapes that resonate with neural mechanisms in the brain that are linked to visual information. Humans make aesthetic judgements about shapes and forms quickly and easily, preferring certain shapes to others, even in the absence of any narrative. Dr Richard Latto from Liverpool University's Psychology department has discovered that these shapes resonate with the processing properties of the human visual system, which is responsible for analysing what we have seen. Humans inherit a basic visual system through the natural selection of an eye-to-brain system that provides very selective information about the world around us. It has evolved to provide only the information that we need to survive - for example, we cannot see most electromagnetic radiation or follow the leg movement of a galloping horse. In this way, evolution had given the viewer of an abstract work some genetically determined physiological mechanisms enabling responses to be made to certain shapes, colours and forms arranged in a way that is aesthetically pleasing. The viewer uses their own brain to monitor the effect. Certain arrangements of horizontal and vertical lines are popular because they resonate with our visual systems, which have been tuned by evolution and experience to respond particularly to these biologically and socially important visual stimuli in landscapes. As with other adaptive behaviours, we have evolved a mechanism to encourage us to concentrate on these features by rewarding ourselves with good feelings.

In Latto's view: "Artists were experimenting with abstract shapes long before scientists began analysing our nature of perception. Through observation or trial-and-error, artists have been identifying these aesthetic primitives - critical shapes and arrangements - and have indirectly defined the nature of our visual processes. In purely abstract painting, as with much music, form is all we have. Popular works have shown that essentially we like looking at what we are good at seeing."

Functional specialization in biology refers to the fit between form and function that is characteristic of biological adaptations to environment. For morphological adaptations like fins or wings, the meaning of "form" is clear. In the case of cognitive mechanisms, form refers to information-processing features of the mechanism. These can be thought of as the mechanism's design features (where "design" refers not to design by an intelligent agent, but by evolutionary processes). Typically, a list of a mechanism's design features would include a specification of the kinds of inputs the mechanism accepts, and the operations that it performs on those inputs. Of necessity, all mechanisms will operate on information only of a particular format. In this respect there are two aspects to viewing art: nativistic perception which is the synchronicity of eye and brain that transforms electromagnetic energy emanating from the picture's surface into neuro-chemical codes. This is hard-wired into the brain/eye sensory-cognitive system. The second aspect is directed perception, which incorporates personal history and knowledge of the entire set of our expectations and past experiences. Both forms of perception are part of the appreciation of abstract art, and both are products of the evolution of the conscious brain over hundreds of thousands of years.

The spaces in between

2009-05-09T01:13:00.000-07:00

An exhibition of new abstract work by Susi Bellamy entitled 'The Spaces In Between' was held in the Castello di Gabbiano, Florence, from 8th May to 31st October 2009. The following is a description of how these works fell into five categories according to what motivated her inventiveness and the visual outcome. The aim is to span the always present gap between seeing a painting and then using words to describe what we know.

Classification
On a visit to the Natural History Museum in New York, Susi was attracted and inspired by the arrangements of rocks and crystals displayed on the museum walls. In her Classification paintings, she arranges areas of colour like rows of displayed geodes or pebbles that seem to hover in space against the almost transparent smoothness of the background. In the Resin Classification series (the smaller works in the study) Susi recycles old paintings into ovals and constructs them into layers cemented down with a thick resin. Gazing through the smooth, shiny surface, it is like looking through water into a deep bed of stones, a grouping of cells, or a mosaic, a pietra dura, made up of pieces of coloured marble.

Plasma
In this exploration of chaos versus order, amorphic, kinetic areas of surface are set against backgrounds which are again, limpid and smooth. Sometimes the dense areas in these paintings break into swirls or rivulets of colour that spin away for mere millimeters from the central sphere, like the trail of light or gas from a comet. With this work, as in the Classification series, there is a startling trompe l’oeil effect, in which the coloured areas appear to be heavy concentrated masses floating in space. The edges of colour create a tension between the areas of bonded, centrifugal mass and the surrounding open space.

