Organic Art = the patterns of life (1)

I terminated the digital variations of painting 1-03 of the "grand project".

Here follow some samples and some initial commentaries.


Check the entire collection of all 256 digital paintings here.

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My paintings and digital variations can best be described as organic art. They are indeed tentative visualizations of the organic character of life. But how did I evolve to such a form of visual representation ? And what exactly do I mean by representing the organic character of life ?

As any other Western painter I started painting by representing the traditional subjects that painters have been attached to over the last century and a half. First landscapes, portraits and stills which were the 3 obliged painting subjects from Early-Modernity. Then I switched to a modernist approach which was initiated by the avant-garde while High-Modernity was entering its triumphing era at the turn to the 20th century. But the modernist approach soon was kind of sucking for me because of the uncertainty that I experienced with its painting subject. I mean I was feeling that the modernist painting approach was not having a firm subject founded in firm ideas. Modernism was indeed a period of searching for what the avant-garde thought would be a deeper dimension than the painting subjects of earlier eras. But such a deeper dimension painting subject never really materialized and Western artists have been struggling since the 2nd World War with this reality.


While you are immersed in your present it is difficult to get a clear understanding of the evolving historical processes that fashion the present societal trends and behaviors. And so we go with the flow without realizing what’s really taking place. For me personally Modernism gave rise to a feeling of uncertainty in its painting content. I also observed that this uncertainty was directly impacting the craft of the image maker. It was not specifically me. That impact could be observed in the craft of all modernist painters. In other words the painter’s uncertainty, in the ideation of what he is representing, makes it impossible for him to concentrate on the image making craft itself and as a result the form of Modernist artworks were most generally unsatisfactory at least for those of us who have some notion of art history.


These feelings were haunting my mind and fostering uneasiness which forced me to try to understand what was really going on in the artworld. As a result I spent nearly two decades reading and thinking about what art is all about and how it finally evolved into Modernism. What I discovered literally blew my mind.

1. The word art with its somehow exceptional connotations, and its high social status, emerged sometimes during the renaissance 1 that means at the high of Early-Modernity. Over the previous 1000 years the image maker was indeed a manual laborer, a craftsman, who was relegated at the bottom of the social ladder.
2. Over the last 70 years, with the assistance of merchants and financial speculators who own the art market, US federal propagandists have succeeded to completely erase from the minds what the nature of art had been over the preceding tens of thousands of years 2. And so I came to understand that my feeling of uneasiness with Modernism as well as the newer trends that followed Modernism were largely justified indeed.

In the meantime, while my conscious mind was researching what art is all about, I was stuck in my painting with unanswered questions and my "subconscious" gradually took over. I mean that painting was somehow becoming an automatic ritual act that the conscious side of my mind was simply observing. During this episode my paintings transformed into mindscapes. At first these mindscapes centered on people but later people vanished opening the canvas to patterns unknown to my conscious mind.


Since my childhood painting had always been one of two sides of me. The second side being thinking. By thinking I mean:

• trying to understand the working of reality through reading and studying the available literature. That activity is the prerogative of the conscious mind which nowadays has adapted to the ways of the scientific method.
• dwelling into my subconscious and trying to reconcile the resulting observations with my conscious certainties. I described this whole process in an earlier series of articles3. Let me note here that the subconscious is not an organ nor a place in the body or out of the body. It is nothing else than the brain’s processing activity that remains hidden from the conscious mind (self). That’s why it is also called the unconscious. The conscious mind is only aware of the small fraction of the brain’s processing activity that relates to the information needed in order to act to preserve the body’s physical integrity. Societal and cultural evolution have largely expanded the complexity of the information we need to preserve our physical integrity but this did not reduce the volume of brain activity that is out of the conscious mind’s reach. The subconscious remains, by far, the largest part of the brain’s activity. It governs our lives and behaviors in ways that are unknown to our best scientists. This contrasts with the ancient tribal men of knowledge, the wisemen, who thrived in consulting their subconscious in order to gain information to abate the suffering of their fellow tribesmen and to guide the smooth governance of their tribes through the long haul of tens of thousands of years.

Both conscious and unconscious naturally impact each other back and forth. And that’s how my painting gradually became like a meditation ritual where the subconscious takes over while the conscious mind simply observes how the creation evolves and limits its intervention to the technical aspects of the painting craft. This is how my canvasses gradually filled with unknown patterns. Today, after decades of thinking, my conscious mind interprets these unknown patterns as being subjective approximations of the patterns that life traced along its tortuous billion year old path. In other words these patterns are like illustrations of the organic nature of the visions of life as they are stored in my subconscious mind and interpreted in light of my past experiential life.


