Join Quinn on Saturday, August 3, 2024, for an hour and explore the relationship between creative and non-creative people and how they cope with mortality. Quinn will cover some of Ernest Becker's thoughts on Otto Rank's breakdown of how artists manage their anxiety about death.
Stream Yard: https://streamyard.com/rdy5fe8ipy
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/FPPpLUQFz7U?si=uJZIftVEZFMVHzHs
Join me on Saturday, July 20, 2024, at 1000 MST for part two of an ongoing examination of the role that mortality plays in creativity.
Stream Yard (live feed): https://streamyard.com/hdccnpxqmj
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/WuIqkBuuggA?si=je73XTzh5ipZN0Kc
This week, Quinn will continue the series on The Creative Mind and Mortality, Part 2." This will address artist's unique perspectives on why they create art and the struggles they face in light of existential dread or mortality. What does it mean to have a "creative practice"? How does creating art help with the fear of death? Do creative people process existential terror differently? If so, how? Ernest Becker's "The Denial of Death" and Otto Rank's book "Art and Artist."
I’m back! Join me July 13, 2024, at 1000 MST! Links below!
The Stream Yard link will allow you to join the room on the live show. The YouTube link will allow you to view and send messages on the chat board. You can go to the YouTube link now and click on the bell, which will send you a reminder.
Stream Yard: https://streamyard.com/t5r53p8qtw
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/OPfZS-a50Jw?si=UPm9YE-P4fRR7fDu
If you have any questions, feel free to drop me an email!
“In the City of Crosses” - April 27, 2024
It’s our “one month” anniversary today. We’ve been in New Mexico for 30 days, and man, time has whizzed by!!
Between unpacking boxes and running household errands, I’ve been slowly getting back on track to work on my book. I get excited about the thought of actually completing this work. It’s no longer a hope or dream; it’s close to becoming a reality.
“Man literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, and personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness—agreed madness, shared madness, disguised and dignified madness, but madness all the same.”
These theories seem simple on the surface, but it takes some deep thinking and evaluation to really understand them and, moreover, to apply them to your life. My hope is that by sharing these ideas and concepts in a book, it will inspire people (especially artists) to engage with these theories and start to share them through their art.
I wrote a while ago about someone asking me if there was a movement in art around “death anxiety.” In other words, Becker’s and Solomon's (et al.) theories could form an entire art movement based on the theories dealing with death anxiety and terror management. This is what happened in existential psychology. There are people working on PhDs in terror management theory and have been for years; why not art? Not unlike impressionism, cubism, dada, etc.
In a lot of ways, all art does address these ideas, but rarely intentionally or consciously. It’s food for thought and a wonderful way to get people to engage with these ideas.
Importance of Creativity
"Both the artist and the neurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an external, active, work project. The neurotic can’t marshal this creative response embodied in a specific work, and so he chokes on his introversions.
The only way to work on perfection is in the form of an objective work that is fully under your control and is perfectible in some real ways. Either you eat up yourself and others around you, trying for perfection; or you objectify that imperfection in a work, on which you then unleash your creative powers. In this sense, some kind of objective creativity is the only answer man has to the problem of life.
The creative person becomes, in art, literature, and religion, the mediator of natural terror and the indicator of a new way to triumph over it. He reveals the darkness and the dread of the human condition and fabricates a new symbolic transcendence over it. This has been the function of the creative deviant from the shamans through Shakespeare.
Otto Rank asked why the artist so often avoids clinical neurosis when he is so much a candidate for it because of his vivid imagination, his openness to the finest and broadest aspects of experience, and his isolation from the cultural world-view that satisfies everyone else. The answer is that he takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art. The neurotic is precisely the one who cannot create." Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
We’ve been here just over a week now. So far, we love it. I mean, everything fits and feels good, and we are excited about the future here.
There’s still a lot of work to do, including unpacking, organizing, figuring things out, etc. It’s a process, not an event. We’re on no one’s clock except our own. It’s a wonderful feeling to have a beautiful climate, time to do whatever you want to do, and easy access to most anything you’d need or want. I want to remember how grateful I am for this; I don’t ever want to become desensitized to it. I really appreciate it beyond words.