Landscapes
In this series, stratas of landscape are conveyed by a ‘fossil’ approach in which parts of an earlier painting on the same canvas are embedded and revealed in the paint. At times Susi paints in the negative spaces, the holes and streaks left by the rough surface of her trowel with a contrasting colour. At other times the introduction of gold leaf adds an extra dimension to the work – inspired by the Italian Renaissance. The sense of place arises from her travels in the USA and Italy, and from her British home in Northumberland, combined into mysterious evocations of familiar places blended in her imagination and memory. The interplay between looseness and control, one of the veins of investigation she mines in all of these works, gives these paintings a rich and organic texture.

Pool Series
Drawn to contrast and colour, Susi’s attention was caught one evening by a contemporary swimming pool, artificially lit to a brilliant turquoise against the natural darkness of an Arezzo night sky. In her subsequent painting she was inspired to explore the contrast between the artificiality of hard lines and the beautiful fluidity of the natural landscape.

Microcosms
In her series of smaller abstract works Susi uses acrylic to simultaneously convey both infinite space and the most microscopic of cells, or the smallest of evolutions in a Petri dish. These paintings suggest dreamed versions of natural structures and events. Patterns can mimic the folds and jagged edges of crystallization, the millennially slow process of fossilization, the sliding cross sections of tectonic plates, all suspended in a moment. Although these images sometimes have the weight and solidity of marble and stone, there is incredible movement here as well, as if they were changing at the speed of light at the exact second in which Susi imagined them. The colours are brilliant, vivid and alive with intense temperature, icy blues and lava hot reds. Sometimes grids of black uneven lines are honeycombed over the surface, like a membrane stretched thin on a microscope slide. The negative spaces and shape, brief areas of flat colour, create glimpses of sky, air or distance. In these beautiful works Susi continues to play with spatiality, with what is inside, between and beyond the spaces she observes and creates.

In her introduction to the catalogue for the exhibition Mary Murfin Bayley writes

The exploration of order versus chaos, the influence of Florentine artisan skills, and the opposition of the practical and pragmatic against the precious and the ornate, are all themes that re-occur in Susi Bellamy's work. With her rich, exuberant colours, her use of gold leaf, the layering and marbling of paint, and landscapes that bring to mind the rough texture of stone walls, Susi conveys the Florentine influence, catching a city encrusted with the antique surface achievements of the Renaissance reflected through a contemporary aesthetic.

Her atmospheric landscape paintings suggest both the geometries of ancient cities and stratas of stone and cliff. Susi paints in the negative spaces, the holes and streaks left by the rough surface of her trowel, giving order to something that has appeared at random. This interplay between looseness and control, one of the veins of investigation she mines in all of her work, creates a texture that appears to have grown naturally, a surface with spaces that seem to contain their own layers of distance and perspective. In other paintings Susi sets areas of pulsing swirling colour against backgrounds that are limpid and smooth. Whether arranged as rows of displayed rocks or geodes, or exploding from the centre of the canvas, spinning rivulets of paint like the trail of light from a comet, these concentrated areas of mass and colour seem to float, gravity free in open space. It is a startling and beautiful trompe l'oeil effect.

The spectacular images in this show - landscapes that suggest both constructed and organic vistas, floating pebbles and plasmas that appear solid and at the same time full of movement, the play of surfaces and distance - make up an exhilarating and beautiful body of work, charged with intensity. The paintings in "The Spaces in Between" transform the spaces around them, creating a glimpse of a world lit up with colour, life, and energy.

http://www.susibellamy.com/

Intent and process in creativity

2009-05-01T11:38:00.000-07:00

The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live Victor Hugo

Art is not a study of positive reality, but a seeking after ideal truth. George Sand

Art has always been a part of culture. It is the way humans express themselves, whether it is in the form of a painting, a piece of music, or literature. Art has always been the greatest outlet for expression and the easiest way to get an idea across to a large group of people.

Giotolandia

Roberto Mari collected smoothed pebbles from the beaches and river beds of Tuscany and turned them into works of art by using the fracture lines as a guide to divide his colours into zones or fields. The Italian for smoothed pebble is ciottoli (pronounced chottoly). He made a pun on the name by referring to this inorganic universe of pebbles as Giottolandia. Giotto is the name of the painter who kick-started the move towards realism in Renaissance art.

