Thoughts on organic growth processes
Becoming a painter is a long and sometimes painful journey. In the beginning, you look for shortcuts, recipes and explanations. There’s what the great masters accomplished decades, centuries or even thousands of years before you even started thinking of making art. There are skills you can try to gain, rules to learn and follow, hidden tricks to find out about.
After the Renaissance mouvement, art became a scientific knowledge base using maths and magic formulas like Fibronacci’s suite to stipulate what art with the big A had to look like. Beauty as a mathematical theorem with the aim to create the perfect picture imitating nature. God‘s Da Vinci code seemed hackable and almost cracked by human intelligence. Artists like Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio and hundreds more managed to create marvelous things following more or less these rules .
Then world wars 1 and 2 happened, millions of human beings slaughtered for no reason, the ultimate horror of the shoah, the cold war and its nuclear menace. In response, artists began to search for other models or even more, to destroy the old models in order to go new ways. Kandinsky, Braque, Picasso, Arp, Dix and so many others, influenced by these man-made infernos, left the rational mathematically ordered academic art and went new ways looking for better humanity and a different kind of expression. They opened up wide the doors and windows for other artists like Pollock, De Kooning, Zao Wou khi, Rothko, Soulages, Basquiat, Richter and so many others.
Today, overpopulation, climate changes, ecological problems of all kinds, the revival of religious fanaticism are topics an honest thinking human being and even more so any artist cannot ignore. What about academic art forms these days? Are they still alive and kicking? Not in the way it existed in the 19th century. Playing to the rules, applying skills like perspective, hue, value and color wheel truths have this kind of a “has been smell” to it. To that point that it’s almost becoming anti-reactionary to paint like Caravaggio or J.S.Sargent nowadays. Artists like Craig Hannah or Costa Dvorezky do that in an absolute amazing new manner. Nowadays main stream art still exists, but it’s in the hand of business people. Artists like Koons, Hirst or Christo whose work is sold millions of dollars, mainly because ultra-rich tycoons speculate with them, seem to represent this new kind of establishment. To me, and I am absolutely aware of the fact that it’s a personal, subjective and maybe even unfair opinion, these forms of Art are just as academic as Bouguereau was in his time. Arp, Breton, Magritte, Dali, Braque, Kline did what they did in response to 2 major worldwide disasters. They needed to destroy, to engage in a “tabla rasa” moment, in order to rebuild a new esthetic and a more humane creative movement. Their heirs are people like Banksy and Basquiat. Street art is where it happens today. But conceptual art in a large general scanning vision is too difficult to understand, too intellectually overloaded and only accessible to an intelligencia form of public. And this elite thinking has nothing to do anymore with avant-garde.
So much for the introduction of my text. But the title speaks of “organic growth processes” and I think it’s about time to begin explaining what I mean with it.
In nature everything is a question of balance. In every ecosystem each part is equally important and depends on its neighbors, partners or opponents. In my journey to Art I wish my development to be of that same organic growth type. Not leaps from one step stone to another, but meandering slowly through a landscape of pictures, thoughts and emotions.
Nine months ago this is what my paintings looked like :
I was stuck. No life. Just technique and playing according to the rules.
I began changing subjects, using new materials, went back to drawing classes to study life poses. Nothing helped.
Then I decided I needed a real change. I felt I had to follow some of the paths other artists took in similar situations.
The only way out seemed to break out, letting things go wild. I started to work intuitively going deliberately against established rules. Mixing mild pink, black and olive green just to see what that might give me. Scratching paint, even if it felt awkward to destroy something I had just created. Giving big brush strokes all across my painting, just because …
Here’s what I my artwork looks like today :
Looks bizarre? It does, but then that’s what I wanted. Breaking my rules, going beyond self imposed limitations and see what happens. I know that this is probably a temporary situation. I will go back to something less tortured, less accidental and more conceptual. But for the moment it feels good to have total freedom and to let these images just appear without judging them.
Why do I call this organic growth?
Because I let things grow intuitively in complete interaction with my feelings, my thoughts and my quest for spiritual content.
I no longer try to give it a certain direction, since that would only make place for my subconscious to interfere through pre-installed mind processes. Ideas like “this should be more realistic” or “that’s not a good perspective” would arise and once again bring along frustrations and performance moves. Letting things go means accepting things to be different than expected, in other words discovering new things. And I feel that it’s those new things that I am actually looking for. Colors and feelings. These colors are feelings and they have been inside of me for decades. Maybe I was just scared to let them out. Maybe I just thought “that’s not what you’re supposed to do, feel or think”.
The organic growth process I am talking about works exactly as in nature. Moving in a certain direction means hitting into walls, rubbing against uncomfortable surfaces, walking on needle covered soils. A bit like a tree growing in a forest and trying to find its place amidst the other plants. Some walls demand to be pushed away or torn down, some surfaces become shiny when polished. And on other days it feels better to turn around and go another way, to respect what I find. There are moments when it looks as if I had reached a dead end and then all of a sudden things become clear again. Turning around some corners may reveal unsuspected happiness, whereas walking on large boulevards might at times lead to some meaningless endpoint.
I have this premonition that, just as that tree in the forest, letting things grow slowly, accepting some borderlines, contouring others and breaking through seemingly unbreakable walls when it feels necessary will eventually guide me to the canopy up there on the canopy.
Doing so means getting rid of any idea of success, deliberately not seeking likes or claps. It means creating for the sake of creating, not for money, fame or appreciation from others. It’s doing what you feel important for yourself.
And gosh it feels good … A fellow artist, whom I really admire, talks in an article about the ecstasy of creativity. His name is Hamid Sepahzad. He didn’t speak of any acid trip like ecstasy, but of the feeling you get to be in harmony with yourself, nature and beauty. Meditation, dancing like a derwish or just listening to birds in the morning sun can give you those ecstatic instants. And believe creativity does too. But just as it’s not enough to sit down close your eyes and decide to meditate as hard as you can, just as it’s impossible to spin around in circles hoping to embrace Sufi’s philosophy without a long learning process, it’s also useless to force yourself to be creative, to oblige yourself to produce beauty. If it doesn’t come from inside it’s worth peanuts. And in order to let it out you need to learn how to open your heart. That’s a long and difficult procedure. But I am sure it’s worth taking the time to do so.
Namaste