That’s why I characterize my work as organic art. The final product is a subjective illustration of the organic nature of the patterns of life. And the process to reach such a final product has necessarily to be an organic process in itself otherwise the final product would miss its own organic nature.

As I often have mentioned in earlier articles Western art has been languishing over the last decades in something akin to a comatose state that left the propagandists and the merchants in firm control about what the market deemed to be artworks. And the whole range of participants in the art market, also called the artworld, went along in their role as art specialists confirming the high quality artistic nature of whatever works that were being pushed by the propagandists and the merchants. It was as if they had been drugged out of conscience and had ended up brain dead. But the fact of the matter is that all participants in this mercantile artworld went along because they extracted a handsome financial profit from their collaboration. In the meantime the real artists, and all those who were interested in what had been continuously the nature of art since the emergence of tribal societies tens of thousands of years ago, were suddenly relegated on the margins of society fulminating against what they perceived as the drive of Western art and culture into a state of nothingness.


This debasement of the historical and societal nature of artworks had multiple consequences:

1. since a little less than a century ago the public at large started to reject art. A recent British poll confirms that this is still the case today and Jonathan Jones commented 4 that “ this shows that ‘high art’ alienates the public more than any other cultural form ". In other words the public rejects the recent debasement, of the historical and societal function that art has been playing over the last tens of thousands of years, at the hands of propagandists and merchants. Does this mean that art is dead as some have claimed ? I don’t think so. It has merely been put to sleep waiting for the right societal conditions to thrive again.
2. the real artists, and all those who have an interest in the tens of thousands of years old nature of art, are seriously pissed off by the present state of affairs but their thoughts and words are blocked from the mainstream media. As a result their voices are being marginalized and contained within the very small audiences of the 3B's: bedrooms, bars and blogs.
3. within the financial bubble of the artworld all is well. Money is flowing…
4. the debasement of the traditional nature of art resulted in the loss by Western societies of what had been for tens of thousands of years a powerful instrument to help strengthen societal cohesion. No surprise then that these societies are ending up being in deep trouble. Societal cohesion is indeed an indispensable and prime ingredient to ensure the reproduction of societies over the generations. And so we discover that the vanishing function of art is participating, among other factors, in fostering the fall of Western societies that we observe today...

These conclusions opened my conscious mind to the real possibility of a near to mid-term Western societal collapse that could greatly accelerate the course of the present mass-extinction of living species which, by the way, also threatens our own. Confronted with such extremely radical possibilities many of our troubles appear rather trivial and this is how the principle of life suddenly appeared so awesome in my eyes that it eclipsed everything else. The unknown patterns that appeared on my canvasses started to make sense. Life is a rare gift in the universe but our power societies, and more particularly the quasi-worldview of Modernity, lost touch with this evidence. Now that we start to grasp the fact that this gift could be taken away we come to appreciate that it is the most precious thing we ever had.


But how did we arrive at such an impasse ? To answer this question we have to address the following matters:

1. what has been the nature and function of art over the last tens of thousands of years ?
2. how did a very backwards Western Europe possibly initiate such a successful worldview as Modernity that the rest of the world felt compelled to adopt in the 20th century in order to survive ?
3. how did Western art lose its traditional nature and function to end up in nothingness ? And how does this impact non-Western societies ?
4. if art is merely asleep, waiting for the right societal conditions to awaken, what are the prospects for its awakening ?

These will be the subjects of my next 4 articles.
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Notes

1  Art: about the history of a word.
-    " Lecture # 6 – The Changing Role of the Artist in Society " by Professor Kaoime E. Malloy. University of Wisconsin Green Bay.
-  “ The Death of the Artist “ By William Deresiewicz in The Atlantic Culture. January/February 2015 Issue.

2  “ Speaking Out. I'm glad the CIA is 'immoral' “ by Thomas W. Braden who was the first chief of the CIA's “International Organizations Division” (IOD). In his eighties he divulged what had been the purpose of the IOD. The Saturday Evening Post, 20 May 1967.
See also:
-  “ Modern art was CIA 'weapon' ”. By Frances Stonor Saunders . In The Independent.1995-10-22.
-  “ Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War ” by Eva Cockcroft, in “Artforum” 1974. This article should have caused a reassessment about “The New York Art School”. But by then the art market, and the inertial weight of its investment, worked to obviate that possibility.
-  “ How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art ”. By Serge Guilbaut.

3  From Modernity to After-Modernity. Book 3. Divination

4  “ Banksy is the Brits’ favorite painter of all times “ by Jonathan Jones in the Guardian. 2019-07-15.