Using Dreams as a Filter

Using dreams as a filter for painting may sound surrealistic, but from certain aspects, it can be defined in a really realistic way, as if it's a moment of everyday life. I do not see myself painting a surrealistic moment, as i'm only defining the moment in my subjective 'virus of concepts', which is extremely realistic in my case. Apparently, this way of filtering a moment, or anything might cause a slight schizophrenia in perception, but the aim here is to make it possible for viewers to experience the very act of dreaming, bringing vision into envisioning.

A distorted perception and filtration of some particular terms is different in such ways;

filtration as definition is the act or process of removing something unwanted from a liquid, gas etc. by using a filter. I believe that this definition of filtration can be used as an act of control over dreams, emotions and distortions when painting. For me, painting is the act of using these elements as a filter, it's a painterly way of lucid dreaming. It's the separation of unwanted or unnecessary elements to be able to represent a 'better' version of the particular moment. As Odilon Redon has said in his autobiography, 'To Myself': 'There's a certain style of drawing that the imagination has liberated from the embarrassing concern of real details in order that it might freely serve only as the representation of conceived things.' 

Distorted Perception/Representation of a Moment

This topic led me to several definitions of 'distorted perception' when doing soft-search. Before writing about it's representation in a moment, it's best to understand what really a distorted perception is. A distorted perception is an abnormality in sensory or psychological perception. This can be the result of psychological disorders, damage to the brain or nervous systems, medications or other potential interruptions to the cognitive processes involved in perception. But i think we can all agree that one doesn't need to have a psychological or any other disorder to have a distorted perception.

Perception is pure in its original state. It can become distorted by what Bhante Gunaratana calls ' the virus of concepts '. Bhante points out that despite the initial purity of perception, ' concepts, ideas, opinions, beliefs, and many other categories of conditioning have influenced our perception. In essence, our perception has become distorted.

The representation of distorted perception in a still moment has a lot do with subjectivity of course and it may come out in such details that we only see when we're dreaming. Distortion in dreams is a whole other topic but it has it's influence on me when painting. Or, in other words, i believe that a distorted perception might transform into a distorted dream (in a painting), but only in details. When representing a still moment or an arrested motion with several distortions, i aim to effect the viewer's perception of the painting and create an illusion. I almost aim to create an effect of a lucid dream. Which, in my case is the awareness and control towards what's going on in the painting. When i'm painting, i have the ability to control the distortion of my perception, unlike in real life. That makes me gain control and helps me create a subjective area to reflect on. And when painting, just like in dreams, there may be repetitions of details and circling back on's.

It is a topic full of contradictions, but contradiction is the essence of it.

Arresting the Moment

As i'm still making researches about these topics, i've noticed that my continuing paintings do not completely relate with the term stillness, in the way i wrote at the previous posts. I get inspired from still moments, but i'm more into the distortion of perception and creating my own reflections on the painting, more than letting the viewer to have chance to reflect. I like the idea of holding on to that particular moment in the painting and arrest it in my own terms. There is still an essence of stillness but it's just a base of what is coming next.

One of the things that inspired me the most during this research was the movie '3 women' by Robert Altman. The movie has a dreamy atmosphere which is filled with a disturbing stillness and illogical details that can only be perceived when seeing a dream. The movie is mainly about personalities merging with each other but i found all of these aspects really inspiring for my work. This means that i will have to add more terms into my research, like dreams and distortion. All of these terms has a lot to do with stillness, or arresting the moment in my case, in which stillness becomes a base for reflection of subconscious aspects. 

Arrested Motion

 ' The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artifical means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. '  William Folkner

Two areas that help create the illusion are stillness and arrested motion. Although they sound similiar, they are different in the way of arrested motion being a capture of motion in action that causes the viewer to feel a sense of motion about the image. Stillness, however, tends to be much less dynamic (paralysation of velocity) and more natural. Thus, our understanding of motion in painting, or, painterly motion simply consists of the human perception. The motion we see does not exist within our perception. The 'likelihood principle' is an explanation of how we interpret. The principle created by Gestalt psychologist Helmholtz implies a perceptual commonality at the heart of all perceptual interpretations: we perceive that which would in our normal life most likely have produced the effective stimulation we have received. What we see results from an internal comparison between immediate sense experience and prior knowledge. Our perceptual understanding of virtual motion derives from encounters with reality, it is real in perceptual terms. 