Jeanne and I trekked out onto some trails behind our house today. We did almost 3 miles and really enjoyed it. There are trails everywhere around here to walk or bicycle on; someone told Jeanne today that there’s one about 2 miles from us that goes south all the way to El Paso, Texas. Wild!
I found myself inspired today by the color and shapes in the desert. I want to paint some of these ideas and start making paint sketches again. And I’m looking forward to getting my darkroom setup again and making some photographs.
Once I’m organized, I’ll begin working on my book again. I really feel like I might be able to finish it this year. That’s my goal. I think with the better environment here, I’ll have more time to devote to it and really make it what I know it can be. About 90% of the writing is complete; it just needs to be edited. And the photography is complete, unless I end up adding anything here. That could happen; I’m not really sure at this point. And I have several paintings that I may include. So, it’s just a matter of carving out time and making it happen. And it will!
“Big Changes,” 3.75” x 5” acrylic, charcoal, newsprint (mixed media).
This is a book by Dr. James Rowe that I would recommend reading if you want to understand what I’m trying to address through my artwork and my life in general (my interests). He is addressing Ernest Becker’s theories and terror management directly. I’ve never seen anyone write about the results of death anxiety applied to politics and modern and historical problems directly. My book will address these theories in detail, but I’ve made it personal. I’ve explained how the theories have driven me both creatively and psychologically.
Radical Mindfulness examines the root causes of injustice, asking why inequalities along the lines of race, class, gender, and species continue to exist. Specifically, Dr. James K. Rowe examines fear of death as a root cause of systemic inequalities and proposes a more embodied approach to social change as a solution.
Collecting insights from powerful thinkers across multiple traditions—including black radicals, Indigenous resurgence theorists, terror management theorists, and Buddhist feminists—Rowe argues for the political importance of seemingly apolitical practices such as meditation and ritual. These tactics are insufficient on their own, but when included in social movements fighting structural injustices, mind-body practices can start to transform the embodied fears that give supremacist ideologies endless fuel while remaining unaffected by most political actors.
Radical Mindfulness is for academics, activists, and individuals who want to overcome supremacy of all kinds but are struggling to understand and develop methods for attacking it at its roots.
“Is It the Beginning or the End?,” 5” x 3.75” acrylic, oil and charcoal on paper.
Roger Ebert (June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013) was an American film critic, film historian, journalist, essayist, screenwriter, and author. He was a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. I used to watch and read his reviews of movies. Generally speaking, I agreed most of the time with his critiques. Sometime ago, I heard that Roger Ebert’s wife, Chaz, talked about Roger’s last words. He died of cancer in 2013.
“Life is but a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Clem Snide released an album called "Forever Just Beyond." The lead track on the album, “Roger Ebert,” is especially arresting. The late film critic's wife, Chaz, recalled Roger Ebert's final words in a letter to her, which served as the basis for the lyrics. As the song puts it:
Did you know these were Roger Ebert’s dying words?
It’s all an elaborate hoax
It’s all an elaborate hoax
There is a vastness that can’t be contained
Or described as a thought in the flesh of our brain
It’s everything, everywhere, future and past
Dissolving forever in an eternal flash.
It’s all an elaborate hoax
It’s all an elaborate hoax
Chaz Ebert wrote, "The one thing people might be surprised about—Roger said that he didn’t know if he could believe in God. He had his doubts. But toward the end, something really interesting happened. That week before Roger passed away, I would see him, and he would talk about having visited this other place. I thought he was hallucinating. I thought they were giving him too much medication. But the day before he passed away, he wrote me a note: “This is all an elaborate hoax.” I asked him, “What’s a hoax?” And he was talking about this world and this place. He said it was all an illusion. I thought he was just confused. But he was not confused. He wasn’t visiting heaven, not the way we think of heaven. He described it as a vastness that you can’t even imagine. It was a place where the past, present, and future were happening all at once."
“Circles, Squares, and Triangles,” 3.75” x 5” acrylic and charcoal on paper.
“Existential Distress No. 3,” 3.75” x 5” acrylic and charcoal on paper.
“If you kill a cockroach, you are a hero, if you kill a butterfly, you are bad. Morality has aesthetic standards.”
