In its purest form, about nothing, is at its full creative power. The courage to create with no reason for making it – hence you have the full scope of doing anything and not even in style or form would matter. There should be no thinking in it, and there is spontaneity and chance mark making and slip sliding of paint surface with mistakes done but saved as something good happening, with the marks that are created. This kind of art is at its purest – anything goes anytime, every which way, and nothing not allowed.
Then you put it up on the wall and call it something.
Perfectly OK as Art is free to create with no boundaries.
The problem starts with what is required of us in the art world – consistency and done with reason. This in itself would ground the creative process. In an instant the free artist is nailed to the ground in what he can and cannot do.
To be fair to anything goes art is that if you can make it your thing and explain it as a thing in itself it is about the freedom to make art – then it becomes yours and people will look out for your work as that guy who does what he want and is free to create – lets go and see what he has come up with – lets see how crazy he can get and it works or not. Even in Pollock there was something is this in him but he was still limited by his mark making, the drip onto the canvas and it was a laid drip on the canvas. Many say he painted himself into a corner – but the once who say it also have done the same but they stand behind the respectability of the object in the painting, behind the reason for making art work – the landscape, the figure. They get this feeling of belonging and of doing the right thing and in being safe in what they do – the more they make it real and photographic the more they are complimented and they live by those complements and hence stop innovating and moving forward.
There is also the general feeling of the minds of all of us who make art – if we do art without reason there is an uncomfortable feeling in us that we are not complying with our conditioned self and hence back track on the freedom to create.
So you can see that the possibilities in art is scaled up and down between motivated and non-motivated art. The mind in itself is limited in how it goes about making art. You will notice that in anything you want to do you WILL ALWAYS go back to what you already know or to your memory for information on how to move forward. You always go back to your past to move forward and hence the process moves at a snails pace – a lot from before and perhaps something new from here and there that you found and all that is changing is this “new” pattern with the same old information.
The Giant Leaps are not of the scope of our thinking brain-minds. But lets say some of us did make those Giant Leaps and found a way to create something totally NEW. Just hypothetically lets just say this was created – the mind will not recognise it for what it is because there is nothing in the past that it can compare with and to recognise it as something new and hence will be rejected by the masses. So everything is created from the known in you and only perhaps new patterns are created.
Take this first ever abstract painting that was created by Kandinsky in 1913, and accepted by the establishment as being the first abstract painting: Composition VII
Even here Kandinsky could not get away from his thinking brain-mind to create this painting. It has been said that he used the narrative of Finnish folklore to camouflage his mark-making and to create his form. He even describes his shuttling of colours with his brushes like it is his own until I find this image in a book he might have read as he was a closet Theosophist.
This image below is from a book called “Thought Forms” by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater.
What do ideas look like? This clairvoyant view of the shape, color, and atmospheric effect of mental energy includes black-and-white drawings and color plates to convey a graphic representation of the power of thought.
Prominent Theosophists Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater were pioneers in asserting that thoughts are, indeed, things. Originally released in 1901, Thought-Forms is a seminal work on what thoughts look like. It had an impact far beyond the circle of its primary readers and greatly influenced leading artists such as Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky.
Simple in style and clearly written, Thought-Forms is a classic of the Theosophical tradition that has as much to say in our own day as it did a century ago. It lucidly sets forth a way to conceive of the invisible realms within and around us, with implications both for how we view the world and how we act in it.
Discussion includes the meaning of color, thought forms built by music, and the nature of helpful thoughts. Based on the authors’ clairvoyant vision, its illustrations suggest the form thoughts take in relation, for instance, to anger, fear, intellect, sympathy, devotion, and a meditative state. Annie Besant herself describes the book’s purpose as being to serve as a striking moral lesson to every reader, making him realize the nature and power of his thoughts, acting as a stimulus to the noble and a curb to the base. With this belief and hope we send it on its way.
Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater – they don’t make people like this anymore and something of Jiddu Krishnamurti in it:
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Capturing shadows on canvas – a chance happening.