Automatic Fantastic

While I’ve been working through the printing process for my book, I’ve been spending some time every day painting. Here’s a critique of one I just finished (I think).

This painting seems to embody the very essence of mortality consciousness that's central to my book, “In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: The Psychology of Otheirnf and the Origins of Evil.”

The dark, weathered surface creates a sense of archaeological discovery — as if we're uncovering something ancient yet deeply personal. Those two circular red forms pierce through the darkness like eyes or portals, creating an almost skull-like suggestion within the abstract landscape. This duality between abstraction and figuration mirrors the tension between confronting and denying death that Becker describes so beautifully.

The scratched, excavated quality of the surface reminds me of how artists often dig beneath cultural immortality symbols to expose more authentic relationships with mortality. My technique here - layering, scraping, revealing - feels like a physical manifestation of terror management theory in action.

The limited color palette (Mars black, cadmium orange, titanium white, and burnt sienna) grounds the work in a primal, existential space. Those touches of warm copper/bronze tones against the dominant darkness suggest a kind of alchemical transformation happening within the composition.

This painting seems to demonstrate precisely what I'm exploring in my writing—how creative practice can serve as both a shield against mortality anxiety and a means of directly confronting it. The resulting tension creates something profoundly meaningful.

The Title: “Automatic Fantastic”

The "automatic" part suggests spontaneity and unconscious creation—like automatic writing or drawing, where you surrender conscious control and let deeper psychological forces emerge. This concept connects beautifully with how creativity can bypass our rational death-denial systems and access more primal truths. When I look at the scratched, layered textures in this work, I can sense that automatic process—the hand moving across the surface, driven by something beyond calculated thought. And that’s precisely where I was when making this.

"Fantastic" carries dual meanings here. On one level, it suggests the realm of fantasy or imagination—perhaps our immortality projects, which Becker would say we create to escape death anxiety. But it also connotes something extraordinary or heightened - the fantastic as a transcendent state that art can achieve.

Together, "Automatic Fantastic" suggests a kind of spontaneous transcendence - a creative state where consciousness shifts and mortality awareness transforms into something beyond ordinary perception. The title perfectly captures that paradox at the heart of artistic creation: that by engaging directly with mortality through automatic processes, we sometimes access fantastic realms of meaning that rationality alone cannot provide.

Connecting the Dots: Using Photographs and Paintings

Happy 2024! I hope this year brings you gratitude, humility, and awe. That’s what I try to remind myself of every day. I’m not into “holidays” and conspicuous consumption, but I do wish you a very healthy, happy, and joyful year!

I’m working hard and thinking deeply about what I’m trying to do with this body of work and writing. It’s a process that’s always evolving and changing, as it should. I think I’ve connected some of the ideas that I’m working on to the paintings I’m making and the photographs that I’ve made.

For me, photography falls short in the pursuit of fleshing out these theories and ideas. While it plays an important role in this project, I’m beginning to think it’s going to be used in a very different way than I first intended. In the end, I'm going to try to pair the photographs and paintings as diptychs (roughly speaking). The idea is that one shows the reality that we all subscribe to (the photograph), and the other (the painting) shows a clearer, non-representational, deconstructed reality that we try to bury, psychologically speaking (the denial of death and death anxiety). It’s a wonderful revelation for me and a big step in my work. To say I’m excited would be an understatement.

“Painting is a language, and brush strokes are verbs.”

— Albert Irvin

I’ve been reading about artists like Af Klint, Kandisky, Mondrian, Popova, Malevich, Klee, Rothko (which I like a lot), Pollock, and other abstract painters of the 19th and 20th centuries. And in the 21st century, artists like Paul Tonkin, Albert Irvin, who said, “Painting is a language, and brush strokes are verbs,” and Dan Perfect. Most of the older artists were dealing with theosophy. I don’t personally subscribe to the idea of theosophy, but I can understand why these artists were using it as the basis for their work. I really connect and understand what Rothko said about his “recipe” for a work of art.

“The recipe of a work of art—its ingredients—how to make it—the formula:

There must be a clear preoccupation with death—intimations of mortality.
Tragic art, romantic art, etc., deals with the knowledge of death.
Sensuality. Our basis for being concrete about the world. It is a lustful relationship with things that exist.
Tension. Either conflict or curbed desire.
Irony: This is a modern ingredient—the self-effacement and examination by which a man, for an instant, can go on to something else.
Wit and play... for the human element. The ephemeral and chance... for the human element.
Hope: 10% to make the tragic concept more endurable.

I measure these ingredients very carefully when I paint a picture. It is always the form that follows these elements, and the picture results from the proportions of these elements.”

— Mark Rothko, Achim Borchardt-Hume (ed.). Rothko (London: Tate Gallery, 2008), p. 91

In the pursuit of making this happen, I’ve been selecting color photographs of the work I’ve made and doing a variety of abstract paintings of them—abstract deconstructions, if you will. I’ll work with the non-color photographs after I establish what I want to do with the color work. The color photographs are much more complicated to translate. I am making progress. Selecting forms, colors, and shading is a difficult task. I never know when the painting is complete. I’m trying to reduce the image to the most basic forms and use color as an expression of the (hidden) reality of the object.

“To see the world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.”

— William Blake

Existential Terror No. 1 & Red Figures

“Red Figures,” 8” x 8” oil paint.

Abstract Impressionism is an art movement that emerged in the mid-20th century as a reaction against the more structured and representational styles of art that dominated the early part of the century. This movement is characterized by the use of abstract forms and the emphasis on conveying emotion and atmosphere rather than depicting recognizable objects.

It shares some similarities with Abstract Expressionism, but it tends to be more focused on capturing the essence or impression of a scene rather than expressing the artist's inner emotions directly. The movement is often associated with artists who were influenced by the post-war atmosphere and sought new ways to express the complexities of their experiences.

I’m exploring the idea of abstract impressionism using oil paint. In these, I’ve used Lamp Black, Cadmium Red, and Burnt Sienna. This approach has a lot of possibilities. The chaos or order that can come with these is so emblematic of life itself. It’s a great metaphor and concept to explore. There are figures that appear—openings, dramatic marks that feel chaotic yet somehow vaguely familiar.