Self Expression- Peculiar and Unexpected Ways

As a child I place a pencil on the paper and make a mark. No judgment, no preconceived idea, no plan. Is it simple play or something more primordial?

Joseph Campbell said that the folk are led by artists. The people consequently respond to what the artists makes but the artists lead. The mark leads.  As an artist you come to the realization that you either lead with your mark or you are just following the person in front of you. That realization can be either inspirational or painful. Maybe both at times.  What is self expression?  Does the power of art reside in self expression or in the expression of the material itself, regardless of who the self  is?  

We are not  born with material knowledge . We explore that freely as children.  The desire to make something  be ‘special’, the scholar Ellen Dissanayake says, is the reason the world makes art. We intuitively know it is special until we are sadly taught otherwise.  When and how did the statement ‘Art is a talent you are born with’  become an excuse for believing you don’t have talent? 

One does not  have to master  materials before you can create something beautiful. In this sense art has always been about what happens in the process of making. What you have to try to master is the ability to see what is beautifully happening during  the process. This may be what children have and adults lose as they mature. We are taught not to trust ourselves. We judge and are critical of what should be natural.  As a elementary school child I was taught to draw a Thanksgiving turkey by tracing my hand on the paper, the teacher showing me how it was best done.  No wonder I’m such a mess.

Instead of using materials to express our self  we should think in terms of  our self expressing the materials. The difference is subtle and changes the way I think about art. Art is not art therapy.  Art in itself  is therapeutic but not in the sense of a treatment.  In T.S.Eliot’s essay  ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ published in 1920,  he contends that the best art is art made when the self gets out of  its own way.  “The process of an artists is continual self sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality”.   This seems to be quite a different explanation of the creative process than what I was taught.  Eliot writes, “The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the man who creates; the more perfectly the mind will digest and transmute the passions which are his material.”   Hans Hoffman said that the artists technical problem is “how to transform the material…back into the sphere of the spirit.”  The self transmutes but the material transforms.

Stories abound of painters, writers, and dancers who after  years of practice and struggle break through to something new and exciting.  Their relationship with their medium has gone through the transformation that Hoffman speaks of.  This, as Eliot explains,  has more to do with the expression of the artists use of materials than the expression of the self.  “The poet(artist) has, not a  ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium, which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impression and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.”   Unfortunately having a great personality does not guarantee that you will make great art.

Eliot’s  “experiences” combined in “peculiar and unexpected ways”   helps me explain in simple terms the act of  painting.  Painters explore new combinations, treatments of paint, brush work and compositions in “peculiar and unexpected ways” that they may not always understand. You are led to something new and exciting by not knowing where you are going. We enter the unknown, where things get both frightening and exciting.  This is counterintuitive to what I was taught as a child.  I was shown it was important to plan, organize, test, reassess, and have a back up plan.  I do some of that also when I make a painting but I  want to be willing… no I want to be brave enough, to chuck all of it and fly blind.  It is only in this type of  foggy consciousness which hovers just above what is subconscious that poetry is formed.  Its our primordial soup.  Its the swampy bog of  possibilities which we crawl out of  to join those who have come before us.  Eliot believed that the poet is formed by the “peculiar and unexpected ways”  of  the generations that have come before. And when the modern poet or artist puts their mark down they effect  all of the history that came before them as they, in turn, were effected by all who proceeded them. It’s like adding your building block to a continuum of changing and growing consciousness. You are formed by what has come before you and you will form those who come after.  Its a big beautiful cosmic art plan. A big, world changing  plan that your -self and my -self can participate in.  And you get to make a turkey picture  anyway you want to.

 

 

 

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