The Pace of Perception

Have you ever had that furious fire burn when the gates of vision open blazing white, exploding in your mind and body in one surreal sensory download?

Or had that moment right before you wake up with such astounding clarity, answering lifelong enigmatic questions that had plagued you for a lifetime and yet a few minutes later, haunt you in ambiguity?

Or perhaps had those dreams or visions where you could see the future of your art just as plain as it was sitting on the easel right now yet thinking back it’s a foggy remembrance.

For me, I began to have these experiences early on. A sort of visual cortex hyperdrive I couldn’t turn off, yet it was so difficult to translate directly into a work of art let alone describe it to anyone satisfactorily.

UNDULATING BEHIND THE LUMINESCENT PASSERBY

I still struggle today to keep up with the pace of perception. It’s a pursuit that never ends and somehow continues to remind me that I’m falling behind... Always undulating behind, just catching the dust from this extraordinarily luminescent passerby.

At the most inopportune moments I’m struck with vision. Like an invitation to Mexico and a free ticket from an old friend right when I’m so deep in overdue commissions and late rent. My never-the-right-time ‘timing’.

Inspiration has a mind of its own as well, ever urging me forward into places i couldn’t dream up with my most determined efforts. Its an exalting experience that often leaves me exhausted, mentally trying to hold on to what I had seen long enough to start something.

It’s been about twenty years now that I’ve consciously been on this chase through the depths and heights of perception and artistry.

I can certainly remember simpler times as scattered as they are throughout my life. Even then I dreamed and prepared great monuments in the sky acting as if it were enough.

I do a lot of work in my head in general. Most of it however may never come to pass. It’s a sort of neurological practice though when I do get down to some solid blood-sweat-n-tears work, this exercise comes back to me and I can draw on it to project into my next several moves.

Ill also practice painting the scenes of the world around me. How I would start the painting with a foundational layer and move into the foreground or work the light and shadows with viscosities of paint and wild or deliberate brushstrokes, smoothing thisarea finely and applying an impasto to another. When I’m working on a new style, I’ll paint the world as well while I’m on a walk or at the cafe with someone.

At first this was extremely tiring and got a bit surreal at times though I think painting in this way is like a good game of chess, in that you have a greater likelihood to succeed when you can think a few moves ahead.

CONTROLLED CHAOS

Now, of course I use a lot of free form expression as well in the act of creating and let the paint tell me what it wants to do. This balance is what a few fellow artists and I have loosely referred to as ‘Controlled Chaos’.

It aptly describes the process of letting go even though something is still recognizing patterns and influencing outcomes. The constant visualization of creating artwork in my mind certainly helps that point of relinquishing control to then ease back into composition and form, molding it into a variation on what was originally envisioned.

SPIRIT AND INSISTENCE OF ART

That last part is important. It has never quite been what I originally saw. As soon as the hard work of creating the thing comes into play... it, in all manner of speaking, has a life of its own.

I am a co-creator most of the time and this is a very successful ratio of being along for the ride yet physically the one painting it. A weightlessness accompanies being the co-creator and I’m urged forward as if the wind is at my back. That’s when I know it’s really on!

This is the momentum, the spirit and insistence of art. Like being plunged into the

supernatural collective and temporarily altered with that primordial language

beyond words. You succumb to the raging forces of chthonian nature.

MARVEL OF SIMPLICITY

Describing that brief and exalted state is no less than difficult and yet it exists without an explanation. So we go on creating the signs that point to what is out there regardless.

What we see while we’re feeling and hear while we’re thinking is the complex elixir that goes into each crystalline image.

The issue here, the thing above all sums and summations is finding that steady rate in it all. That constant within all changes. I wonder sometimes, Can we as artists prepare ourselves to join the reality of the world as it is?

Study the business of art on top of holding steadfast in the world we’ve created, grow in this international art community and flourish from a schedule of good solid rhythmic production while keeping the passionate fire alive with ambition-like oxygen?

It appears to be a marvel of simplicity, wrapped in layers of successive actions.

OPPOSING THE NOTION OF A MISTAKE

Go ahead and begin the day of work,..

Mix the paint, prepare the canvas, render the concept in various ways

and then without a second thought, let the paint and canvas collide

as if that moment of inspiration had been there all along waiting for you to get started.

So much is discovered in accidents and mistakes. We can fight against an onslaught of troubling thoughts, or simply oppose the notion of a  mistake altogether.

At this point are we screwing up anymore?

Are we waiting on genius?...    

I don’t think so!

We’re making millions of micro corrections, learning through action and experimentation to a level of fine artistry.  We’ve not stumbling in the celestial dust of our potentiality, waiting for the right time and getting crushed under the pressure as we miss it again and again.

We can keep pace with visionary perception, with the speed of our own thoughts . We can be succinctly human and use mistakes to urge us forward turning them into head corner stones in the building of our own styles and quality of perceptions.

THE HEYOKA ELEMENT

Personally I like to start my work with a splash and splatter of paint to break down the sacred barrier and get up close and all the way in there.

Sometimes I’ll use a canvas as a palette for another piece until it speaks to me. Some pieces develop from the potency of the vision alone and arrive with a force. Some pieces push you beyond your limits and you come back to them much later.

However it works, breaking down the sacred element  like the Heyoka trickster has always been important. We need to break in and wreck the place a little bit before we can rebuild it as it truly is, beyond the internal construct and ungrounded assumptions.

In that process, I think, is a profound respect for the sacred design . It might not be perfect but here I found a way into the great halls of creativity that works for me.

Breaking down this mystical untouchable early on allows for a steady build up to that pinnacle of sublimity at a pace we can keep up with and understand.

In the end I know I’m finished when it begins to breathe on it own. My eye travels effortlessly throughout the painting with satisfaction and there is nothing left to do but marvel. Any other addition would crumble the life it has, so I sit back for a time and enjoy what has been done and then prepare another canvas.