Ideas mid-confusion
Just putting incomplete thoughts down as I am involved in an open studio tomorrow and if anyone asks what I’m doing, all I have is this right now. If anyone out there wishes to comment, great, as I would love some discussion.
My main artistic concerns still follow the thread of my last post, ‘The lighthouse.’ In broadest terms, I am still dealing with the materiality of paint, although I think I’ll be doing that for a lifetime.
Some painting strategies I am sticking to are:
- Not working from images/still/life until I feel I have shaken my urge to be too faithful to them. This is a difficult strategy for me. Colour and light work so perfectly in this world and I am highly critical of my experiments that start from nowhere.
- Paint problems to be solved. Make a hideous move and instead of being critical followed by tentative moves, see it as a risk worth taking that heads in an initially uncomfortable direction. I am less prone to trying to preserve sections of a painting by circling around them, paint getting thicker everywhere else until these areas feel left behind. It is now embedded in my brain, ‘Nothing is wrong’, if it doesn’t work it’s a problem to solve and commonly where the magic moves lie. Thank you, Denys Watkins artist from Aotearoa.
- Refuse my mind when it tries to convert abstract beginnings into representational things. What is it about people? Why do we have to look at something and think, 'Oh I can see a cat in that?' Just play, breathe let the paint do the work, try not to be drawn into convention.
Hacked from Poet, Christopher Patton’s website, he talks about, Dōgen Zenji, his teacher’s teacher on what he has to say about painting Spring:
'When you paint spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots – just paint spring. To paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots is to paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots. It is not yet painting spring.'
https://artofcompost.ca/2015/12/19/a-taste-of-rhizome-mind/
As always with me there is a book or something that’s influencing my thoughts.
I saw an exhibition at Chapter, ‘The Botanist’ by artist Myfanwy McLeod.
Myfanwy took as a starting point, Michael Pollan’s book, ‘The Botany of Desire: A Plants-Eye View of the World,’ which examines 4 plants, the apple, the tulip, cannabis and the potato, each identified by Pollen as evolving and multiplying across the world over centuries to gratifying human desire.
It was whilst wandering around this exhibition with larger-than-life wooden apples, Adam and Eve and buds of marijuana that I came to a selection of books that informed Myfanwy’s ideas, one being, ‘Entangled Life,’ by Merlin Sheldrake.
At the time I could not have imagined that this would become my starting point. Fungus now fascinates me, these 'metabolic wizards' in the art of chemical transformation their lives and behaviours magical and widely unknown!
I found myself drawing comparisons between fungus and my thoughts on painting process. Some of the key things informing my work are as follows:.
- Sheldrake, participated in a study on the effects of LSD in problem solving, the non-synthetic version being derived from the Ergot fungus, he described his experience as forcing the imagination luring him out of worn patterns of thought, giving permission for confusion and amazement, re-examining what he knew, loosening the certainties. This struck a chord with my current paint strategy. I want to paint with no preconceived ideas about the endpoint. Searching, slowly seeking out connections with paint, its tone, colour, texture, form. Lure myself out of worn paths, giving myself permission to be confused and amazed.
- Vast mycelial networks that respond to their environment connecting with plants transporting nutrients, minerals, carbon water, they forage and search, smelling and taste remodelling themselves based on environmental stimulus. This feels like some sort of metaphoric framework for my painting process. It also makes me think about James Elkins, ‘What painting Is’, and his thoughts on how we should view a painting as the artist's process, layer upon layer and not how it sits within art history.
- Louis Sarno recorded women gathering mushrooms in central Africa, no leader no individual identity a unified polyphony in bodily form. Totally incredible listen to this:
- Insert electrodes into an oyster mushroom and detect waves of activity connect this to a synthesiser and listen to them talking. I’ve listened to them for days, they help me focus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_eCjmcdk08&t=2472s
- Mycelium is not routed to one spot, it’s a flexible migrating network. I predominantly mix on canvas, drag, dap shift a pignment across, intensify, neutralise, block out, leaving a complex trail that at times is barely discernible.
- Lichens drape, tuft, creep, seep, like afflictions on their surfaces. Crustose, folios, squalmose, leprose, fructose. Lichens like fungi inhabit the boundary between life and nonlife. Love Love.
- Mushroom derived psilocybin stimulates serotonin reducing the activity of the default mode network DMN resulting in an unconstrained style of cognition, Aldous Huxley, opening people’s minds to new ways of thinking. McKenna proposes our altered states on psilocybin have left an imprint on the world, being at the root of cultural and spiritual development with its rituals, ceremonies, myths and legends, composite animals, werewolf’s, chimera, sphinx...... Sharman dress and behave like animals.
- Wasson met with Curanderos spiritual healers in Mexico and had a soul shattering experience published in life magazine New York 1957 seeking the magic mushroom
- Trading strategies without brains mycorrhizal fungi make trading decisions transporting at higher and lower prices based on scarcity of phosphorus over the entire planet.