Isn’t it strange that we all have to deal with our ending? Some try to never think about it and will do almost anything to avoid thinking about it. Others incorporate it into their personal belief system or religious beliefs (Buddhists, for example). While I’m not "religious,” I’ve made an effort to think about my mortality every day.
For me, art drives that type of meditation or thinking. I do a lot of it on my daily walks, too. Knowing that I’m going to die and that I have limited time here brings me closer to the things and people that I love and care about. It comforts me and reassures me of my humanity. It provides a type of gratitude, awe, and humbleness. And it puts my perspective in balance—my cosmic insignificance is in full view.
The reason I do it is simple: it reminds me to take every day as a gift. It makes the sweet sweeter and the bitter not so bad. It’s not morbid or neurotic; it’s valuable and important for me; it’s a very positive thing, nothing negative at all. C. S. Lewis said, “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort, you will not get either comfort or truth, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.” That resonates with me. I’m a truth-seeker. I try to keep my worldview based on reality, and I try to avoid fantasies and fiction.
When was the last time you thought about not being here? What did you feel? Did it make you uneasy? Create anxiety? If it did, do you know why?
Existential Distress No. 1," 5" x 3.75" acrylic and oil (mixed media) on paper.
“The neurotic opts out of life because he is having trouble maintaining his illusions about it, which proves nothing less than that life is possible only with illusions.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
Existential Distress No. 2," 5" x 3.75" acrylic, charcoal, and oil (mixed media) on paper.
“Death (The Smell of Death Surrounds You),” 3.75” x 5” acrylic, charcoal, and newsprint (mixed media) on paper. This is a memorial painting for my father and brother (Stanton Sr. and Stanton Jr.), who both died in 2023 (August/September). I’m sending it to a childhood friend in California who knew both of them well. I hope he likes it.
I’ve had some interesting discussions lately about my departure from making photographs. I suppose it was a bit surprising for the people who don’t know me very well to see me posting paintings and not photographic prints. I’d say for the ones that know me better, it's not so surprising.
How and why did I move in this direction? I have to start out by saying this wasn’t an accident, not in the traditional sense anyway. I’ve been (slowly) moving in this direction for at least two years, even longer if I step back farther. Also, when winter hits here in the mountains, my darkroom and studio are shut down (off-the-grid). I decided to paint and write this winter, and that’s what I’ve been doing.
After decades in photography, I needed to explore something more personal and expressive. I would even say painting is more liberating in a lot of ways than photography. I love photography; I will always make photographs, but this project, as well as my need for deeper, more personal creativity, needed something different and something beyond photography (realism or straight representational work).
What is abstract art? I define it as something in the real world that is reduced to it’s minimal parts. Usually bright or non-traditional colors and even distorted shapes. I’ve talked about non-objective or non-representational abstract work before; this is the same idea only using shapes, lines, and colors that are not representational of anything in the real world. I’m interested in both. The interesting rock formations I live near or even the cracks in the dirt paths and roads I travel on—all things that exist in the real world—can inspire me at times. And other times, I’m more interested in non-objective or non-representational work. I call it “psychological abstracts.” Paintings that come from the unconscious or subconscious mind. The unconscious and subconscious are two different phenomena. The unconscious is a process that happens automatically and is not available for introspection. The subconscious is part of our consciousness process that is not actively in focal awareness. These areas are where Becker focused his attention and his theories about existential terror. I’m a bit preoccupied with these ideas and like to see how painting reveals them. Something photography can’t really do.
My latest project, “In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: The Psychology of Othering and the Origins of Evil,” led me to break out the paint and brushes. It was not only the physical attributes but, moreover, the psychological impact of making paintings about our subconscious in relation to existential dread or terror. That’s probably the biggest reason for the direction I’m working in now. I find it both fascinating and powerful to create art from a place that most of us rarely think about. I like to experience a painting reveal itself to me with every brush stroke, mark, or application of paint. It is very empowering and satisfying for me.
After almost 40 years of making photographs and working in all of the mediums, variants, and formats, I simply wanted to explore something more personal. less mechanical and intimate. Painting answered that desire in a profound way. I can say with some certainty that painting will always be involved in my creative process. I really like the combination of the representational idea of photography and abstract painting.