New Painting Objective
Jacqueline Wadsworth
“Painting is a thundering collision of different worlds intended to create a new world in and from the struggle...a new world which is the work of art.”
–Kandinsky
For years I have wanted to make big oil paintings. I feel oil is an important medium for an artist and until I had something significant to contribute I could not begin. One night in the beginning of 2003 something sparked and I made a series of sketches for paintings. With these sketches and the sequence of thoughts that followed, I feel like I have discovered a theory of art for my own work and I have arrived at a point of clarity so that I can begin painting. After years of disconnected thoughts and bits and pieces of ideas, I am finally able to get images on paper that I feel are an expression of my own voice and hopefully offer some kind of communication of my ideas to others.
I realized a criteria through writing this paper that satisfies a sense in myself that my expression is whole and complete. I needed to discover this before I could paint. By writing I clarify my own thinking and bring to the surface ideas that float unrecognized in my brain. This paper is about finding my voice (subject matter, expression), using or rejecting my knowledge of art up to this point, and discovering what painting is for me. I wanted to document this invisible process or it might be lost. Process and the small miracles that let you discover your own way should be remembered.
My art up to this point has been illustration on a small scale using watercolor and mixed media. The series of sketches I made represent the beginning of a change for me from illustrator to painter. Physically the change is represented by the difference in medium and size, but it also marks a change in my psyche from concrete to esoteric thinking, outer world to inner world representation, exploring other's thoughts to my own thoughts and ideas.
Through years of illustrating I have found that I communicate most clearly through a visual narrative or a kind of figurative story telling. I am interested in symbols and the idea of archetypical images that transcend people and time. I am able to best express my thoughts through these devices. Communicating my ideas so that the viewer will derive its intended meaning is important to me. Working figuratively is the most effective way for me to do this and the way I paint stylistically and abstractly conveys my ideas, which are abstract in nature, best.
I want my painting to be the truest expression of my psychological/spiritual/philosophical experience of life. I also want my painting to fit my conception of a poetic world — a kind of poetic other world. I have a desire to write poetry but have no talent for it therefore painting can satisfy this desire for me. I am interested in what lies beneath the surface of our experiences. I have a strong desire to interpret our inner life into symbols and narrative, not to convey specific events, but to describe experience metaphysically and symbolically. I am interested in what is undirected by us in the flow of the life force, invisible energies sensed and exchanged between people, and how things that are happening in our lives can be translated symbolically to give us meaning.
For a long time my ideas were more like a swirl of emotion and angst than anything concrete. I have always written about my experiences in a stream of consciousness form hoping to find the seeds and threads that might translate into imagery. I was trying to make this jumble of writing more tangible and one day I wrote the following:
"I am frustrated by what I want to say in my art. I am looking for and grasping onto ideas but they are so illusive. It’s as if I’m in a storm of butterflies and when I try to catch one it escapes. I want to keep it but it slides through my fingers like something I can’t hold at all. Slippery like peace."
I analyzed this passage about my inner turmoil and I realized I had described my feeling and experience as visual allegory. This became a sketch and the beginning of where I came to formulate a body of work. I had discovered how to convey my subject matter. (Subsequently I am using the butterfly, most commonly a symbol of the soul, in most of the paintings I am working on now - its meaning varying from painting to painting).
Criteria (Painting = Dream)
I now understood how to make my ethereal thoughts into a physical sketch but I still was not ready to paint. I needed more of a reason to translate my thoughts on experience into visual imagery. I had a basis for how to approach the work with my discovery of subject matter but this approach felt incomplete.
My love for art and most of my art knowledge came from a teacher with whom I studied with for over ten years. His training strongly emphasized drawing from life. These feelings I had of an incompleteness came from a fear of rejecting how I was trained. I wanted the work to encompass the totality of my experience of living. Would I be departing too much from my training and what I loved by working only from my inner self and imagination and should that matter? This teacher taught me how to study and teach myself and emphasized independent thinking, but I still had problems with the idea of departing completely from what I see (working from life).
I started to write down my dreams and realized what I needed to begin painting when I made the analogy of painting = dream. One night I had a dream that helped me make the connection of experience (what I see included) and expression. I realized after this dream that I needed to take something from my day and use it in my painting thus satisfying in a round about way my working from life issue. It also gave me an approach to painting based on my idea of what a dream is made of and gave me an explanation of what painting is for me.
I was at a children’s birthday party and the cake (ice cream cake) was pastel pink, purple and white. That night I dreamt about pastel colored ice cream. In the dream I was in a room and the room took on the characteristics of the ice cream. I was completely immersed in the essence and feeling of the ice cream - not cold or sticky but an ethereal, architectural and visual sense of the ice cream.
When I woke up I wrote this:
Art is equivalent to a dream in its mechanics and structure. A dream often takes your days and life’s experience and rearranges these experiences into symbols that sometimes have meaning for your soul or Self and might, at the same time, use archetypical symbols to give your soul new information. A painting should do the same thing.
An idea or expression in painting is that of your experience and soul. You then can use bits of information from your day like seeing a flock of birds or noticing the shadows of trees as elements in the painting. Then you combine that with universal images and symbols to further convey your idea.
This thought was what I needed to be able to relate my inner life to my painting – my outer experiences creating an inner world. It gave me the idea that both a dream and a painting should have the same ingredients. The dream was based most specifically on the cake at the party, something I would not have remembered if I hadn’t had the dream. This made me think that visual elements of my day should be used in my painting when they impact me. For example I may get a feeling from seeing the shadows of trees in winter. This experience of everyday beauty could be used as an element in a painting. It then becomes to me a kind of reverence and record of fleeting experience. The painting needs to be attached to something earthly for me because of my training and because of my conception of the world. Using just a piece of working from life in a painting (even in a round about way) would be enough to satisfy that desire for me.
Maybe because I am noticing something visually or something is impacting me it is somehow significant to meaning in my life. Why do certain visuals, experiences or people impact us and others go unnoticed? Hopefully the ones that do impact us have a certain meaning, however mysterious or unknown, to the entire plan and direction of our lives (and thus, painting). And why do certain impressions show up in dreams and others do not? This is a doorway for what I want my work to be – earthly elements (things from my everyday personal experience) living harmoniously with universal symbols in the painting.
I stated earlier that I am interested in what lies beneath the surface of what we experience: this is what a dream is. I want to be able to use the experience of dreaming in painting, not creating an image of the specific dream but more of a recreation of the structure and mechanics of a dream. If I use these bits of experience from my days and combine them on the canvas with psychological/spiritual/philosophical ideas I formulate from writing and translate them into archetypical symbols then, in a way I am making a painting that has the same elements as a dream. I want my paintings to be a recreation of a dream in the sense of how the mind and soul create a dream. The mechanism and structure of this unconscious process can be the same way to create a painting.
Later...
Working on this paper and writing keeps my mind moving towards art. Since writing this paper a year ago I see the process that allowed me to start painting and how a criteria came about for me. Immediately after completing this paper I did a series of tree paintings from life, completely ignoring most of the ideas in this paper. Although I did these without much conscious thought, in hind site I see it is important to break any rules or criteria I set for myself to enrich my own learning. Doing this occasionally and in relation to my main work only adds to what I ultimately want to accomplish and helps in my attempt to always keep my learning alive.
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