These are some of the phrases translated from a brochure describing these objects.

"If human beings weren't able to note the passing of time (i.e. the geological events that produced the pebbles) they wouldn't be capable of feeling the sensible world and its objects in space"

"Ciottoli are stones that trigger new experiences, sensual feelings and scenes"

"They become the object and the subject of photographs that reveal them as high quality icons like natural paintings. Their hidden secret becomes decoded by the artist through his microphotos which have a strong, aesthetic impact"

“Giottolandia brings a reflection of the relationship between man and nature to the centre of our consciousness”.

You can see photographs of some of the stones he chose to paint in Mari’s gallery at:

http://www.giottoli.com/giottolandia.php

These ciottoli indicate how the use of randomness as a generative principle could present an artist with a creative design environment where uncertainty or unpredictability is an intricate part of the process. The use of randomness can be dated to eighth century China where the teaching of Taoism led some Chinese artists to believe that chance images could be better explained as symbols of the artist's harmony with the cosmos. Wang Mo often got drunk before he splashed paint on a silk scroll, which he then kicked, smeared, scuffed, and sat on to achieve the desired effects. He finally used a brush at the end of the process, foreshadowing 20th century Dada's characteristic of adding conscious ``finishing touches" to random designs.

Randomness

In an exhibition at the New Art Gallery Walsall in 2007 some works focused on randomness in nature. Works by Richard Long were created by dipping black and white card into the mud in the River Avon, while Alice Maher encouraged snails to trail across her etchings, leaving traces of the vegetable dye that she applied to their tails. Tim Knowles allowed different trees to participate in his drawings, by attaching pens to the outer branches and allowing the movement of the wind to create a drawing on paper that is placed beneath them, resulting in enigmatic, obsessive strokes. Krokatsis held fireproof stencils over burning rags allowing the ensuing carbon deposits to collect on the paper above, creating ghostly apparitions.

Currently the most successful artist whose work begins with randomness is Wayne Riggs. He began as a photographer taking closeups of weathered metallic surfaces such as portions of trash cans, cars, walls and the like to produce abstract images of the urban environment directly onto photographic paper. He then painted directly onto the photographs. He explained his interest in the random-start in 'Observations on a Early Photograph ( http://www.wayneriggs.com/index.htm)

"The first thing I'll do is start writing my thoughts on how I have done my work up until this point. I started working in photography some forty odd years ago. What first comes to mind is actually a very early black and white photograph, that was taken, developed and printed when I was around 16. I remember it was a view of an old shed on the farm, the summer kitchen. It was a close-up of a window with no glass in it. The frame of the window had little or no paint on it and the white of the walls had been washed out long ago. Through the window was a double sink resting on the bottom sill, tipping downwards out toward the ground. The sink itself was old, but modern in the sense that it wasn't thick enamel but steel, so the bottom being black and the top being white cast a certain shadow onto the window. The faucets were still on it and were turned every which direction. In the sink that was outside the window, was a potted plant that drooped down over the edge going down and out of the picture frame. At the top of the window and the top of the picture frame was a piece of ivy coming from inside the shed; like a snake it wound its way downward towards the sink. This was not, of course, my first picture ever, but one that I do remember. As I look back on it now, I guess why I remember it is because of the randomness of it. The idea of a window with no glass, the idea of a sink in the window, the idea of a pot in a sink. Those random placements of these things - my father throwing the sink on the windowsill because it was in the way, my mother putting a pot in the sink because it looked like a good place for a plant, I don't know. I took a picture of it because it was interesting, although at the time I only guessed it was interesting. It was only after I saw the picture did I know it was, and then it is only now that I write about it. I write about it because I remember it, not the image per se but the randomness of the image".

From this point of view all art starts from randomness; the randomness of history, the randomness of nature and the randomness of becoming and artist. Randomness also enters into a work as it is being produced that can change the direction of intent. This is illustrated by Francis Bacon’s description of ‘accidents’ that occurred in his creative process.

