The primary purpose of life is to achieve a growth of consciousness.
It follows that the principle aim of art is to see the world anew.
At the end of the 19th century, in Europe and America, the world was
seen in terms of a perspective that had been invented in Italy in the
15th century. This renaissance way of seeing originated from the
individual observer as the point of origin and moved from foreground to
middle ground to background.
This way of seeing, now sometimes called "illusionism," was
taught as gospel in art schools and was generally taken for granted as
the way in which the outer world was represented.
Modern Art came into being with the aim of introducing relationships,
between the painter and the subject being painted, that were more open
to innovation. In Modern Art, new approaches to seeing were initiated in
the expression of light, space, time, and speed.
Fresh imagination came into play in the portrayal of beings and objects
and their interrelationships with the environment.
The abstract language of lines, forms and colors was explored. Liaisons
were expressed between dream images and the waking state. Faster and
more lively forms of expression were achieved.
By the mid 1930's the different movements of Modern Art taken
together had achieved more direct ways of seeing
and a lively interplay between the observer and the observed had been
awakened.
A new level of consciousness in relation to seeing the outer world
had been attained. The haunting question now arose:
In what direction did the next stage of Modern Art lie?
How could seeing the world become more direct, profound and open?
It was a crisis.
In desperation Picasso tore a square from his shirt and stitched it
to a canvas. Miro stood a ladder upright on the earth pointing to the
heavens. Giacometti's figures, in the search for a primal human image,
became smaller and smaller and risked disappearing altogether.
Henry Moore's reclining figures took on the greater dimensions of a
rolling landscape.
In 1939, in the review Minotaure #13, Andre Breton in his article
"The recent tendencies of Surrealist painting," hinted at the
new direction in painting. He said that the younger members of the
Surrealist group were moving away from Salvador Dali's images of
paranoia and were moving towards the direction
of Yves Tanguy, who was expressing an inner world seen for the first
time.
Never seen before images began to appear in the automatic
manifestations of the fumages of Wolfgang Paalen, in the decalomania of
Oscar Dominquez, in the spontaneous drawings of Matta, in the grattages
of Esteban Frances, and in the coulages that appeared under my hand.
In 1940, during the second World War, the climate became inhospitable
in Europe for the creative life.
The center of Modern Art moved from Paris to New York.
In the United States there were already fine collections of art.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York City was then considered to be the
temple of Modern Art and was visited with reverence and awe.
In the United States the culture was young. The Industrial Revolution
was in full swing. In the hustle and bustle of everyday life, there was
little inclination for pondering the mysteries of life. Energy was
directed towards harvesting the resources of nature for human needs, the
invention of machines, the building of cities. Commercial interests were
a predominant influence. In the art world of New York, the aim of
painters tended towards the search for intellectual novelty and the
winning of recognition. Painting became focused on technique, (paint for
paint's sake), on surface reality (sometimes called: wall paintings),
and on preoccupations that could be readily appreciated by reasonable
people. Action Painting and Abstract Expressionism took over.
Modern Art, with its preoccupations with the mysteries of life, as
far as the New York art world and its world wide influence was
concerned, went underground, where it has remained until recently, when
present planetary conditions demand, on pain of human extinction, a new
attitude towards life, a deeper respect for the interdependence of
humankind with nature which implies the need for a deeper and more
inclusive ways of seeing the world in which we live.
The human eye is as yet young and is open to seeing anew.
The profound preoccupations that inspired Modern Art during the early
part of the last Century are now once again, for more and more people,
coming back into focus, and they are finding expression in deeper levels
of consciousness. The preoccupations of Modern Art with the outer world
have moved to preoccupations with the Inner Worlds of the collective
unconscious, from the visible to the invisible.
Every night in deep sleep we travel over vast distances, at great
speeds in the Inner Worlds of the Mind Shared By All
and, in this way, we become recharged with cosmic energy for the next
day. On waking up, our experiences of deeper dimensions are too fast,
too vast or too minute for human memory, with its limited range of
awareness, to recall.
Inner Realism is dedicated to the quest of the Inner Worlds of the
unconscious Mind Shared by All.
Images of the inner worlds appear through spontaneous painting.
Spontaneous painting comes about through cultivating the Open Mind
and painting just faster than rational thought, just faster than the
painter's speed of consciousness while giving full attention to what is
appearing in the painting as it appears.
In spontaneous painting, the Mind acts directly through the hand
of the painter to the painting and never-seen-before images appear.
The painter, as a separate individual, becomes an instrument of the
Mind Shared by All, the creative spirit of the cosmos.
The Inner Worlds are invisible, or at best appear as a white light,
blurred and ghostly and hypnotic. In spontaneous painting, a line or
mark from an Inner World, that exists in a time speed outside human
awareness, is caught while in motion as it happens and is seen in the
painting as being still. In this way, aspects of an invisible world
become visible.
The Inner Worlds are of other dimensions than the visible world to
which the human mind is at present attuned.
Through spontaneous painting, little by little, aspects of an Inner
World appear and, in time, through contemplation of what has appeared,
the nature of the Inner World being expressed enters ever more clearly
into consciousness.
The principle preoccupation of Inner Realism is to express the nature
of an Inner World as directly as possible from the Open Mind.
When the painter, after long experience, feels at home in the Inner
World that has appeared, and when the time is ripe, spontaneous painting
can speed up and there is a leap into a world of deeper dimensions.
In this way the Inner Worlds involve from the worlds of Inner Earth
to the worlds of Inner Sky to the faster depths of the Mind Shared by
All,
to the omnipresent Deeps, where time and dimensions no longer seem to
apply..
The nature of each Inner World seems to be inexhaustible.
Every pioneer painter, through spontaneous painting, has a chance to
make an unique contribution. The inner worlds are always present in
spirit.
Inner Realism is the quest of the Inner Worlds.
Seeing aspects of the inner worlds within changes life irrevocably
and leads to seeing the world without
in a deeper and more intimate way
that engenders a corresponding growth of consciousness
and a deeper participation in the evolution of the cosmos.
Gordon Onslow Ford, January, 2001
