Automatic Drawing part 2

 

alesteban_6977@yahoo.com

What is automatic drawing?

     

Andre Breton Automatic Drawing            


According to surrealist definition, “Automatic drawing is a drawing that is not influenced by reason and consciousness, the hand draws as if on its own, it is led by the subconscious. It is necessary to get relaxed completely and tear oneself away from what one is doing. Every man reflects a mirror of their inner self, their knowledge, and way of thinking or a direction on their journey through life. If people want to heal others – they draw in a diagnostic way, if they long to please others – they draw in a more artistic and free manner. This is what distinguishes automatic drawing from realistic one. Automatic drawing can be used in various ways, for example in psychotherapy (drawing one’s mental problem, removing blocks and inhibitions, transferring negation from the inside out). Many public courses, on the other hand, tend to freer drawing, to a more significant use of the right cerebral hemisphere, loosing creative powers, expressing emotions and feelings.

Automatic drawing distinguished from drawn expression of mediums was developed by the surrealists, as a means of expressing the subconscious. In automatic drawing, the hand is allowed to move 'randomly' across the paper. In applying chance and accident to mark-making, drawing is to a large extent freed of rational control. Hence the drawing produced may be attributed in part to the subconscious and may reveal something of the psyche, which would otherwise be repressed. Examples of automatic drawing were produced by mediums and practitioners of the psychic arts. It was thought by some Spiritualists to be a spirit control that was producing the drawing while physically taking control of the medium's body.

Automatic drawing was pioneered by André Masson. Artists who practiced automatic drawing include Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Jean Arp and André Breton. The technique was transferred to painting as seen in Miró's paintings which often started out as automatic drawings, and has been adapted to other media; there have even been automatic "drawings" in computer graphics. Pablo Picasso was also thought to have expressed a type of automatic drawing in his later work, and particularly in his etchings and lithographic suites of the 1960s.

Most of the surrealists' automatic drawings were illusionist, or more precisely, they developed into such drawings when representational forms seemed to suggest themselves. In the 1940s and 1950s the French-Canadian group called Les Automatists pursued creative work chiefly painting based on surrealist principles. They abandoned any trace of representation in their use of automatic drawing. This is perhaps a more pure form of automatic drawing since it can be almost entirely involuntary - to develop a representational form requires the conscious mind to take over the process of drawing, unless it is entirely accidental and thus incidental. Surrealist artists often found that their use of 'automatic drawing' was not entirely automatic, rather it involved some form of conscious intervention to make the image or painting visually acceptable or comprehensible, "...Masson admitted that his 'automatic' imagery involved a two-fold process of unconscious and conscious activity...."

In the ecstatic condition of revelation from the subconscious, the mind elevates the sexual or inherited powers (this has no reference to moral theory or practice) and depresses the intellectual qualities. So a new atavistic responsibility is attained by daring to believe-to possess one's own beliefs-without attempting to rationalize spurious ideas from prejudiced and tainted intellectual sources. Automatic drawings can be obtained by such methods as concentrating on a *Sigil-by any means of exhausting mind and body pleasantly in order to obtain a condition of non-consciousness-by wishing in opposition to the real desire after acquiring an organic impulse towards drawing. The Hand must be trained to work freely and without control, by practice in making simple forms with a continuous involved line without afterthought, i.e. its intention should just escape consciousness. Drawings should be made by allowing the hand to run freely with the least possible deliberation. In time shapes will be found to evolve, suggesting conceptions, forms and ultimately having personal or individual style. The mind in a state of oblivion, without desire towards reflection or pursuit of materialistic intellectual suggestions, is in a condition to produce successful drawings of one's personal ideas, symbolic in meaning and wisdom. By FORM MAGAZINE Vol. 1 No. 1, April 1916

