Progression of Style
A study of my own creative process
Below is a sample of some artwork made over the years. These were primarily completed between 1985 and 1990 and follow something of a logical progression influenced by my interest in different print media, eventually leading to my work in digital art and design. I offer these as a view into how an artist might progress from one phase to another based on the nature of the work. It is interesting because looking back at the course of the work (which continues to this day), I am struck by how much the progression makes sense of my artistic path.
By the end of this series, I was fully engaged in digital design and my professional career took off. Again, my professional career paralleled the logic of the printmaking media in that I moved from print design, to desktop publishing, to Web design, to application development (I could show that progression here as well, but it is, for the most part, reflected in the chronology of my resume and bio.
This first group is a series of collographs in which I was interested in several things: 1) the use of viscosity in ink printing, 2) the use of paper as a sculptural element, and 3) a painterly approach to the print media. I have been very process oriented from the beginning (my strong Thinking function) and immediately fell in love with all forms of printmaking because of its strong process orientation. The collograph media in particular was a great media in that it is a tactile way of creating as opposed to etching and lithograph that tends to be far to precise and rigid (again, my counter-Feeling function wanting to balance out the Thinking side). These are not totally non-representational. As much as I wanted to believe that I worked non-representational, I later discovered that the images emerging from the work tended to follow very specific themes based on my engagement with literature or music or some other art form (note how one looks like a mask).
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The Container of Relationship by James Brown
“Do I contradict myself? I am vast, I contain contradictions.”—Walt Whitman
In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophane states that the original nature of man was androgynous, constituted by the union of the male and female, and possessing a duality in all their bodily divisions. “Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their heart were great, and they made an attack upon the gods” (Jowett 1953). After their division by the god Zeus, “each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they began to die from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart.” From this ancient myth, we get a feel that our very existence is the struggle to re-establish a state from which we have been exiled. Life as such is born and lived in a state of conflict constituted of our separated wholeness. Freud in his work, reduced this fundamental truth to an instinctual tension between life and death drives that he believed to be active in every particle of living substance (Freud, 1961, p. 40)—constantly keeping each other in check lest one overwhelm the other. This in turn manifests in our conflicted human psychology.
The nature of psychological conflict in the Jungian model is that the oppositions are fundamentally irreconcilable in their natural state where they co-exist in an undifferentiated way. These pairs of opposites, according to Jung in his mystical writing in Septem Sermones Ad Mortuos, “are qualities of the Pleroma which are not, because each balanceth each” (Jung, 1916). Since we are an inseparable part of that very same Pleroma, or fullness of the divine cosmos, all of the qualities exist within each of us as well. However, the ground of our nature Jung continues is that of “distinctiveness.” As such, the normally “balanced and void” qualities are “distinct and separate” within us in order that they may be effective in the world and as such “delivereth us” in our distinction from the void.
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Peter Birkhäuser
reproduction of original book
CLICK ON A THUMBNAIL TO SEE THE FULL SIZE IMAGE
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FREUD on DEATH
Freud’s views on death varied significantly over the years. Near the outbreak of WWI, Freud argued that the conscious attitude towards death prevailing in civilized society was one that, though nominally acknowledging the reality of death, was in fact based upon denial. This was evident in the fact that we tend to emphasize the external causes of death, such as environmentally determined diseases, or accidents. By so doing, we strive to reduce death to a near-chance event. Also, by emphasizing the external causes of death, it becomes natural to arrange life in such as way as to reduce the probability of such occurrences. But the end point of this process is not a life affirming one. For ‘life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes shallow and empty... the tendency to exclude death from our calculations in life brings in its train many other renunciations and exclusions.’ (p.290-291).*Freud makes another keen observation, which may help us better understand the contemporary craving for fictional representations of life: ‘It is an inevitable result of all this that we should seek in the world of fiction, in literature and in the theatre compensation for what has been lost in life. There we still find people who know how to die who, indeed, even manage to kill someone else. There alone too the condition can be fulfilled which makes it possible for us to reconcile ourselves with death: namely, that behind all the vicissitudes of life we should still be able to preserve a life intact... In the realm of fiction we find the plurality of lives which we need. We die with the hero with whom we have identified ourselves; yet we survive him, and are ready to die again just as safely with another hero. (p.290)*
In fact, Freud concludes, it is in times such as war times, when the reality of death can be denied no longer, that life becomes interesting again, and recovers ‘its full content’.
*Freud, S. (1970). Thoughts for the Times on War and Death. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14. London: Ogart Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis. (Original work published 1915).
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