While in an experimental mood, I came up with a style of painting that perfectly captured my sentiments of what it's like to LIVE, to be alive in this body, dragging around this recalcitrant, dumb, willful sack of flesh - while at the same time contending with a bright, fast, searching, unresting mind.
The result: choreographed chaos.
The technique is as follows:
1) find a preposterously uncomfortable painting technique - in my case, alternate lefthand and righthand strokes, with two paintbrushes per hand, each paintbrush holding a different colour
2) find a particular rhythm, and stick to it religiously. In my case, alternate red brush in right hand with blue brush in left with yellow brush in right hand with green/white brush in left. One, two, three, four, over and over again, with no distraction, editing or variance
3) play an album of music non-stop, hopefully of the same artist. My first experiment had me use Amy Winehouse. My uncomfortable left-right-left-right alternating occured to the beat of both of her albums.
4) Commit to making a cool, interesting, cohesive work of art, under those limitations.
I am the sort who finds debates re Fate and Free Will (the sort of thing most people don't really THINK about.. I mean.... honestly....) to be charming and quaint, due to the Machinaean view that we must advocate for the supremacy of one or the other.
Of course any notion of Fate as such pretty much defies all scientific ideas and concepts, especially as the whole discipline of Science has come down to us from the days of Occam at the height of the Plague, whereby he was able to establish the philosophical justification for the idea that "even if there IS an all knowing force that understands, defines, and unifies the meaning of everything*, the human mind will never be able to apprehend this. However, we CAN apprehend the small phenomena we can mediate and observe, and can apply rules, theories, etc to those things." This allowed for the development of a scientific methodology which advocated for the study of phenomena somewhat divorced from the obligation to capitulate to God, All-that-is, etc. It gave permission to the scientific mind to TINKER, and to view the possibility of phenomena acting of its own accord. It also raised the importance of pragmatic empirical reasoning, based on observable phenomena, theory, praxis, etc etc - and none of this intellectual heritage allows any of us to seriously take something such as 'fate' seriously. (damn, I really need to rework this)
In spite of that, I contend that we poor humans have far less FREE WILL than we would like. And i don't refer to any particular mystical, astrological or religious thinking in this regard - the simple fact is, we are already TRAPPED in a fated way to certain collective experiences that pretty much militate against the sort of unfettered freedom that the mind is capable of.
We all have to eat. We all have to sleep. We all have our highs, lows. We all are young. And then we age. We are all subject to the same sorts of social obligations, myths, urges, desires, and destinies - defined by our personal heritage, our social and economic status, and our place in history.
We all have particular character traits - for good and ill - that operate at a sub- neocortex level that we will drag with us to our graves - no matter how hard we try to slough some of them off. These character traits in parts, summed to the heritage we are born into, will, in a very alarming way, define our destiny. Hence, it starts to look a lot like FATE has the upper hand.
As such, I find it a more HONEST approach - if not entirely pictorially successful - to employ a technique which limits us in our physical expression of whatever beautiful image we are trying to bring to fruition. This seems more like life to me - more accurate than simply dashing off a pretty lady or a landscape or whatever it is that our mind imagines and which we have trained ourselves to do.
The peculiar inexorable rhythm of the technique itself is, to me, analogous to life within the body - the way that, no matter what, we are subject to its cycles - its eating, its sleeping, its joy and woe (always so predictably provoked), and its eventual decline. All we do in life must somehow be accomplished in the interstices of all those demands that flesh makes - the 25 aggregate years sleeping, the 10 or so years eating, the countless centuries spent cleaning, cooking, fixing things, getting into arguments, getting out of arguments, contemplating sin, tossing all life out the window thanks to some grateful or ingrate passion - the list is endless.
Yet with all this against us, our minds race ahead, light years ahead, and expect so much of us!
The requirement that the rhythm never stop is also analogous to the entire life experience as a series of heartbeats that, unceasing, takes us from one life phase to another, and helps - or hinders - us in the manifestation of whatever it was that - according to us - we incarnated on earth to create.
Once the music stops, life is over, and the painting is done.
No more. No touching it up. No cheating. No coming back for a last touch, a final edit, the last word. The music stops, the rhythm ceases, you're done. Whatever shows up on canvas reflects what you were able to do in life. Doesn't quite look like what you dreamt of or expected? Too bad. It's not so bad --- it has its own intelligence, its own grace. Be satisfied with that.
I plan to develop a series of these works, if circumstances prove convenient.
*crude paraphrasing
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