On Friday, 5/4/18, there will be an opening reception for the annual juried Painting Show at the Emerald Art Center in Springfield, OR. I am grateful to have a piece accepted into this show and am looking forward to the opening. I am curious to see what this particular piece looks like hanging in a show. But I am most excited to share the concept of automatism publicly through a painting defined by it.
Automatism is a concept I speak about a lot, for it is an approach to Artmaking that has endless potential to expand our relationship with reality. It has limitless promise for psychonautic exploration as well as communal connectivity. The possibilities that present themselves when fluid and intuitive composition are favored over direct representational intention or academic astuteness are staggering when we think of the infinite potential for the harmony of color and form.
I have been working on a fair number of Automatist Landscapes, offspring of the aforementioned piece in the Spring Show. I am enticed by their potential to captivate two spectrums of perspective within the viewer. They are abstractions ripe with suggestive patterns and forms which create the visual connection to a landscape. Even an alien or imagined landscape can evoke our direct relationship with common terrestrial recognitions.
These are pieces that do not alienate those uninitiated to abstraction with the same propensity that a full on ab-ex painting might. Within the heavily rendered and seemingly abstracted micro-paintings and forms within the larger piece and the complexity of rhythm and movement garnered from the automatist and layered composition, the space that seems to be sky and the space that seems to be land or sea grounds the viewer into a realm that they don’t immediately question. That is part of the hope at least.
It is important for a painting to affect in the instant, to work, and then to evoke questions. If the viewer/painting relationship is one that starts with unreconciled confusion, the channel of instant understanding which yields the explorative questions isn’t crossed. I believe that the gap which still exists in the larger social comprehension regarding Abstract Art is one that will need to be minimized to free painting from our own experiences.
I want to help assure that the concepts and foundations of abstract Art and automatism are somehow expressed to those who would normally dismiss them. Therefore, I feel that these abstract landscapes, which continue to explore paths within the compositional method I work with in their textured and musical layering, are also a way of bridging that gap with a universally accepted and revered subject matter rendered into the explorations.
I am grateful for the opportunity and impetus to continue this work on automatism and the “surreal” landscape concept. I look forward to sharing more work as they are completed, here and in other public venues. And thanks to all who put together the Spring Show!