My way of automatic drawing application could be called diagnostic and therapeutic, because automatic drawing can also be a source of amazing information about the condition of energies in man, surrounding environment or society. At the same time automatic drawing can influence these energies. It is possible to express energies in different ways. I usually start with the whole field of energy on my mind then visualize a bright light coming out from my head , then go on to chakras and six levels of aura. While listening to then after about half an hour after listening to Stargazer’s meditation and Aura cleansing my hand will voluntarily

It all started with non-directional line which moves without any sense of reason and direction

             


Automatic Drawing Exercise 1                            Automatic Drawing Exercise 2

The very important part of my research approach in Automatic Drawing  is to find the information that started the beginning of All information – subliminal programming of emotion, position, experience or memory is a power carrier which influences man on physical level or in relationships with other people. I draw them automatically; sometimes I see some pictures from the past.

An "automatic" scribble of twisting and interlacing lines permits the germ of an idea in the subconscious mind to express, or at least suggest itself to the consciousness. From this mass of procreative shapes, full of fallacy, a feeble embryo of idea may be selected and trained by the artist to full growth and power. By these means, may the profoundest depths of memory be drawn upon and the springs of instinct tapped. Yet, let it not be thought that a person not an artist may by these means not become one: but those artists who are hampered in expression, who feel limited by the hard conventions of the day and wish for freedom but have not attained to it, these may find in it a power and a liberty elsewhere undiscoverable. thus according to Leonardo da Vinci:-"Among other things, I shall not scruple to discover a new method of assisting the invention; which though trifling in appearance, may yet be of considerable service in opening the mind and putting it upon the scent of new thoughts, and it is this: if you look at some old wall covered with dirt, or the odd appearance of some streaked stones, you may discover several things like landscape, clouds, uncommon attitude, draperies, etc. Out of this confused mass of objects the mind will be furnished with abundance of designs and subjects, perfectly new."  

Figure 1.2 (21.5” X 27.5” “Between Something and Nothing” by A.L. Esteban Aug 2011)

Between something and nothing creates a melancholic atmosphere 

All I have learned you will find in my book THE WORLD IS A MAGIC PLAY OF ENERGIES. The book has been written in such a way that you can start drawing on your own and discover the hidden world of energies affecting our lives. It is also supplemented with a lot of inspirations to understand the mutual connections which form our destinies. I hope you make good use of this possibility and actively join the mankind’s transformation process taking place all over the planet.

Your drawings are a record of your touch, your movements, and your responsive interactions with the elements in your drawing. What a wonderful, liberating, and expressive way to work!”

                                                                                                                           by Steven Aimone

                      

Study for Planet XO Drawing - Xoey HAWK                  Automatic Drawing Drawing - Xoey HAWK

“By engaging in the process of doing and undoing, you’ll create drawings automatically that speak metaphorically.”
                                                                                                                            by Steven Aimone

                 

Automatic drawing by ~Erockwhitley                  Automatic Writing & Drawing by Andre Masson

“Artistic imagination must remain free. It is by definition free from any fidelity to circumstances, especially to the intoxicating circumstances of history”

                                                                                                                                                     by Andre Breton

Drifting falling (series 2) A.L. Esteban 2011 21”X27”

History of Automatic Drawing

Andre Breton; automatic drawing, automatic writing, language and insanity

Automatic writing was closely related to Breton's interest in psychotic states and other modes of consciousness, which he saw as having broken through the bonds of reason. Breton wrote that he was "not afraid to put forth the idea ... that the art of those who are nowadays classified as the mentally ill constitutes a reservoir of moral health. ... the fact of internment and the renunciation of all profits as of all vanities [are] guarantees of that total authenticity which is lacking in all other quarters."

French poet, essayist, critic, and editor, chief promoter and one of the founders of Surrealist movement with Paul Eluard, Luis Buñuel, and Salvador Dali among others. Breton's manifestoes of Surrealism are the most important theoretical statements of the movement.

André Breton was born in Tinchebray (Orne), the son of a shopkeeper. He spent his childhood on the Brittany coast and started early on to write poems – he knew the poet Paul Valéry while still young. Breton studied medicine and later psychiatry, and in 1921 met Freud in Vienna. He never qualified but during World War I he served in the neurological ward in Nantes and made some attempts to use Freudian methods to psychoanalyze his patients, whose disturbed images he considered remarkable. Among Breton's friends was Jacques Vaché, a wounded, rebellious soldier, who declared art to be nonsense. Vaché died of an opium overdose in 1919 in a hotel room with another young man, but his views, expressed in Lettres de guerre (1919), continued their life in the Dadaist movement.

Breton joined first in 1916 the Dadaist group, but after various quarrels continued his march forward: "Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the road." He turned then to Surrealism and cofounded with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault the review Littérature. Very important for his literary work were his wartime meetings with Apollinaire. His MANIFESTE DU SURRÉALISME was published in 1924. Influenced by psychological theories, Breton defined Surrealism as "pure psychic automatism, by which an attempt is made to express, either verbally, in writing or in any other manner, the true functioning of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of all control by reason, excluding any aesthetic or moral preoccupation." In the Second Manifesto Breton stated that the surrealists strive to attain a "mental vantage-point (point de l'esprit) from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, communicable and incommunicable, high and low, will no longer be perceived as contradictions."

Breton and his colleagues believed that the springs of personal freedom and social liberation lay in the unconscious mind. They found examples from the works of such painters as Hieronymus Bosch and James Ensor and from the writings of Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry – and from the revolutionary thinking of Karl Marx. The Surrealist movement was from the beginning in a constant state of change or conflict, but its major periodicals, La Révolution surréaliste (1924-30) and Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (1930-33), channeled cooperation and also spread ideas beyond France.

In the 1930s Breton published several collection of poems, including Mad Love (1937), a defence of an 'irrational' emotion of lovers, which used the Cinderella myth. Humor was an essential part of the Surrealists' activities and Breton also edited in 1937 an anthology on l'humour noir, which featured such writers as Swift, Kafka, Rimbaud, Poe, Lewis Carroll, and Baudelaire. "When it comes to black humor, everything designates him as the true initiator," Breton wrote on Swift. His prose has been more highly rated than his poetry, and among his masterworks from the 1920s is NADJA (1928), a portrait of Breton and a mad woman, a patient of Pierre Janet. The title refers to the name of a woman and the beginning of the Russian word for hope. Breton's first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs of places and objects which inspire the author or are connected to Nadja. In LES VASES COMMUNICANTS (1932, The Communicating Vessels) Breton explored the problems of everyday experience, dreams, and their relationship to intellect. "Anyone who has ever found himself in love has only been able to deplore the conspiracy of silence and of night which comes in the dream to surround the beloved being, even while the spirit of the sleeper is totally occupied with insignificant tasks", he wrote. "How can we retain from waking life what deserves to be retained, even if it is just so as not to be unworthy of what is best in this life itself?"

From 1927 to 1935 Breton was a member of the French Communist Party. Although he broke with the party in disgust with Stalinism and the Moscow show trials, he remained committed to Marxism. In Nadja he had said: "Subjectivity and objectivity commit a series of assaults on each other during a human life out of which the first one suffers the worse beating." With Leon Trotsky, whom he met in Mexico, he founded in 1938 the Fédération de l'Art Revolutionnaire Independant, and produced a paper on the civil liberties of an artist. When the Nazis occupied France, Breton fled to the United States with Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. He held there a broadcasting job and arranged a surrealist exposition at Yale in 1942. On a boat ride to Martinique in 1941 Breton met the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and discussed with him artistic creation. Lévi-Strauss criticized that Breton's definition of a work of art as the spontaneous activity of the mind opens the question of the aesthetic value of the work. Breton answered that he is "hardly interested in establishing a hierarchy of surrealist works (contrary to Aragon who once said: "If you write dreadful rubbish in an authentically surrealistic manner, it is still rubbish") – nor, as I have made clear, a hierarchy of romantic or symbolist works." (from Look, Listen, Read, by Lévi-Strauss, 1997)

