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The function of art is to open for us the doors that lead to the other side of reality.

Octavio Paz, What is Art? – Octavio Paz and Art

This year I have learned much. I read several books about physics, cosmology, the mind, consciousness, and artists. I seem to be centering on the surrealist. Octavio Paz’s book, Alternating Current, moved me more in that direction. It seems he was a friend of Andre Breton.

Breton being best-known as the co-founder and chief apologist of surrealism. He wrote the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as “pure psychic automatism.” Paz brought to the table helped me understand how the unconscious was tied to the automatic writing/drawing process. Not sure where I am going to go with this. Right now, I am reading, Concerning the Spiritual in Art by Wassily Kandinsky. I am finding how closely some of the ideas spoken both by the Surrealists and presented in Kandinsky’s book are very close to ideas and beliefs of the Religious Society of Friends. 

As I was creating the work above, it occurred to me, one dot made by my pen can influence or change the composition. The substrate could easily stand-in for the universe…. the dots, the individuals that exist within, and how one dot and every dot… or every person contributes to the whole. By the decisions we make, each of us changes our surrounding environment or the universe in some small or big way.   

This is nothing profound… Just thoughts and where I am at in my journey.

“Wondrous as it is, our sense of vision is clearly not without certain limitations. We can no more see radio waves emanating from our electronic devices then we can spot the wee bacteria right under our noses.”

Adam Hadhazy, 27th July 2015
What are the limits of human vision? BBC.com

“I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.”

Jackson Pollock The Healing Power of Art and Artist

Titling work is hard… In the past, I frequently titled a work only to retitled it later when I have exhibited the work. To me, that underscores that work does have a life of its own. The meaning changes as time, culture, and viewers’ experiences change. I guess the artist’s experience changes too.
This work is my latest, inspired by both the Greek myths and the book “Conversations with God” by Neale Donald Walsch.  I settled on the title-Created. I think it could be Losing it too. Maybe soon, I will think of another. 

A great article in The New Republic, Art with No Name, by Ruth Bernard Yeazell, discusses why many untitled works were produced in the 18th Century. As it examines the subject, it brings forward as art becomes more mobile the need to title a piece increases to provide an entrée into the work.

Titling, as E. H. Gombrich has observed, “is a by-product of the mobility of images,”; and before the rise of the art market, the growth of public exhibitions, and the development of the reproductive print, the mobility of images was distinctly limited.