“…. Of all the pictures I did in 1946, the one like a butcher’s shop, came to me by accident. I was attempting to make a bird alighting on a field. And it may have been bound up in some way with the three forms that had gone before (a previous painting), but suddenly the lines that I’d drawn suggested something totally different, and out of this suggestion arose this picture. I had no intention to do this picture; I never thought of it in that way. It was like one continuous accident mounting on top of another.

It suddenly suggested an opening-up into another area of feeling altogether”.

Talk about process brings up thoughts about the two elements behind the production of a work of art. Process is one of them and 'intent' is the other. With regard to intent, is it making money, becoming famous, realising an ideal or simply resolving something that puzzles you, like pure science?.

There is no universal form instantly understood by anybody just looking at it. Even the simplest of marks has a density of meanings and references. Even your way of looking is loaded with complexities of attitudes, ideas, experiences, and meanings that shape the image in front of you. To be unaware is to be blind. If the viewer does not ask questions about why it looks the way it does there is no way of really ‘seeing’ the world. For example, what is it about this particular combination of forms, lines, and colours that makes me think of certain things and feel a certain way?

To assume that it is possible to understand a work of art solely by understanding the intent of the artist is to also to make a leap of faith that the artist is being completely honest about his intent. Should one trust the stated intent of an artist more than a used car salesman? Are they not both, ultimately, in the business of selling their wares?

Some statements are are really meaningless in terms of intent. Consider the following:

“My intent as an artist is to create beauty. I try to express the beauty I see through my eyes and represent it either on silk or in oil paintings. The feeling of the art is all important to me. I try to create a mood and enhance it by the use of colour. I consider color to be my strongest point. I desire to share what I see with the world and as a result, create happiness....” Elizabeth Crowder

Process

The following section is a development of the model of creativity set out by Brett Battey

Brett Battey http://www.dmu.ac.uk/faculties/humanities/departments-staff/staff/bret-battey.jsp

http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/~bbattey/Words/creativity.html

Most people imagine that the creative process flows from idea to realization. That is to say someone gets a creative idea, executes it, and the process is finished. Battey illustrates this as:-

However there is rarely a single idea involved in a creative work. Creativity is a feedback process consisting of a series of oscillating steps of action and assessment of the outcome.

Innovation occurs between ‘idea’ and ‘realization’. Between the idea and its realization there is action designed to realise the idea. If the idea is not realised a new attempt is made at a new realisation. Action and observation oscillate and the idea and realization are adjusted and changed repeatedly until the idea and the realization are brought into alignment.

In this process, the original idea and original realization can be transformed or discarded but the gap between an idea its realisation has been narrowed:

Battey placed a magnifying glass in the above diagram as a reminder that where the gap between idea and realization is narrow, high value is placed on fine details in the realization.
Where the gap between idea and realisation remains large there has to be an emphasis on injecting new ideas and sticking with the need to resolve the difference by repeated oscillations of action and observation.:

Creativity feeds upon itself and the innovator strings together a number of creative acts which spawn a larger creative process. Cyberneticists and system theorists refer to this as a ‘meta-change’, that is, change that causes a innovative thinking about new realisations.

For those innovators free from external goals each individual act of creation serves a larger act of personal creativity rather than being an end in itself. Innovation can become an agent of personal, and thereby societal change.

In summary, creativity as a process can be visualised as a spiral, where the first step is the vision of a model, either a tangible object or a mental picture of something. This generates an idea that this can be bettered. The novel idea is the start of an action pathway by which new versions of the model are created as prototypes on the way to an ideal end point. Prototypes are compared with the new ideal and ideas for changing them provide feedback into the action pathway. From time to time prototypes may be compared with other models, and this feedback is also used to change the prototype. Eventually the ideal is reached which is not capable of further changes in the mind of its creator. At this point, the creative pathway reaches a dead end. However, the final model may, on reflection generate a new idea in the mind of its creator, or become the start of a new action pathway in the mind of another creator.

The tile model

The following photograph was taken of a tiled wall in an Italian kitchen which was taken as the starting point for the production of a prototype which separated a flowery image from the hypnotic simple mass produced repeat pattern.

