At times, it seems new ideas simply pop into my mind. This often happens when I’m beginning a new work. I start with a vague idea, and as I work, that vague idea becomes clearer or changes into something else altogether. It feels as if new images magically appear, rather than coming from me.
Lately, I’ve put UFOs into some of my paintings. I think they represent this mysterious process. It makes me wonder about how so many people see them these days. Is there a larger mystery trying to break through into our consciousness?
For years I’ve kept an illustrated dream journal. I’m in awe of the strange vignettes that seem real until I wake up. Scientists say dreams are amalgams of things we’ve experienced during the day. Psychologists say they may be unexplored areas of our psyches. But could they occasionally be something else? Some dreams have an otherworldly feeling. I rarely use a dream image directly in my finished work, however engaging with them and the questions that arise inform my art.
Like the Surrealists, I enjoy using automatism techniques to inspire ideas. They attempt to create something without conscious thought to engage the unconscious. Sunday night is family dinner at my house, and often we play a poetry game that I discovered in Poetry Crazy: Freeing Your Life With Words by Susan G. Wooldridge. Once I had a job that had a lot of down time, so I could browse through magazines and cut out intriguing words. I collected quite a few. When my family plays this game, each person draws eight words out of a box without looking. We arrange our words to create a poem, then read them aloud with interesting and often humorous results. Before bedtime, I sometimes create and illustrate a poem this way to give my dreaming self an entry to novel thinking.
Scribble drawings and spontaneous drawing are other automatism techniques I like. A Book of Surrealist Games by Alastair Brotchie contains techniques created by Surrealists. Playing these games is like stretching before running a marathon to get the creative juices flowing. Some Surrealists considered the product of these activities to be their art, while others used them as a starting point or inspiration for finished art. For me, they are a way to let the seeds of new ideas emerge. Some get planted and watered and grow into new work.
Sometimes images arise in a crack in the sidewalk, a stain on the floor, or the twisted loops of my bathmat like a waking dream. Where do they come from? Are they merely the soup of my everyday life, or a gift from another realm?
It’s a mystery worth exploring.
From dream journal sketches
