ARAS Connections: Image and Archetype - 2009 Issue 4

I would like to start with a brief introduction to my paintings, as they are the motivating force behind this text and the ideas contained within it. Perhaps I should start with one of the most basic aspects of my practice whereby my paintings are initiated through a detached method of pouring paint, I call it process painting; it provides a method to carry on painting in the face of doubt. Process, in one sense, requires no belief, just the material and the desire to make paintings. However, my desire is to make paintings that have "significance" and embody "meaning." For me, process takes on meaning as an act of faith in existence through a celebration of matter; though this may often be outside the conscious awareness of many artists. I am motivated by the pleasure of watching paint move around a surface waiting for a moment when the painting "makes itself" and meaning feels not to have come from me.
 
I view paint not only as capable of internal "expressive" possibilities but also as an external agent, existing "objectively" or externally, capable of containing expressive potential through the transformative act of the artist but also mysteriously capable of provoking aesthetic responses through its very substance and physical appearance, even without the "expressive" input of the painter. The process painter lets paint behave as paint. There ensues a careful watching of how materials behave and a sensitive response to these qualities. The writer James Elkins likened painting to alchemy, seeing painting as rooted in the physical but extending beyond it. He observes,
 

Science has closed off almost every unsystematic encounter with the world. Alchemy and painting are two of the last remaining paths into the deliriously beautiful world of unnamed substances. (Elkins 2000, p. 199)

 
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Margot McLean: Permeability is a state of being porous so that images may alight and find a resting place, and set off elaborations. These happen not necessarily in the studio when concentrating on the work. They may even be impeded there. Similarly, elaborations of a dream into insights and recollections and interpretations do not necessarily happen in the analytic session but require a permeability throughout the day after the session and the days after the session, here, there, or anywhere, and not with the analyst but with anyone.
 
Artists work in an imagistic space. A space that has no beginning, no end, no middle. When is an artwork finished? When is a dream finished? The image seems to want to go on. Cézanne said a painting is complete at every stage of the work even if it is never finished.
 
James Hillman: I am concerned, beyond art-making, with the psychology of the incoming, which the San Francisco poet Robert Duncan called the invenio, Catholicism calls the Annunciation—the descent of logos into physical matter, the all-too-solid flesh. I am concerned less with what comes in than with the incurring, the fact of human permeability, the ordinary, quotidian and ubiquitous fact of visionary, ideational, auditory, symptomatic, and personified incursions.
 
Why can fantasy-thinking not be shut out?
 
The composer, the painter, the writer are not special human exceptions. They are the subtle more vulnerable examples—not of "weak ego", but of the essential nature of the human mind, that it is membranous, osmotic, susceptible, suggestible, seducible, seditious, hysterical.
 
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