Tile prototype 1

This prototype stimulated thoughts about fruits, particularly the central seed producing structure of an apple revealed in cross section. This in turn triggered thoughts about the structure of a root

The apple idea

The root idea

These ideas resulted in the production of a second prototype which emphasised the foldings around a central ‘seed’.

Prototype 2

This lead in two directions to produce the following end points where creativity dried up.

The end 1

The end 2

Lichen model

This began with a photo of lichens on wall of Glastonbury Abbey (to be continued)

Microcosms of imaginative awakening

2009-04-16T07:22:00.000-07:00

Paintings as enterprises of the imagination are two-dimensional microcosms in which a small piece of reality is simplified in two dimensions to reveal a basic pattern culled from its three-dimensional structure. The scale may be reduced to encompass a landscape or a human figure. On the other hand it may be enlarged to accommodate the components of a microscopic system of life or minerals. But what is happening to artistic creativity when the starting point of the imaginative awakening is a painting itself, which is inevitably coupled with the style, customs and values of the social system that motivated the artist to produce it? This is the problem that confronted Susi Bellamy when her imagination was fired by an enforced stay in the Academia Gallery of Venice because a tidal surge in the Adriatic had marooned the first batch of early morning visitors. As the hours passed studying the paintings the many religious works, she began to think of them in terms of their geometric compositions. “I was fascinated by the flatness of their design, the rich colours and the interaction between the Madonna and child”.
A simple ‘mother and child’ pattern was actually the historical basis for the devotional representations produced by the early Christians of the Mother of God with her miraculous child, which date from the Byzantine Era. This is evident from the Fig 1 where the mother and her ‘adult’ child, created in a Cretan cultural backwater, are both draped in plain loose heavily folded cloth. The flat background in glowing gold leaf is the cosmic space for two small angels placed symmetrically on either side of the centred subjects. With the passage of history, the mother’s clothing actually becomes more elaborate. Also, her baby is transformed from a supernatural miniature man to a realistically depicted dimpled lively infant interacting with his now glamorous richly clad Renaissance mother. He also interacts with his immediate surroundings as all human babies do.

For the past three years Susi has developed this ’ Madonna and Child’ theme using Italian paintings dating from the early to mid-14th century to simulate little worlds of patterned fabric building on her former experience as a fashion editor. The cut-out face of the mother of god and the body of her son are embedded in bold collage fields composed of wrapping paper which follow the original artist’s scheme of draping the two figures (Fig 2). The paper fields are in traditional Florentine patterns, and are embellished with beads, shells, and gold filigree paper doilies (baking paper). These simple flat fields of discrete masses of miniature repeat patterns function to transform Renaissance high art into a rich, ironic, kitschy take, as original stand-alone pictures. This novel re-arrangement actually serves to emphasise the relationship between mother and child and their impact on the viewer. The overall effect is present a 21st century interpretation of the famous ‘Venetian web’ by which Madonna painters from the time of Paulo Veneziano to Carlo Crivelli submerged the mother and child in waves of different colours, patterns and textures. This user-friendly decorative quality takes away some of the preciousness of religious art and makes it more accessible. However the overall outcome is to make the viewer think about the splendid surfaces of Venetian art, and evaluate the centuries old staying power of Christian devotion and spiritual reverence to coloured images of a miraculous relationship between mothers and their babies.

Regarding the incorporation of shells as a dominant element of the picture’s boundary, the idea came from the embellishment of street corner shrines. But there is a direct reference to the universal aboriginal belief in the spiritual power of shells emptied of the living beings that formed them. The shells also contain a more subtle message to what Donald Kuspit has called the relentless materialization and mediafication of art, which have stripped it of its transcendental experience leaving the shell of art rather than its spiritual substance. In this respect it is ironic that the Madonna series is Susi’s most successful commercial venture to date.

