She is such a magical painter: To think that I met her when I was at the Slade and discussed art with her and mostly on the application of paint on the canvas. She did say that before she starts a painting, she mixes all the colours and their shades and lines them up, hence she does not have to worry about the colour of the paint when painting. Then only the process is in the mind and not interrupted by mixing the right colour.

Then there is Jackson Pollock, drip drip drip and yet he said I am very conscious about where the next mark on the canvas is going to go. Spontaneous yet conscious.

I so if you ask yourself what is “new” and that is all you are interested in and not interested in themes or this and that. So what do you think is considered “new”?

You do something and think it is new — then you see something and it has been done in the past — hence new only to you and NOT universally new. Universally new is when it is new to everybody.

So has everything already been done in art? They is nothing new to discover. If I wanted to make something that has already been done then I would be a carpenter and not an artist or painter.

The totally new moment had come in 1913 with Kandinsky:

This is the first time that painting had crossed from realism to abstraction.

Then what is Kandinsky’s painting about?

Pure abstraction is Mondrian, and yet he too came from a drawing and painting of a tree — finally nature and its natural forces, Mondrians paintings seems to capture the beauty of nature.

From here,

to here:

But what about Kandinsky — where is he coming from. Did he find his “new” form in art himself — how did he inventent this form and is there a narrative behind the form — if not then how does one decide what goes next to the other. Kandinsky was a closet Theosophist and not a member of the Theosophical society but Mondrian was a member.

I found this form in a book called “thought forms” written by Annie Besant and C.W Leadbeater.

I mean seriously, for comparison.

But then what do the shapes mean in the painting? If they did mean nothing will it be a problem with your mind. Will you think less of Kandinsky? Is it not enough that the painting form is “new” and it looks beautiful. It is tedious to create — I did see a retrospective of his work at the Tate in London and was so lucky to do so — but I must say that he had one room of exceptionally beautiful paintings and they were separated from the rest in another room — looking at these I just realised how difficult it must have been for Kandinsky to create a form that had to work itself many times over construction and deconstruction to get it right. Then I read what Kandinsky did to justify the mark-making for himself, I guess in his mind is to know what he is doing, so there is not that abstract struggle of nothingness you have to deal with and why and what you are doing — what Kandinsky was doing was abstracting Finnish folklore and painting the narrative. That is the problem in the mind that there must be a reason why you do it to feel good about it. Another thing about the mind is that all it knows is its memory and you tend to go back there for information- so it is always about what you know and hence where is the “new” in it? The most it will be is a new pattern of the past in you and what you already know and memory. Something totally universally new is independent of the past in you. Even a mistake made has a better chance of find the “new” in art as a mistake is not of the thinking mind but spontaneous and instantaneous and the thinking mind has no chance to get to it and add memory to it. So for Pollock it was probably a drip of paint on the floor and then Ah-ha, wonder what I could do with that. Spontaneity, chance and mistakes made have the future in it and yet people ignore them because there is nothing in their memory to recognise the “new” in them to compare it to. As long as we think that way — wanting to justify what is done on a canvas from the past in you, the new will always be the things that just went past you and unrecognised and lost forever.

Has the repository of the universe have the future in it that we can tap into for the new in art? If yes, then how do we get to it:

Thomas Edison on his light bulb:

If you are a carpenter, you know somebody will buy the chair you made because they need it to sit on, but an artist they will buy and keep it in storage, and if you did not make it the frame of the painting will have more value than what is on it. So at the end of the day what has painting done for you — the process of making art is a reflection of what is your brain and mind, the process of thought, and its limitations. The road map of the thinking brain-mind came from the process of making art and understanding the process of thought by doing, and trying to find the “new” in art:

The new exists in the repository of the universe but how does the thinking mind get there:

What are the similarities between the quantum computer and the brain-mind thinking.

In spontaneous activity, you never know what you get:

This doodle above was done in a handful of seconds, not enough for the brain-mind to think what one is doing, but still in my mind the intention was for it to be a figure. Always a reason for doing it.

Freedom, from the known in memory, is important, but True freedom is by accessing the repository of the Universe at the fuzzy end of perception with the extended brain-mind.