Up Jump the Devil

I remember, as a child, watching Disney’s animated tour de force, Fantasia (1940). I’m not quite old enough to have seen its theatrical release, but did watch it on a VHS cassette on a tube television set. That film imprinted its music and imagery indelibly in my young mind, especially the finale with Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain and Satan himself looming over the rising hosts of hell. That was always my favorite scene, because it was both terrifying and captivating at once. Even as a child, I sympathized with the Devil for his being misunderstood.

The title Fantasia refers to the human capacity for visual imagination, which was Disney’s stock in trade. His animators were called imagineers and they transmuted their fantasy into the alchemical gold of marketable content. This is the goal of the modern American artist, too. And I find that in this little corner of North America, the market is all for Mickey Mouse, and the Devil is to be kept safely chained below the mountain.

The term Aphantasia refers to an inability to visualize mental imagery, and this is something that I struggle with. It’s an inherently subjective concept, like synesthesia, a term for whose definition empiricism yields to anecdote. For me, I am capable of imagining, but it’s not at all photographic. I can visualize aspects of a thing, dreamlike, stand-ins for the gestalt. I really like the paintings of Lucien Freud, for how they depict this way of seeing, as do the drawings of children. So too does the art of so-called “primitive” peoples, which often enlarges the essential features of a face, as in the statues of ancient Sumer.

Consider how animators employ theatrical gesture within their illustrated shorthand, including only such detail as suffices to render the character intelligible. It’s maybe a legacy of capitalism, and our assembly line approach to labor. In the pre-industrial world, art was brooded over by workmen carving meticulous brass engravings or woodcuts. These images were meant for mass proliferation, and meant to be examined. The act of studying the images was part of the experience. But in 1940, factory workers had little time for reverie between shifts and between ad breaks on their new television sets. Art had to keep pace and meet them where they were.

One might trace a lineage, if not strictly academically then sentimentally, from the geometric boldness of Cubism and Futurism, through the sleek ornament of Art Deco, and into the stylized theatricality of early American animation. Walt Disney and Max Fleischer were the heirs to a visual shorthand for distilling the vision of career artists into streamlined efficiency. This planted the seed of the art market as it exists today. It’s no coincidence that art schools like the Savannah College of Art and Design produce so many graphic, web, and video game designers. They drill the rudiments of technique and composition until the graduates are able to summon the muse, and bind her to the grinding wheel of commerce. The Disney corporation is a great example of how such a despotic, dare I say fascistic, coercion of art leads more to exploitation than innovation. I see so many art school students who produce beautiful images, but they’re all very predictable and derivative. Usually the colors are too vibrant, like those of the digital screens our eyes are so accustomed to, the imagery is unsophisticated, and any symbolism is overt. When art is reduced to routine and protocol, it loses a lot of the spontaneity which is the soil of imagination’s flower. This is the dilemma I often find myself facing when trying to play to the gallery...literally and figuratively. Maybe that’s what Uncle Walt had in mind with that final scene in Fantasia, when the magician’s apprentice fails to charm the devils of the psyche within the ring of imagination, and they erupt in a volcanic blaze.

I’m learning to balance the need to produce marketable imagery in a timely manner with that devilish impulse to release my libido...like a middle aged man exceeding the speed limit in a pre-owned Hyundai when Metallica’s Ride the Lightning plays on the radio. I sometimes forget the audience for my work, and try to show off the magic tricks I copied from the old masters, and I end up like Mickey Mouse soaked in cauldron water.

The child in me wants to paint dinosaurs, dragons, wizards, cartoons, comic books, and pirate ships, but the market calls for egrets and magnolia blossoms. A Magnolia grandiflora catches the light much like a ship sail, and an egret can look very saurian when stalking the shallows. These are the games an artist must play with the mind, concessions, candy for the devil.

For me, I find that the vicissitudes of life, even one as privileged as mine, conspire to fetter the muse. She is like Pamela Coleman Smith’s Eight of Swords, tied and blindfolded in an illusory world. We have to remind her that the dangers aren’t real, and the soul is eternal. For me, it’s a sort of wordless dialogue very similar to playing music. Studies show that musicians synchronize biologically. Their brainwaves, heart rates, and mirror neurons allow them to function as one entity. That is how it is to create with the imagination, it’s a sort of communion.

When we paint, we are always relying on memory and fantasy. Even using a reference image, it disappears the moment we look at our brush. Art involves balancing the input data and the output, the give and take, listening and speaking. That often becomes perverted into performative gender roles in visual art. Here in the southeast, I see a lot of galleries marketing pastel feminine abstracts and austere masculine realism with little variation. Emotion belongs to one, thought to the other. This false dichotomy undermines progress, and shapes how we relate to the muse.

Each time we command our imagination in order to produce “content”, it shies away. Conversely, when we place no boundaries on the imagination it can begin to command us, like Ginsberg’s angel headed hipsters. The modern artist has to make concessions between the two extremes. At least until we become “established” artists and can let our hair down...or buy hair to be let down, in my case. For me, it’s been about learning to negotiate lovingly with my imagination. To offer candy to the Devil in exchange for him sleeping in the mountain long enough for me to to paint it with a Bob Ross palette.

Contemporary “fine art” in the southeast feels neurotically divided between control and chaos. Authenticity is praised but rarely practiced. There’s little room for diversity in truth. We’re so accustomed to uniformity, to processed foods, digital “content”, curated shopping experiences, and social media, that anything which deviates from convention is repulsive. But, the secret may be to play up that repulsion to the superlative...or “infernaltive”, rather. There’s an old fiddle tune I learned from my late grandfather called Up Jump the Devil. That’s the role of great artists.

I’m trying to find socially acceptable ways to vent the magma on occasion. I recently set up a large dropcloth to allow me more freedom for abstract “action painting”. My abstract paintings generally take much longer than representational images because there is so much more thought involved, and so many more mistakes to be corrected. For me, representational art is like a plan that involves mistakes and abstract art is mistakes that involve a plan. The former is a process of addition, the latter of subtraction. My favorite thing about art is learning to reconcile the two, and to translate my style in either direction.

Rhythm is an essential expression of the human experience, of biology. And that’s the thing that seems to distinguish great painting from illustration or facsimile. Whether abstract or representational, rhythm is the key to translating imagination into manifestation. That’s what Disney did so exceptionally with Fantasia, and its what I try to achieve with my paintings. It takes a real honest connection with the psyche. I have to practically fall face down on the sea shore in obeisance and beg Venus to whisper to me through the conch shell of my vision. It takes a real communion, and when it happens I have to let it flow. Any attempt to direct it is just like Mickey Mouse with the broom. I’ve never gotten it perfect, but I’ve come close a few times. Usually its little things, like patterns in landscapes, clouds, the planes of a face, etc.

There are many ways to develop this “flow state”, meditation, dancing, chanting. For me, it started with music. It’s not necessarily as profound as religious mystics might make it seem, it’s more just becoming aware of your natural rhythms and acting in a way that doesn’t contradict them. The artist’s task is to prepare themselves to channel the imagination, with the technical practice of painting performing the role of asanas in yoga.

My art practice has not been easy, and I have often been discouraged. I can’t remember how many times I considered giving up when faced with rejections and criticism. I would become furious and let the Devil out the mountain, just to distract from poor Mickey Mouse dripping on the castle floor. The past few years have given me increased confidence that I’ve memorized the magic spells, and now all that remains is to cast confidently so as not to accidentally turn myself into a toad.