Many of you have followed the artistic process that I have shared on social media during the past six months. Besides investigating what meaning painting has for me personally, and for society as a whole, my research has examined the creative process itself. I have aimed to pursue a studio practice that is open and fluid without set boundaries – where the continuity and linearity of the artistic process is continuously called into question, so to eliminate the urge to strive for a final goal.
I've allowed my process to be completely open, permitting it to change almost daily as I responded to what I saw, read, or experienced in both the real and virtual world. By applying various rules, I've challenged myself to keep the process going. I've also been fortunate to engage with artists, art historians, and other persons in various forms of dialogues relating to art. This has stimulated me to delve deeper. Further, I've resisted my urge to classify and censor my artistic output. Social media has served as both a recording device and as a means of keeping my process in a continuous destabilizing state of flux. My aim for this was to mirror, in my artistic practice, what is actually happening in the real world and to question my own habits and preconceived ideas. Through the means of art, painting, and intuition, I sought to explore hidden parts of myself. It is true that painting, because of its fluidity, may be one of the best ways to explore intuition and the subconscious of the mind. Already, after six months, I have a better understanding of my own feelings as they relate to painting and my art-making process in general.
However, when an art process relies solely on intuition and feelings, it feels very destabilizing. There are days when the process itself makes me feel "dizzy" or "disoriented" due to the lack of structure and boundaries. One also feels very exposed and vulnerable as if there is nothing there but a feeling of emptiness. It almost touches on the sublime, meaning infinitely beautiful, but at the same time, terrifying. After engaging in this for months, I feel more and more at ease; however, it still feels like a balancing act. Apparently, these feelings are familiar to artists exploring this type of creative output.
Below are a couple of quotes from an essay written by Theresa Hardman called 'Understanding Creative Intuition:'
The collective unconscious specifically is, according to Jung, the source of intuition and instinct. In his theory of the collective unconscious, Jung describes it as a fluid, sympathetic, 'boundless expanse,
a place of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad. It is the world of water, where all life floats in suspension; where the realm of the sympathetic nervous system, the soul of everything living, begins; where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me.
According to Jung, the unconscious (both personal and collective) is therefore synonymous with ego loss, in that the unconscious eliminates boundaries between the 'I' and the rest of the world. He states that the creative person is somehow able to connect unconscious knowledge with conscious ideas, which often results in a creative product or action. Creative intuition is a communication between the conscious mind and the collective unconscious, which suggests possibilities inherent in a subject or situation.This recalls Heidegger's concept of Being, which is an openness to the world through one's state of mind. It involves self-abandonment – an emptiness of mind, not seeking, but listening, waiting and reflecting. In his essay, 'The Origin of the Work of Art', Heidegger writes that in this state of mind 'the artist remains inconsequential as compared with the work, almost like a passageway that destroys itself in the creative process for the work to emerge'. By adopting a passive and receptive state of mind, ordinary, habitual ways of thinking are annihilated, and the artists may be open to the poetic moment. In another essay 'The thinker as poet', he claims: 'We never come to thoughts. They come to us. That is the proper hour of discourse.' Heidegger describes the artist as 'one who truly knows what is', in other words, a person deeply aware of every passing moment of Being and completely open to its possibilities. A Buddhist concept related to this is sunyata, which can be described as the living void, the passing concreteness of experience, which is continually opening to us. It is understood as non-anthropocentric in that, in this void, the individual self loses its separateness and merges with reality beyond itself.
Theresa Hardman, 'Understanding Creative Intuition' is available for download here:
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