Drawing the Shape of Your Life
The art I make is like a construction site
After a recent exhibition, I told a fellow artist I see more lines in the landscapes I paint these days. I wasn’t lying.
I have always found the edges of things most interesting in any landscape.
A crack in a cliff that runs most of the way to the ground. The subtle and not crisp line at the crest of a wave.
The horizon line of a waterfall from above.
Now though, as I continue to make landscapes that are all lines on a canvas, I see the lines within a forest more clearly, and not only that, but they seem to be the most fundamental constituent part.
The lines of bark on a tree are more consequential than the tree itself.
The gaps of coal black between snowy mountaintops define the majesty of any completed range.
It is as if I have taught myself to see line drawings in nature through creations of my own drawn onto the canvas.
It’s hardly a surprise. Neurons that wire together fire together.
The phrase has a lovely rhyming tone to it, but it also holds truth for us as a species that is inalienable.
The things we do, the things we say, and the things we remember, have a concrete influence on our experience of reality. There is no room for any phenomenon in space that our brain has not connected together for us through time.
Repetition helps us build a social reality for ourselves.
Neuroplasticity, in a sentence, defines the very way that we sense the world and what we are good at within that world.
If I paint enough mountains, defined by the lines I place within the overall silhouette, then that association is going to manipulate the way that I see the craggy mountains and rolling hills I see when I look out of the window of my house in Aotearoa New Zealand.
If you came to visit my house, you would see the same view, the same physical properties, and the same colors presented by light frequencies. Still, more astonishingly, you would see a slightly different world.
Cities are great examples of how these connections shape people’s world and the way they see it.
French anthropologist Marc Auge writes of his ‘non-space’ social theory of human culture as a product of the Paris metro, drawing on experience from his regular underground commute.
His theory states that the world we live in is defined just as much by the black hole of things we do not see in our world, the things we miss out on, and the things which pass us by and ignore us.
He is not wrong. Imagine a world where you never saw a sunrise or sunset. In that world, the indescribable orange-yellow-pink-red of a perfect sunset would be meaningless to you, for it would not exist.
Your view of what is possible in the world would be defined by what you missed out on, not what you found in experience.
For an artist, this concept is interesting because it speaks to the reason that no two artists will ever portray an identical idea, image, or place in the same way.
Augmented realities exist in the maelstrom of existence and will become more of a continuous presence in the daily life of people living through technological revolutions.
In truth, however, augmented realities have always existed in some specialized ways.
Vincent Van Gogh is purported to have suffered from a form of epilepsy that may have led him to create images of the wind and stars, which can be expressively defined as magical realism.
Oracles in the classical world were subjected to clouds of sulfur, and steam, or even kept mildly intoxicated (not always using alcohol).
Such treatment may have led them to see elements of reality in more heightened, augmented, or more dimmed lights.
Historical festivals have attempted to augment the experiences of different classes of people.
Saturnalia famously made slaves of landowners and landowners of slaves (within reason).
The reason that there could be such a celebrated festival (it clung on into the Christian reign of the Roman Empire), is because it provided intoxicating effects of experiencing something completely novel — an alluring temptation for all classes of play-actors.
Making new connections was as a desired outcome of life in the Ancient World as it is in the modern era. Only the tools have changed.
The key to all this experimentation is that it will have lasting effects on your nervous system.
Imagine you suffered an injury, but after 6 months you were fine and there was nothing (people, places, scars, memory, etc.) to tell you it had happened. To your mind, it would not have happened.
The neurons that need to be wired together would not have interacted.
Or if they had, the connection will be severed and lost in the intervening months.
The injury would have zero impact on your past, present, or future. It would not exist.
What is more, you would be just as likely to end up in the same position again and repeat the injury in the future.
You would experience it as if for the first time.
The rest of us, in a similar situation, would anticipate the discomfort, and possibly even adjust life to avoid the incident. You would not.
The connections we make matter to us on a physical perceptual level.
It is the fact of that deep-rooted mechanism in our brain that enabled taxi drivers in London to develop oversized hippocampi during their training and employment.
That mechanism is also the reason that GPS systems have resulted in the loss of that defined skill-based brain adjustment in many recently trained black cab drivers.
We are able to shape the world we see and feel based on unconscious assumptions our brain makes about what is important.
The reverse is also true, the environment around us becomes a corrective measure.
Roger Bartra posits that the explanation for consciousness (not the how, but the what) can be found in the way that our interactions with the world correct and counter the disequilibrium in our nervous system.
The brain is forced to present an image for conscious reflection by the environment it does not fit within. Art forms part of that environment, but it is also a kind of warp drive.
In a painting, a film, or a video game the virtual transportation into new worlds allows our brain to be calibrated to even more images of what makes a world.
There may be a downside to this, as it could strip away part of the amygdala's joy of shock and awe at the first sighting of the Starry Night Over the Rhone.
The upside is that there is now a way that people can connect meaningfully with Saxon England (The Winchester Exhibition), Ptolemaic Egypt (Assassin’s Creed: Origins), and Icelandic Viking Taverns (Lewis Chess Men).
These connections become an avenue that can be followed to a new understanding of a world that we do not fit into, and a way to explore art forms that could never be dreamed of, without those connections.
The brain is a black box, which bleeds into the world through the sculptures its body creates, based on past connections made.
Reality is plastic. Our neural connections form the basis of our understanding of the outside world.
The lines I see in the hills around my home and the skylines of cities I visit are new to me.
They have appeared over the last few years since I started painting.
Places I have visited previously are now seen in a new way, they have new elements which seem to be made of the same images that were there before, with new lines now overlaid.
I cannot begin to understand how our unconscious minds create our conscious world - I still believe that is the biggest question in my field of neuroscience - but it is clearly done in concert with reality itself and our actions. This is what makes art so valuable.
It is also how art — of any kind; writing, game design, graffiti, oil painting, filmmaking — teaches us how to live a good life.
Not a prescriptive life, a life made by an individual and a community.
It adds new shapes to those lives we otherwise would never have seen or experienced while we are alive.
For me, alone in the mountains, the paint shapes itself even before I have prepared the canvas.
The lines jump out at me in formation; parallelograms, triangles, Arêtes, and cracks.
It is said that there are no straight lines in nature, but I am not so sure anymore.
The building site of my art practice is a miscellany of influences that I have shaped to fit the dimensions of a canvas or woodblock.
The lines I see feel straight, even though I am willing to accept I am in part to blame.
The exterior phenomenon remains the same.
My view has been doctored by my past work.
