Studio Time

I know the whole “automatism/scribble” idea may sound a little ridiculous. It’s something I’m entirely serious about. I don’t do everything that way. I still do portraits and figure drawings and so on. I do have a lot more interest in it than I do most anything else. I’m not quite sure that I buy the idea of channeling your unconscious mind and so on that the Surrealists were so fond of. I do like the idea that it helped create a real break with traditional representative art and helped lead us to Abstract Expressionism and so on. I think there’s still something vital and important to be found there.

I started this sort of thing during what was probably the last artist’s block I’ve ever experienced. Late ’80s, I was suffering from fairly severe depression due to a few failed relationships and the culmination of a fairly long battle with “substances“. To this point, I’d simply drawn the stuff that I saw in my head. It occurred to me one night that I might actually be able to express something of what I was feeling through automatic writing or drawing. I decided I’d write a suicide note. Not that I actually intended to commit suicide; though it was a fairly frequent consideration back then. I just figured that it was a fairly intense idea to put down on paper. I started writing on a fairly large sheet of paper and by the time I’d finished… I was shaking. The whole thing was nicely cathartic but did leave me with a large sheet of paper covered with unreadable scrawl. I decided I’d try to turn this mess into something that meant something… started drawing into it, picking out shapes, adding elements and so on. The painting actually worked. It sold a long time ago… way back before the age of digital photography. Otherwise, I’d have an image of it here.

Amusingly enough, I included the painting in a show at one of the Illinois government offices. It was around Christmas. I got a call one afternoon to come down and move it seeing that the workers there didn’t feel that a painting titled “Suicide Note” was all that appropriate in the same room as the Christmas tree.

Since then, I’ve incorporated some form of automatism in most everything I do. At the very least, it can offer a way to develop a composition. I frequently develop forms from the spaces and shapes it creates. As of late, I’ve dealt more with abstraction and the sort of emotional/expressive qualities of the whole thing. I do keep some sort of intent in mind while I’m doing this. It’s not entirely automatic. Occasionally, I’ll put in a portrait or figure or try to build a landscape from things.

Working this way does offer a sort of catharsis. Working large can actually be physically exhausting. I have stretched rolls of canvas across the wall and simply attacked them with a handful of pastels or charcoal. It’s actually a pretty good workout both emotionally and physically.

(Oh… I no longer mess with “substances”, I’m happily married and suicide’s about the furthest thing from my mind these days.)