Opening the door of the cage

  Painting in progress (header image) I have written about pictopiesis as a simplification, there is a filtering and distilling going on throughout. The synthesis, a sublation, is a simplification but not an over-simplification, as that would eventually lead nowhere if followed through. I am in a situation with the painting whereby it has an internal pictopoietic dialectic. […]

Pictopoiesis and Artificial Intelligence

Reading this article, I am wondering if a program for pictopoietic thinking could ever be conceived, perhaps hypothetically. The thing is, pictopoietic thinking is living thinking, and a computer is not alive. Meanwhile, I shall carry on trying to explicate pictopoiesis and its elements as best I can. Today, in and out of the studio. The days are […]

The blind spot

I am thinking that in this article is correspondence with an essential principle underlying pictopoiesis: that the material reality of the painting and its beginnings with the fundamental building blocks (the black dot “atom”), is what the painting all works back to, and traceably so.  In fact, how closely this principle of pictopoiesis, of material connection with source and origin, […]

Intellectualism and Inspiration

Image: Oil, graphite, pencil and pigment on paper by JWR some correspondence with Agnes Martin: Art ‘Requires a Relaxation of Control’: How Agnes Martin Gave Up Intellectualism to Harness Her Inspiration

Big Questions and the Smallest of Things.

In effect, we are living in a state of perpetual remote control. As Carl Miller argues in his book The Death of the Gods (2018), algorithms have taken over many day-to-day procedures.  https://aeon.co/essays/do-you-know-your-stuff-the-ethics-of-the-material-world Food for thought vis a vis pictopoiesis, its appropriateness and timeliness in our remote-controlled world. In pictopoiesis connection with origin, or source is maintained. The serial […]

Treatise, Tantra, Mantra

image: Great Mirror, oil and pigment on paper by JWR Some background contextual research regarding the explication of pictopoiesis: Treatise note: to list of treatises given in above link add: Leonardo Da Vinci A Treatise on Painting also: Vincent de Beauvais “Great Mirror” also: Albertus Magnus also: Sol le Witt Paragraphs/Sentences of Conceptual Art; Paul Klee […]

Cloud

Painting in progress, and without it being predetermined, a cloud suggests itself. I orientate the work in different ways. The cloud, like the thought of it itself, subject to constant reformation. Its behaviour governed by conditions around it, near and far, of atmosphere, weather and climate. Everyone knows clouds.     I have already journeyed from the earthed […]

Pictopoiesis and Pragmatism

Painting in progress:   There are certain facts about oil painting which make it tricky to handle at the beginning. When I began painting in earnest, I found it difficult to handle oil paint, actually I did not like it. I had only ever used water paints before. But I persisted with the oil painting. […]

The Integrity of Line

The drawings below were all made freehand, with a basic mouse, no other aid. I call them mouse drawings. At the time I was interested in the possibility of inventing a series (alphabet-like) of protoforms suggestive of different habitats or dwelling places, structured line by line. Like building a skeleton, external and internal. In every case, […]