Fig 1 Madonna and Child (Cretan circa 13th century)

Fig 2 Madonna and child (after Nicolo di Pietro)

http://www.sanskrit.org/www/saris/Introduction.html
http://media.schoolofvisualarts.edu/sva/media/1568/medium/Proceedings2001.pdf

Worlds within worlds

2009-04-15T05:42:00.000-07:00

In every age and in every place where humans have left records, we see evidence that as soon as societies innovate beyond the needs of bare survival, they begin to create arts, to invent gods, to wonder and theorize about the universe. The line of descent from ancient legends to the modern quests of philosophy, religion, and science is direct and unequivocal. This is the thread of human social development that links the out of the ordinary places that people relate to when they think about a wider view of their place in the cosmos. These are the greater and lesser worlds of which Homo sapiens is a part as a distinctive gathering of stardust endowed with life. In this sense we can relate imaginatively to our place in the solar system, galaxy and universe and our place on Earth as a social animal existing in community groups based on different languages and customs. Here on Earth we interact with other worlds consisting of multicellular beings and unicellular forms, all with the same biochemistry as ourselves, interacting with the dynamics of mineral particles making the rocks and soil of planet Earth. This is the theatre of macrocosms and microcosms in which art and science are applied forms of thinking about where we have come from, the world of which we are now a part and the future for humanity yet to come.
Artists and scientists have taken it upon themselves to explore these lesser worlds, taking a narrow or broader view of how works of art can illuminate the essence of structures and systems and their values. In the West, painters first began to take up this role of delineating worlds within worlds in the 14th century, and one of the first outcomes was the depiction of landscapes which gradually forged a bridge, through geographical studies, with the emerging sciences. After Galileo had discovered the four moons of Jupiter in 1609 he became increasingly convinced that the Copernican, heliocentric system of the world was correct. Nevertheless, there was a constant debate about the right world system during the whole 17th century. Pictorial representation played an important role in it and the illustrations used as book frontispieces were a significant medium for the dispute.

Regarding the role of the high art of the Renaissance, in 1502 a contract was drawn up between the Umbrian painter Bernardino di Betto di Bagio, nicknamed Pinturicchio, and Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini Todeschini , then archbishop of Siena, to decorate the library adjoining Sienna Cathedral . The library had been commissioned by the Cardinal in 1492 as a repository of the books and the manuscript collection of his uncle, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Pope Pius II. The project was conceived to celebrate the life of the Pope. The design, possibly subcontracted to Raphael , was conceived as a series of massive fresco panels in brilliant gleaming colours depicting significant episodes in the life of Enea Silvio, set beneath a ceiling covered with painted panels of mythological subjects. The work took Pinturicchio and his assistants several years to complete, being interrupted by the death of Francesco in 1503 shortly after he himself was elected Pope.

One of the panels represents Enea Silvio as an up and coming servant of the church in a procession of delegates leaving the Council of Basel along the shores of Lake Geneva . In its composition this fresco represents one of the first attempts to depict cultural ecology as a seamless knowledge system in which nature is integrated as one with society. In this respect it can be broken down into five lesser worlds within the painted world, framed by a massive decorated arch which marks the pictorial interface between painter and viewer.

The dominant feature is the Alpine atmosphere of the lake and its water economy represented by the dark chaotic sky stain of a summer storm (1), which spans the lake and its mountainous horizon. This is the first time a storm scene had been depicted in Western art. The geological system of the shore is painted as a group of tree-covered stratified rocks and hills (2) on top of which sits a small walled city (3). The tightly grouped procession of diversely clad humanity (4) is dwarfed by the landscape of lake and sky, and is itself hemmed in at the base of the picture by a narrow roadside verge packed with wildflowers (5).

The scope of this particular fresco as a semi-scientific painterly enterprise has been compared with the first expansive evocation of urban culture in its landscape painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s on the theme of ‘Good and Bad Government’. This was produced two centuries earlier on three walls of the council chamber of Sienna’s town hall.

