Child's Mind

"[Erik ReeL's painting:] micro-stories told via little tetches of color, via efficient tagmemes of emotion. The strange mixture of distance and intimacy. ..."

- Jae Carlsson


I've recently run across the delightful work of Alison Gopnik, a psychologist and philosopher currently at UC, Berkeley. I highly recommend her most recent book, The Phiilosophical Baby, to anyone interested in how our mind works.

Gopnik doesn't so much say that children are philosophers as that philosophers might do well to pay more attention to children. She and others have made an interesting case for how very young children [1-4 years] learn and work with the world in terms of Baysean nets, experimental strategies in their behavior and play, and progressions of cognitive development that set up adult behavior and thought.

As an artist, I find her work intriguing on several levels: it is intrinsically wonderfully fascinating work pertinent to every human being; philosophically, her work supports suspicions and my own experience in terms of what it is like to paint improvisationally.

I have received a fair amount of input lately from others who claim that my recent painting--if given sufficient viewing time--seems to impact their cognitive processing in some way that they had not expected. In trying to make sense of this feedback, I have found certain observations and insights of Gopnik's, in terms of the implications of her and her colleagues' research on adult congiition, to be unexpectedly relevant.

To a certain extent, this painting leads one into an adult version of a sort of "child's brain" state, where visual relationships are newly fluid and conversant within the pictoral field, but, as adults, we do this while excluding -- or postponing?-- it's relevance to everything else.This means it engages without mimesis, representation of an "other" -it's otherness is contained wholly in itself, as itself.

Micro Tetches of color

"... Micro-stories told via little tetches of color, via efficient tagmemes of emotion. The strange mixture of distance and intimacy. ..."

- Jae Carlsson




Primal Marking

Human marking, the initial urge, homo sapiens emerge, on cave walls, an ax shaft, stones, earth, bodies.

We make our mark. The mark of the hand echoing the mark of consciousness. Some turns into written language, the rest, no less meaningful, seeps from our depths like the gutteral howls of Janis Joplin, the improvised riffs of a deep bulerias. Words, explicit signs, are not necessary, not sufficient.

Improvisation accesses subtler states of consciousness, edges, communal communications, attained, transferred, transformed, followed, lost, found and expanded again. A higher determination enters into the improvised moment, a greater presence is demanded; a deeper sense of time.

The hand speaks directly, free of the planned intrusions of the intellect, the deeper nuances emerge, like music. The play of Imrat Khan, Charusia, Debendra Krishna Chattoppadhyay, Flamengo, Miles Davis, Theolonius Monk, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Dewey Redman, the Sabri brothers. Play emerges triumphant, ecstatic, dancing across the moment, the eternal Now. The heart of art.

Enter into these visual worlds. Take time, drift around in them awhile and ask yourself if there is a mark without meaning, a nuance you have not felt?