Painterly motion as a technical phenomenon requires some explanation. The painted image has possibilites that photography lacks. The photograph is static, It 'arrests' the subject imaged, presenting a single moment from all possible moments of the subject in motion. The motion, however, is absent. Taken as a whole, it is presented within the idea of motion. But for painterly motion, we interpret displacement and distortion in the painting as motion. Based on these explanations, we can say that an arrested motion transforms into a painterly motion when painting, it is interpreted in the artist's perceptual terms and it causes distortion, both to the viewer and the artist. This interpretation provides a natural sense of motion and stillness and eventually a new way of seeing. As definitions, arrested motion and stillness are a little different than each other but i believe that when painting, they may transform into one another. 

   

Stillness and Illusion

These two terms may seem a little unrelated but stillness itself contains illusion in it's own definiton after all. As i've mentioned before, stillness can be defined as not the absence of motion but a state of paralysation caused by velocity. Based on that definition, we can say that stillness does not exist and that it's actually a series of precise and powerful movements which creates the illusion of motionless. It's more or less a mind trick that effects our perception upon daily moments. But the thing is, our perception is effected by many other things as well, such as our memory and emotions. Our perception is our reality and it's a highly subjective one. As a conclusion, i believe i can say that we live in our minds and everything we perceive is an illusion.

 'Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.' - Douglas Adams

Perception is the organization, identification and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the environment and is shaped by learning, memory, expectation and attention. And, the simple definiton of illusion is 'not perceiving things as they really are'. So, i think i can say that illusion is a distorted form of perception where by one sees things not as they truly are. Perception itself is a illusory device, because we never perceive anything as it actually is. According to that definition, it's inevitable to say thay how we view reality will always be in distortion, such as with the effects of pyschological illusions that only exist to the perceiver.

Conclusively, to me, stillness, illusion and perception are all pieces of the same composition. And when we observe a painting, we perceive the reality of the artist in that work of art. But the way we perceive that particular perception in that artistic work is also open to distortion. That to me, creates an effect of illusion in an other illusion. The way we appreciate and get affected by it consists on our own visual perception. Following Hermann von Helmholtz, who described visual perceptions as unconscious inferences from sensory data and knowledge derived from the past, perceptions are regarded as psychological projections into external space and accepted as our most immediate reality.

Stillness II

After entering the term into search engines and doing a soft search, i found out that stillness can also come from speed itself, and not from the opposite. As a matter of fact, it can be thought up like a wheel, spinning so fast that it appears motionless. I believe that this description of stillness might seem more accurate considering our lives in the modern society. It can be interpreted both positively and negatively, such as either being alert enough to be able to observe the stillness in all that complexity of the modern life or being so numb to be even aware of anything that is still. And when saying alert, i mean to have a consciousness well enough to step outside of what's happening and take action somehow.

The term also led me to Spinoza's theory of Metaphysical Individuation in which he defines motion and rest as a ratio for the existence of an individual's body. He defines bodies and minds as modes, not as substances or subjects. Concretely, a mode is a complex relation of speed and slowness, in the body but also in the thought, and it is a capacity for affecting or being affected, pertaining to the body or to thought. So, if you define bodies and thoughts as capacities for affecting and being affected, many things change, such as the presentation of the moment.

Regarding to my paintings, i'm interested in being defined in that rapid-motionless dynamic and being open to affect or to be affected. But i'm also interested in taking control towards these affections through forms. By taking control in a moment of stillness, and by taking control i mean both observation and taking action, we let it evaluate from passivity to potentiality. A potential that is extremely individual and subjective, and resistant towards what's passive and poor.

Stillness

In this first post, i'll write about what i understand from the term 'stillness'. When i think about what stillness could actually mean, initially, inaction and placidity comes to my mind. It's almost like a scenery where time doesn't exist and lets us make either an objective or a subjective observation.   When we catch that placid moment, we make room for deep reflection. More than that, we get a chance to actually observe what our reflection on that moment is. It may sound peaceful, but i find it extremely chaotic, in a sense that one must have an enough level of madness to even reflect something and observe it in return.

I find paintings to be a natural container for contemplative space, They do not engage with time as a dimension of the work and they provide us with moments that lets us be in that painting's present. This is what i aim to do in my own paintings, i try to create that inert moment, or scenery let's say, to reflect my own state of mind. This is my way to take action in a still moment, with a subjective kind of observation, i recreate that once objective moment that i captured before. Basically, what i love doing is to violate stillness, with re-creating myself through forms and gain control through them.