I've been thinking about what is attracting me to the 7 cascades and it's the Space. So today I went back again with this in mind and did a charcoal sketch and three 6"x8" oils one after the other. I like to work like this because I get quicker and freer as I go.
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| 6"x8" first sketch |
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| 6"x8" second sketch |
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| 6"x8" third sketch. |
If you look at them from far away, the third has a feeling of deep space. You can see how by simplifying it one can actually achieve a better 'feel' to a painting. I like to work for several hours this way, this is when the subconscious starts to work and we use our depth mind.
I am reading "The psycho-analysis of artistic vision and hearing by Anton Ehrenweig." He says:
"The need for beauty belonged only to the surface layers of the mind, but was foreign to the 'gestalt-free' depth mind. The break-through of the depth mind in modern art has done away with the aesthetic surface of art and revealed the unbeautiful gestalt-free vision of the unconscious. Thus modern art can serve as the most direct evidence for the irrational and unaesthetic modes in which our unconscious depth mind creates and perceives form." pg15 preface and introduction.
In other words: pretty pictures belong to the surface mind and 'form free (abstract)' pictures come from the subconscious, depth mind. He goes on to say that dreams, which come from our subconscious, are also inarticulate and don't make much sense to the surface mind. This is how the subconscious works.
He also says that the artist's task is to:
"produce half-consciously a matter from which, when produced the reader may, if he chooses, extract ideas. I may be permitted to add that the public may project not only missing contents, but also missing articulate structures into the artistic form which, because it is half-consciously produced, shows the inarticulate structure typical of all unconsciously created form..."p14
"To a great extent, the creative process remains on an unconscious inarticulate level where unconscious perceptions communicate themselves directly to the artist's 'automatically' working hand. The cycle of the creative process is closed through the secondary projections of the public whose surface perception cannot but transmute the half-articulate form material of art into a more articulate gestalt. Hence we shall describe it as the
artist's primary task to disintegrate the articulate and rational surface perception and to call up secondary processes in the public which will restore the articulate structure and rational content of surface perception." p 14.