Common ground

2009-04-15T03:46:00.000-07:00

"Both, science and art are not separated from each other. There is even a similarity between them as they help us observe nature”. Cheng-Dau Lee, Nobel laureate in physics

William Morris in his book ‘Signs of Change’, written in 1888, considered the aim of art is the generation of happiness. He was writing as a notable artist, and simplified his day to day mode of activity as a cycle between ‘idleness’ and ‘energy’. He says… “ these two moods are now one, now the other, always crying out in me to be satisfied”. When in the mood of energy we must be be doing something or we become unhappy; when the mood of idleness we become restless and our mind picks up memories of “… the various pictures, pleasant or terrible”, which our experience “have fashioned in it” ' Restlessness makes hapless men and bad citizens. He further supposes that the objective of a work of art is always to please the person who becomes conscious of it when in a mood to idleness. The person thereby becomes happy. ' Regarding the artist the aim of making art is to gives pleasurable satisfaction to our impulse towards energy, and “giving to that energy hope of producing something worth its exercise in the production of happiness in the viewer”.

Science arose to understand and manage the human environment in order to meet our needs and wants. Therefore, regarding the aim of science it is also the generation of happiness but now in our technological society this is taken up from the viewpoint of satisfying wants. On the one hand, there is the utility-maximizer, who has wants and tries to maximise their satisfaction through maximally efficient techniques. On the other, there is the Stoic, who manipulates his wants to achieve maximal satisfaction given the situation. The common ground of the scientist is to isolate an event as a member of a category of events by formulating general laws and pointing to uniformities. The objective is to deduce a theory to picture the processes actually at work in nature.

In their pursuit of happiness, artists and scientists share the following features:
· a capacity for innovation;
· careful observation;
· precision in presenting the outcome of thought;
· a reliance on intuition and inspiration.

The common ground between artists and scientists is the process of creativity.

About

2009-04-09T00:40:00.000-07:00

This blog has been set up by a scientist and an artist to encourage people to talk about creative relationships between art and science.

Our starting proposition is that a scientist measures relationships between objects in the existing universe. The artist discerns such relationships and restates them in highly personal clarified forms. Science is about discerning a pattern of function in ideas about the objects and their relationships. Art is about discerning a pattern of being in ideas about objects and relationships. Both scientists and artists are engaged in understanding' the universe – the one using mainly intellect, the other using mainly emotion. Both of them make extracts from the universe. Both use the terms truth' and 'beauty' to describe the quality of their discoveries. What causes them to extract a fragment of the world is the love of the pattern. The artist presents it to us purged of its functional trappings, as a thing admirable not because it works but because it is. Love of the spiral of a nautilus shell is common to artists and scientists. It is the inevitable result of the growth of the shellfish. Scientists have discovered the laws of growth from which it derives its own mathematical formula. But the same spiral in a work of art is there merely because the curve pleased the artist's eye. He may have guessed intuitively at its mathematical basis, but his only excuse for using it is his delight in the curving line it makes.

The artist can no more create beauty than the scientist can create truth. In art, the pattern-possibilities of the human body are inexhaustible. The set of patterns discovered by the Greeks was not exhausted by Pheidias. Michelangelo tapped another seam, Rubens another, Degas another. In our own time, Lucien Freud and Andrew Gormley have made fresh additions. Each new discovery has thereby added to our sense of beauty. Beauty in Nature is a product of the mathematical behaviour of Nature, which in its turn is a product of function; whereas beauty in art is a product of man's love of the mathematics of Nature based on his intuitive understanding of it. In summary, the scientists creates paradigms to explain the functional origin of pattern and the artist creates objects to explain his feelings about pattern.

The following two quotations are representative of an artist and a scientist's views on the common ground of creativity.

"As I watched my sister, a developmental biologist, from a distance in her own environment, I could tell that her lab processes were not that different to my studio ones. In science at the bench as much as the potter at his wheel or the sculptor at his block of wood there is a process of preparedness, some questions posed early on and a distinct feeling of grafting away until a result wins through.

There follows a period of stepping back; more questions, what does the result say to me? How can I change the outcome? Is there anything that failure can teach me? And then back again to retry or reshape the work in hand." .....Helen Storey

The creative artist is an observer whose brain works in new ways making it possible to convey information about matters that were not a subject for communication before. The discoveries of the artist and the scientist are exactly alike in this respect. Artists have discovered new aspects of space with one symbolism just as physicists had with another.... J. Z. Young