Accidental Animals : Intuitive Painting, Companions, and the Inner Voice.
Recently, I found myself trying intuitive painting for the first time since somewhere in my high school years. (Thank you, Tam LaPorte, Alena Henessy, Flora Bowley and Lifebook 2015, in general.) This was harder work than it might seem.
I think intuitive painting is always an exciting proposition because it places you into a relationship with your interior, it takes away your rationality and your intellect and it forces you and your inner world into a conversation. If you’ve never painted before, and you’re scared for that reason, you’re going to have to push through that. If you’ve painted so much that painting is familiar, it takes away the relevance of your acquired skill and leaves you with no advantages. In fact, all your muscle memory and your acquired habits, bad and good, are now a liability. It’s even harder to be intuitive when you have a body of knowledge to cling to, and you’re very susceptible to even more inner-critical interference.
My animal paintings are intuitive, though they do not have the “look” of intuitive work. Intuition plays a part in every stage of their raw starts, accrual, layering, finishing touches, and ultimate meaning. The marks move from the general to the specific, and can become quite controlled looking. However, none of these creatures make sense to me until I’m looking at them as they feel “finished.” Then, a strange thing happens. A couple of days later, I dissect the contents of these little paintings and an incredibly obvious meaning and message will cross the border into my conscious and rational mind from the murky seas of intuition. It’s a light bulb moment – a “duh” moment, actually. They are usually carrying a message that I desperately needed to hear, like Lassie coming over the ridge to pull me out of some emotional or problem-solving well.
“Heroes” and “Queen of the Night” were both made a couple of days before an elective surgery with a biopsy component. “Perennial Favorite” was made during a time of intensive stress. None of this was consciously chosen – conscious responses to these stressors would not be as cathartic or as interesting to me, nor as relevant in a mysterious way, to those looking.
When these paintings and drawings happen for me, they feel very dangerous, though they are also great fun. It’s a strange source of vulnerability – they are fundamentally harmless and enjoyable, and it’s just that which I traditionally won’t allow myself to trust. There is an incredible vulnerability for me in putting artwork out there which isn’t either refined enough to be respectable as a representational drawing or an abstract surface, or clever enough to ping the radar of visually sophisticated people, or somehow already barking and sitting up to please an audience that only exists in my fears.
It feels dangerous and indulgent to insist that my delight is somehow enough. That my self-soothing is somehow enough. That my bemused discoveries are somehow enough. But these things are enough. I realized I was adopting a “that’s OK for everyone in the world EXCEPT me” mentality. I’m not generally inclined to do that, so I wanted to change this.
I’m an outlier on a lot of life’s bell curves – it was time to claim some space in the middle.
Taking pleasure in cute things, CUTE things, is part of our mammalian biological heritage. Animals are also a safe vehicle. They open up the traumatized, they enact political and social satire that would get an author killed if it wasn’t hidden safely in a barn, they bypass our rational minds with such immediacy and skill that if there are such a thing as messengers between the unseen world and the mundane world, the animal is the form that gets my vote as most likely. Angels or not, I do know that the animal is the best messenger between the halves of my psyche that do not like to talk to one another. They are the best carriers for the feelings of this circumspect and cynical thinker.
If anything is going to break through that first layer of paint, Rorschach, and collage, it’s generally going to do it on four little feet.