BUT it’s not all about facts and figures we must engage on many levels forage, taste, smell, experience and be mindful of the balance of small experiential moments and the vastness of our planet….Romantic
- We cannot think of a plant without its mycorrhizal relationships, the slip and slide, back and forth from plant to fungi along the hyphae. Humans have a completely dysfunctional relationship with fungi, destroy soil with fertilizer to improve crop production. They need to stop seeing plants as autonomous with no need for other. Gregory Bateson, anthropologist, considers the blind man with a stick, where does the blind man’s self begin? Merleau Ponty, Philosopher, the stick is not an object it is an extension of the senses, a prosthetic organ. (Like the brush of a painter.)
- Plants in the light can ‘switch,’ those in the light photosynthesise more. In spring the Douglas Fir is the source, the deciduous Birch has yet to grow leaves, the ‘sink’. In summer the Birch is the source and the fir in shade is the sink. Carbon flow switches direction. At first it’s really look like altruism with donors and receivers. In these exchanges fungi are not passive conduits, they are actively moving substance in both directions consuming and sustaining with a take now pay later scheme. Smaller plants on the take, larger on the pay. Like brokers in an entangled web mediating for their own fungal needs. Another metaphoric way of thinking about my paint process. Moving/mixing/pigment, glaze… trading, doner/receiver, give a little red take a little green.
- Some plants form relationships with multiple fungi others with just one, for example, Voyria. They are called ‘complex adaptive systems’, ‘complex’ because they are difficult to predict, ‘adaptive’ because the form and reform into new forms and behaviours, as does the world wide web, termite colonies, cities, financial market and brush with PAINT!! Socialism in the soil or a deregulated market of late capitalism with fungi jostling on the trading floor for a forest of stock exchange! Or is it fungal feudalism with plants as the workers!? How best are we to think of Mycorrhizal networks or paint? Some hues form beautiful relationships, others don't. Currently I am in love with cobalt blue and cad red light with green umber.
- It is well established in the sciences that metaphors help to generate new ways of thinking. Metaphors help to explain that which cannot be directly experienced by humans. Yet, metaphors are laced with human stories and values therefore cannot be free of cultural bias. Today the study of mycorrhizal networks is commonly set with political baggage some portray these systems as, socialism the wealth of the forest being redistributed, others as family structures of parental care, young trees nourished by older mother trees. Some described in terms of biological economic markets trading on the Wood Wide Web.
- The question is, what exactly am I doing with all these metaphors? Ask Gaby!
- Deleuze ‘Drunkenness’, a triumphant irruption of the plant within us. Can intoxication help us loosen our grip on our humanness?https://artofcompost.ca/2015/12/19/a-taste-of-rhizome-mind/
Other FUNGI thoughts I don’t want to drop just yet:
- Fungi have been used in controlled experiments to define the best evacuation routes in buildings even the quickest way out of IKEA!
- Sinard draws comparisons between fungal and Neural networks in the brain Neuroplasticity complex and adaptive main difference being neural networks cannot travel in the way that fungal networks can. We can only rewire.
- Liquids that alter the mind are enfolded into human cultures from ritual feasting to payment of labour dissolving our senses. Sumerians worship the goddess of fermentation Ninkasi, Greeks Dionysus, personification of the power of alcohol to both forge and corrode human culture.
- Ecosystems like human society are a collaboration of competition and cooperation.
- To say a plant decides, learns, communicates are we humanising them or vegetalising a set of human concepts?!
- Composers make pieces of music; decomposers unmake pieces of life. Without decomposers there is nothing for the composers to make with!! There is something here, as in my process I feel like I'm constantly composing and decomposing whilst always will be forward.
Just a few notes on some paintings I have on the go. The only ones on the wall for the open day are Apocalyptic and Battleground:
Battleground
My first painting following this new process began with the concept of hyphae in my head. Someone described it as a battleground another described it as wallpaper!
At first I thought, battleground, why did you think that? The more I thought about it I saw the point. All life is a battleground it’s not all about fighting against its also fighting with, collaboration, victory, defeat, all feeding the next steps. Progression, power, success, failure of all living things..
This is how it can feel to be making decisions whilst painting. It’s a battle competing for space, recognition, the quiet, the loud. The Middle East, the forest, the home, foreground, background. Battleground.
Apocalyptic landscape thoughts on the planet/environment but a new terrain I have never seen before, fungal bridges crossing water.
It’s all about techniques, strategies to attract, repel, defend. Plants, fungus, trees, lichen produced chemicals smells electrical currents that communicate blurring into traps safe havens all feeling the need to stay alive.
Other notes to self:
I am pushing unfamiliar paints together surprising myself searching for new connections in shapes form and colour. Is this enough? It comes from somewhere google ancient tree, Tim fungus.
There are elements that have new connections but always something familiar is this okay? Can I only be me and what I know of this world?
Talk to Jac, Sarah and Gaby about Deleuze and mycelial networks.
It’s not about not being representational, its embodiment and entanglement working with representation…Deleuze never denied this.
So, with these thoughts, what is it about my work that makes me think I am creating new links without preconceived ideas, well-worn patterns? Giving permission for confusion.
The current state of some large scale experiments:
