Decalcomania

Decalcomania initiates a process of suggestion where seeds of potentiality inform the artist for sub creation. This physical use of paint follows natural dynamics, the way that the cosmos creates its forms, and the pathways of geological formative processes.

You can use delcomania to create a richly textured background to your cartoons, and either play the decalcomania through the design or use it in a limited area. It is particularly useful for landscapes, forests, rocks, mountains and so on. You can then paint the value-study based ‘optical grisaille’ in an opague way, or in a way that allows the textures to play through.

The bifurcation of the paint which is caused by surface tension is caused in the same way that nature and forms come into being. The organic markings left through the decalcomania process leave the imprint of natural formations within an underpainting, and can provide a link to a natural thread of image evocation, which can assist in moving away from illustrative or pictorial representation of imagined phenomena. It can become a touchstone of the sense of the natural power of creation, and a great interface to unearth the imagined worlds that are suggested in the multitude of options it presents.

“Look at walls splashed with a number of stains, or stones of various mixed colours. If you have to invent some scene, you can see there resemblances to a number of landscapes, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, great plains, valleys and hills, in various ways. Also you can see various battles, and lively postures of strange figures, expressions on faces, costumes and an infinite number of things, which you can reduce to good integrated form. This happens on such walls and varicoloured stones, (which act) like the sound of bells, in whose peeling you can find every name and word that you can imagine.
Do not despise my opinion, when I remind you that it should not hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or the ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud or like places, in which, if you consider them well, you may find really marvellous ideas. The mind of the painter is stimulated to new discoveries, the composition of battles of animals and men, various compositions of landscapes and monstrous things, such as devils and similar things, which may bring you honor, because by indistinct things the mind is stimulated to new inventions.” 

Leonardo da Vinci

Letting Go – releasing into the Imagination

In the scope of painting… when we let go of rendering our creations from the level of limited rational intellect, we allow the greater powers of the more subtle reaches of our being to express themselves.

The conscious mind measures and compares – for this is the activity of rationality – ratio – to measure. But the greater part of mind is involved in a process of synthesis, sensing, composing and interpreting phenomena in intangible ways which bring forth a potentially unanticipated level of creative expression.

“Every normal human being (and not merely “the artist”) has an inexhaustible store of buried images in his subconscious, it is merely a matter of courage or liberating procedures … of voyages into the unconscious, to bring pure and unadulterated found objects to light.”

Max Ernst

Creating is humbling because it is only when we surrender the over-managing, controlling, devising mind that something greater can manifest. Our personal mark as artists is not something we control but is an emergent property of our whole being, like the timbre of our song. It is analogous to pregnancy and the process of giving birth – in art, we nurture the seeds of inspiration, but we cannot always anticipate the overall form.

In bringing forward the “inexhaustible store of buried images….pure and unadulterated” a process of letting go and surrendering to the “bigger picture” is required.

Resisting the urge to define and delineate, at early stages of under-painting, allows the raw potential of a piece to present different perspectives, and possibilities in the rendering process.

Allowing the presence of serendipity into our work, and taking risks of evaluation and contemplation to allow mythic resonance within the work, develops an image from the level of illustration to encompass the wider arena that is available through the medium of oil painting.

Similarly it opens the mental framework from the individual intention, to a universal appreciation of what is possible. It is through this wider appreciation of Creativity per se, that we have greater access to the reservoirs of genius inspiration, than when we are following to the note our original image which is limited to the scope of our singular perception.

This is where decalcomania can provide a springboard of suggestive inspiration to the under-painting stage; and be incorporated within a work, lying developed or undeveloped where the mythic symbols dictate and can be rendered within the piece. The underlying “random” emergence of the decalcomania, speaks of the flows and natures of life and establishes a relationship for form born from chaos, rather than constructed from the lines of the mind. In this way a painting using decalcomania and then rendering through deliberate intention, can be seen to converge these two streams of capacity in a way which utilises their strengths.

Working with random patterns and textures underneath some simple formal idea like a face, landscape, creature etc, allows organic form to peep through suggestively, and inform the perception with dimension and possibility for the next stage of painting.

Opening to the potentials of an idea is necessary in letting go of ones hold over the original conception; but a further stage of letting go in the creative process involves sacrifice. Sacrifice of previous work, or of adhering to a concept or an outcome. Sacrifice comes once a level of intentionality has been established, and in order for the idea to come into form, it requires determination by marking out what it is not, or where it is, and in doing so losing some of the potential forms, in order to pay service to the objects within the composition. Like Shiva, eminating countless worlds of possibility, and consuming worlds in transmuting fire.

Sacrifice also occurs when a level of perception shows that the work previously rendered will not work with the true birthing of the piece, or that vast corrections are required. In this way sacrificing the area which is problematic, and returning to the potential of that area, may appear like a loss of time and work, but actually is necessary in the creative process. Through the action of sacrifice, accumulated creative force will flow again in the newly established necessary direction; and the learning of the previous phase was required in order to shift the perspective and attune the skill within the approach.

In this journeying staying present with the process often involves a slow revealing of the work, and often we may be surprised by the “symbolic self – organisation” where the symbols in a painting will forge relationship in a seemingly magical way; naturally and without being wrought by conscious intention, being guided by the overall harmonic which is kept by the diligent focus of the painter in the mode of practice.