During the war Breton wrote three poetic epics in which he dealt with the theme of exile. After WW II Breton traveled in the Southwest and the West Indies and returned to France in 1946. He soon became an important guru of a group of young Surrealists. In the 1940s and 1950s Breton wrote essays and collections of poems, among them ARCANE 17 (1945), a mythological work set in Canada. Breton's last poetical work, CONSTELLATIONS (1959), paralleled a series of poems with Joan Miro's gouaches. André Breton died in Paris on September 28, 1966. His three-room studio at 42 Rue Fontaine became a research center, preserved by his third wife Elisa. Breton's daughter Aube from his marriage to Jacqueline Lamba decided to put his books, drawings, paintings, sculptures, photographs, and other items on the market in 2003 after the French government did not buy the personal collections.

Surrealism: A movement in visual arts and literature between World Wars I and II. Much used technique among Surrealists was automatic writing. The later influence of Surrealism can be seen in the works of such authors as Eugéne Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and other writers of the Theater of Absurd, the French writers of the nouveau roman of the 1950s and '60s. Breton's influence was wide and left impact on psychoanalysis and feminism through Jacques Lacan, on politics via Herbert Marcuse, on criticism through Roland Barthes - just to mention a few important names. - For further reading: André Breton by J. Gracq (1948); André Breton by C. Mauriac (1949); Philosophie de surréalisme by F. Alquié (1955); Le vrai André Breton by P. Soupault (1966); Surrealism and the Literary Imagination by M.A. Caws (1966); André Breton: Arbiter of Surrealism by C. Browder (1967); André Breton by J.H. Matthews (1967); André Breton: Magus of Surrealism by A. Balakian (1971); André Breton by M.A. Caws (1971); Les critiques de notre temps et Breton by M. Bonet (1974); André Breton and the Basic Concepts of Surrealism by M. Carrouges (1974); André Breton: Naissance de l'aventure suréaliste by M. Bonnet (1975); Breton: Nadja by Roger Cardinal (1987); Andre Breton: Sketch for an Early Portrait by J.H. Matthews (1986); Revolution of the Mind by Mark Polizzotti (1995); André Breton by Mary Ann Caws (1996); Andre Breton: The Power of Language by Ramona Fotiade (1999); Surreal Lives by Ruth Brandon (1999) - Suom.: Runosuomennoksia valikoimassa Tulisen järjen aika (1962) ja Tuhat laulujen vuotta, toim. Aale Tynni (1974. - See also: Guillaume Apollinaire

Automatic Drawing an Analysis

Automatic drawing is a process whereby one enters into an altered state of consciousness to bring the world view of an artist through the medium of the hands. Using the automatic drawing an individual can connect with the world view of say Picasso or Cezanne, and draw or paint unachieved painting or even planned paintings that were never made. This principle apply for not only for departed artists but for those still alive and it apply equally to any artistic and scientific data .This is why many artists and scientists often have the same idea in same time, they all tap in each other ideas. The channel doesn't enter in contact with the artist per se. He merely connects with the world view or thoughts about the world of the chosen artist.

Thoughts are like objects, the less inhibited the channel the greater the chance to pick up original and brilliant material, if the channel project his own world view on the chosen artist world view the result will certainly be a watered down version of the artist idea.

If an artist planned to make a picture containing imagery that is in opposition with say the religious or ethic ideas of the channel, the channel will most than probably distort the original material to make it fit his own world view or pre-programmed belief system, to avoid such a pitfall, a certain let go of the channel world view is necessary for him or her to achieve proper translation of the original idea of an artist.

