Dancing cells

A cabbage takes me by the hand and leads me back to art

Ecoline inks, 2011

In my previous pieces I’ve been gradually tracking my art pilgrimage, which began at the age of 16. I went to two art schools, worked abroad for many years, informally studied Chinese landscape painting, did a degree in Indian Art, and then somehow became an educational researcher immersed in complexity theory.

As I wrote about all of this I began to notice a thread running through my different experiences. My questions about art, my approach to the teaching that I did to pay my bills - everything has been held together by something that first made its appearance in a conversation with some lichen on a branch. Wandering the hills and valleys of Chinese landscape painting expanded this conversation, until the raw experience of living in a rhododendron forest in the foothills of the Himalayas brought it all together and I finally began drawing in the only way that mattered to me.

It seems that my whole life has been, and continues to be, some kind of mysterious conversation with the deepest forces of life; with the energies that move rivers down mountainsides and power the blood through my veins. Writing my last piece, about teaching and research, I realised that I’ve always been trying to connect more deeply to these raw energies (in that particular case, the way that the life energy of a group of adults surprised me every time I walked into a classroom). When I finally ended up with complexity theory as my means of talking about the unpredictability of educational processes, I had unconsciously arrived back at one of my earliest influences; images of the cellular basis of life, as seen in electron microscopy images taken by my father, a cell molecular biologist.

Amorphophallus titanum anther cross section, Dartmouth College website

It’s not surprising that years and years of trying to twist my non-scientific, non-mathematical brain around complexity theory (endlessly writing for publication) was an energy-intensive process that ultimately became unsustainable. My own cells began to register their protest at my long hours of teaching and research, and eventually I had to begin to withdraw.

As I slowly disentangled from endless working, strange things began to occur.

One day I picked up my old watercolour box, unused for over twenty years, and began to mess around with it. A few weeks later, as I wrote in my second piece:

… I unexpectedly tumbled back into the mystery. I had just cut a red cabbage in half. I stared at it. Eyeballing the wavy fractals of its purple and white folds, I fell in; into all that had been so vast, scary, and unknown that my younger self had been unable to handle it.

Well, I scanned that cabbage, and then I coloured it in. It was a brilliant ruse on the part of my soul to bypass all the questions and confusion that had paralysed me for so long.

Suddenly, and mysteriously, there was no what to paint or why, no angsting about technique or materials. It was simple. Scan the cabbage, colour it in. Be amazed.

Three cabbage scans, one lichen photo, 2008 - 2010

At first I had the folds of the cabbage to guide me, then later the simple form of a circle. Eventually it was the fractals of the paint itself that provided my forms.

Circles and fractals, 2013

I tried to avoid thinking about the nature of my ‘subject matter’, I knew where that had taken me before (What to paint? What for, after Malevich?). I just played with it all: the paint, the colour, the luminosity of the pigments, the delicacy of the fractal edges, without intention or design. I suppose I was unconsciously doing what Simon Leys had talked about in relation to Chinese landscape painting; focussing not on the skills of creating an illusion (ie representing the real world) but working with reality first hand, in the form of the physics of ink and paper, concrete phenomena in the physical world.

The thin black line that traced the fractals didn’t know itself then to be what I would later come to call my ‘free line’. It was just following a fascination with the crystalline edges of the forms that appeared as different colours of ink met each other in real time.

Watercolour and ink, 2013

The process of interfering as little as possible opened up a space for things to happen of their own accord. This was more than just accepting ‘happy accidents’. There seemed to be a hidden capability, beyond anything I could be consciously aware of, which was able to register unseen echoes and generate unplanned moves, in ways that my mind was incapable of imagining or processing.

I found out that, in complexity terms, these unexpected results partly relied on having a sufficient number of interactions through time (in this case, between my hand, the paint, and the shapes that appeared, which themselves then created feedback loops as my senses took in what had appeared) in order to create the possibility of emergence: the appearance of unplanned forms that couldn’t be causally tracked back to any conscious thought or decision. It was a ‘decentred process’, like the strangeness of a slime-mould changing direction to get away from something that threatens its survival, despite the fact that a slime mould has no ‘brain’ to direct its proceedings.

To stop it from stalling I just had to keep playing, without any desire for result or satisfaction, doing my best to keep the judgements and the voices still living in my head from art school tuned out.

Eventually I decided that I should try to find somewhere to share what I had been doing for five years of ‘looking the other way’ as the ink and the paint danced on the paper.

Everything came together when by some strange luck I was given two rooms in a gallery and created my first show, ‘Wild Life’, for the first Stirling Fringe Festival.

I’ll tell you more about the show in a couple of weeks time, and show you the sandpainting!