The No See-Ums (continue to surprise me!)

While looking over details in my large drawing called "Family Tree" (see October 16th, 2009 post) and other of my frontage works, new, obliquely hidden images caught me by surprise. The no seem-ums, or unintended figurative elements, seemed suspended between the rather pattern-saturated atmosphere of my intended imagery. In "Family Tree" for example, a number of fish, inhabiting the post-like supports of both figures, came to my complete attention. Repeatedly, and in startling detail, the fish were caught midstream in other-wordly relationships, perhaps as irrational as an automatic writing discourse. With this discovery, I drifted into a thought pattern best described by Paul Klee when he wrote in his diary that his paintings were like dreams flowing beneath the waking surface of life. "From the uncertain, a something shines not from here, not from me…" It is a known fact that fish often symbolize the deep waters of the unconscious psyche. As ancestors of our own species, fish may also characterize the division between the conscious and the unconscious, matter and spirituality. In this way, could a possible secondary narrative be explored in these drawings? I leave that up to your own imagination.

In Victorian times and as early as the sixteenth century, intentionally hidden images could be found to create fantastic Arcimboldo-like portraits (see the Napoleon postcard, circa 1905) and portrait-landscapes (see the "the hidden giant" eighteenth century - a face in the landscape.)

I have been fascinated by the limitless possibilities of such an approach to making art, and it never ceases to amaze me that, at the finish of every one of these drawings, an element of surprise continues to shape the content.