To achieve automatic drawing a light trance state will be sufficient, it will be even better if you can use self-hypnosis to give yourself the proper instruction that will be to relax and not to interfere with the reception, if you try automatic drawing it will be easier to choose an artist that you feel some affinity with. You can visualize yourself walking on a beautiful and peaceful place, beach, countryside, and mountain, whatever fit you best, imagine the artist near you.

Step into the artist body and let him or her make the artwork.

One exercise you can do to detach from your world view is the following one, proposed by Seth/Jane Roberts in the book, the Unknown Reality Vol II:

Close your eyes. Imagine a photograph of yourself (in parentheses: Yes, we are finally backed to photographs). In your mind's eye see the photograph of yourself on a table or desk. If you are working mentally with a particular snapshot, then note the other items in the picture. If the photograph is strictly imaginary, then create an environment about the image of yourself.

Look at the image in your mind as it exists in the snapshot, and see it as being aware only of those other objects that surround it. Its world is bounded by the four edges of the picture. Try to put your consciousness into that image of yourself your world view is limited to the photograph itself. Now in your mind see that image walking out of the snapshot, onto the desk or table. The environment of the physical room will seem gigantic to that small cell. The scale and proportion alone will be far different. Imagine that miniature image navigating in the physical room, then going outside, and quite an expanded world view will result

The Influence of Automatic Drawing as Painting Style



Alejandro “Andy” Esteban

“The Influence of Automatic Drawing as Painting Style for F.E.U. Fine Arts students”

"Artists need to allow an element of automatism — that is to say totally free inspiration — without which there can be no art, no progress in art, nor progress of the mind. The mind, moving by itself and for itself, progressively recording its encounters,  that is where the secret of modern art lies.”

By Charles Estienne, ‘Surrealism and painting at the Venice Biennale’, Combat-Art, no.8, 1954

Abstract

In this series of entries I will be discussing my visual arts practice and many issues that inform or affect it. I talk about my work: what it looks like, how and why I make it, who or what inspires me, what media I use, and how I came to work this way. Because of their great importance to my visual art profession, I point out the aesthetic value and essence in art—specifically as they pertain to automatic drawing and painting style for my own arts practice—and impart the painting style with my students as they develop their  subconscious mind thru automatic drawing, and create expressive style in  painting. This leads me to a discussion of interpretation of works of art and the challenges associated with creating a verbal understanding and interpretation of work that is primarily visual.

“Between Something and Nothing” mixed media 211/2” x 271/2” ALEsteban August2011

Because most of my recent work is purely automatic drawing, I made a clear judgment of tuning in my attitudes towards the use of mixed media and my rationale for choosing the various types of pastels as a tool for making works of fine art. Using automatic drawing media as a starting point, I look at questions of disciplinarily in my creative practice—specifically the fact that I don’t think of myself as a medium-specific artist—and issues about materiality as I try to define for myself what exactly constitutes an art “object.” Furthermore I explore definitions of and methods for creating automatic Drawing, and critique some contemporary trends in automatic drawing as arts practice. I also look at some of the historical influences on such trends.

   

     

I discuss expressive free style, technical skill, and their context to socio-cultural aspect with regard to drawing representation, and how I analyze appropriation in contrast to the prevailing approach in local contemporary art which comes from a basis in theory. I take aim at stereotypes and misconceptions of the artist’s life, some of which I find to be more associated with sex and violence in a form of subjective interpretation of visual expression.

  

Neo-Colonial Automatism makes a guest appearance—mostly as a target for my inspiration—because its dominant approach of creating regional oppositions tends to drown out the voices of people such as myself who have culturally hybrid identities. In talking about my influences, I look at my western educational training and Asian heritage, and sources of inspiration from the continuum of high-to-low culture in East Asia and the West.

“Marigold” mixed media 211/2” x 271/2” ALEsteban  July 2011

My attempts to answer the question of why I use Automatic Drawing revolve around issues of sub-consciousness and desire, the role of the artist in society, and the fragmentation of experience that seems to permeate post generation X life.