Primative
Advancing technology is a process of ciphering memories of what has worked and failed. It is important to note that many discoveries were made by mistake by the hands of amateur pathfinders. People who have the basic understanding and training but who have not solidified themselves to the title of being a master.
From the cave paintings to today’s paintings hanging on gallery walls we have made great progress in painting. When the first paintings were still wet on the cave’s walls there had already been a history of artists fine tuning the craft that has long been erased. There had to have been a process of inspiration to aspiration that brought our ancestors into the caves to translate works with tools and skill. The history of technology and who had painted these works are long forgotten. What we have is forgotten memories embedded in line, color, and pattern. It is like that faded dream that you can only recall a feeling of without remembering the plot. You may be able to reflect on some vague image but the meaning is out of reach, all that remains as a phantom feeling. You don’t know if it is a sad or happy feeling. It is sort of melancholy and yet has no label or name.
Today we have records of what, who, and when. Our painting tools and visual concepts are more diverse and complex. Color theories, to paint, or galleries are all complex and abundant. Nothing wrong or degrading about cave artwork, we just are different and more complex now. Now we have science and rules, schools and teachers. Still, painting is primal and arrives from our primitive core. From our inner caves that have no reason or home for science. You can use science and math to send a rocket into space and a heart surgeon can rely on a medical recipe to save a patient's life, likewise an artist can work with formulas of color and compositions to get a painting working. Yet, there are those artists who can reach deeper from their primitive being and carry out works that are unbounded, mathematically free, and beautifully engaging.
Painting is not an actual science that can be calculated with a mathematical formula, nor does it lack a skeleton of structural support. It exists as a bridge that connects the intangible dream to the collected mind. As an artist I am spiritually engaged by the visual discipline of how shapes work to support the whole design. This is a logical and disciplined part of me. I have studied, trained, and beaten my mind with as much knowledge as it can hold, and then tossed even more in for the heck of it. This part has no place for personal opinion, it is just give me the facts people and we can move on. I do like this part of me, love it, and while that is true I am at my best I paint while feeling that discipline as a faded dream. This is the primitive place where body and mind become one or even better nothing at all; a place where true painting happens. t is primitive and it is agile in discipline, so when it arrives on canvas it does so in an unforeseen way and it works. A method based on what you know and applying it intuitively; a calculated risk. It is not a place that you would want your surgeon or engineer to be. They take no risks for mistakes and that is their job, an artists' job is to be primitive and make calculated accidents happen.
