The Quest of the Inner Worlds and the Rebirth of Modern Art

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 in a deeper way.

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 originates from the point of view of the individual observer and radiates out moving 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 seen and 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 re-explored.
Liaisons were expressed between dream images and the waking state.
Faster and more direct forms of expression had come into play.

By the mid 1930's the different movements of Modern Art taken together had arrived at a more involved level of consciousness. The subjective and objective had become more interactive. The spirit of seeing anew was in the air.

The haunting question arose:
In what direction did the next stage of Modern Art lie?
How could seeing the world become more direct, engaged and open?
It was a crisis.

In desperation Picasso tore his shirt and stitched a swath 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 added allure of a rolling landscape.

In 1939, in the review Minotaure #13, André Breton in his article "The recent tendencies of Surrealist painting," hinted at the new direction in painting. He intimated that the younger members of the Surrealist group were moving away from Salvador Dali's images of contrived paranoia and were moving towards the direction of Yves Tanguy, who was expressing aspects of an inner world of the shared unconscious that were seen for the first time.

In the late 1930s, new images inspired by automatic processes were appearing in the fumages of Wolfgang Paalen, the decalomania of Oscar Dominquez, the spontaneous drawings and paintings of Matta, the grattages of Esteban Frances, and in the coulages that appeared under my hand. Those manifestations were the first signs of a new direction that came about through a collaboration with the spirit of nature. This new direction in painting never had time to develop in Europe.

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, to a great extent, focused on technique, (paint for paint's sake), on surface reality often depicted in large dimensions, (sometimes called: wall paintings), and on preoccupations that could be readily appreciated by reasonable people. Action Painting and Abstract Expressionism took center stage.

Modern Art, with its preoccupations with the mysteries of life, as far as the New York art world 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, this implies the need for a deeper, more engaged and 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 with the mysteries of life 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 world to the invisible worlds.

Every night in deep sleep we travel over vast distances, at great speeds in the Inner Worlds of the Mind Shared by All. Through this experience, contact with the Origins is established and 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 other for human memory, with its limited range of awareness, to recall.

Inner Realism is dedicated to the Quest in painting 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 in moments of heightened consciousness sometimes appear as a hypnotic white light, blurred and ghostly. In spontaneous painting, a line or mark from an Inner World, that exists in a time speed outside human awareness, is caught spontaneously while in motion as it happens and is seen in the painting as being still. In this way, an aspect of an invisible world that is moving too fast to be seen by the human eye becomes visible.

The Inner Worlds are of other dimensions than the visible world to which the human mind is at present attuned. An inner world has its own nature, its own space-matter-energy. 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 that is being revealed enters ever more vividly into consciousness.

When the painter, after long experience, feels at home in an Inner World that has appeared, and when the moment 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 depths of the Mind Shared by All, to the omnipresent Deeps, where time and dimensions no longer seem to apply, and from there the inner worlds evolve in unforeseen ways towards a new myth that is as yet, in great part, in the air awaiting expression.

The inner worlds, though invisible to the human eye, are present in the Mind Shared by All. The nature of an inner world seems to be open to inexhaustible creation.
Every pioneer painter, through spontaneous painting, has a chance to make an unique contribution.

Here, where these words are being written, under the influence of the inspiring wilds of the West coast of America and equidistant from the influences of Asia and Europe, the Quest of the Inner-Worlds is taking root.

Seeing aspects of an inner world changes life irrevocably
and leads to seeing the world in a deeper and more intimate way,
a corresponding growth of consciousness,
a deeper participation in the life of Mother Earth
and a minute but vital contribution to the evolution of the cosmos.

Gordon Onslow Ford