Ink Stained Hands

Fritz Perls, Gestalt Therapy, Psychology Video

2009-07-09T14:41:00.003-04:00

This is amazing.

Drawing 2 out of the 44

2009-07-06T13:08:00.003-04:00

drawing 2 out of the 44.

"Man in a bag" 8x10" on Strathmore 400 series drawing paper medium, 80lbs, which is basically light drawing paper with a little bit of tooth. I am drawing with a Faber Castell "Perfect Pencil" which I received as a gift for my birthday from Laurie.

I am drawing on a little drawing platform purchased from Ikea for maybe 11 dollars. It raises the drawing on an angle so that it is more comfortable to draw, and you won't get the distortion that happens when drawing on a flat surface.

For these drawings I am trusting my unconscious mind, and not planning anything except that they will fit on the paper, and probably be a "head/face." Once the basic head emerges, then I am "polishing" it by creating very gentle gradations by being very careful and gentle when shading.

Oil Painting, Help me I.D. the artist?

2009-07-05T19:54:00.001-04:00

old man painting, originally uploaded by Gild Inc..

I saw this painting on Flickr, the photo was taken in 2006 at the SCOPE fair in NYC. Does anyone know who painted it?

Drawings, New Stuff, Bill Donovan

2009-07-04T22:02:00.004-04:00

This is a doodle I made last week, and I got sort of excited about the cartoon face on the lower right. So I made this drawing, where I basically was incredibly gentle with a pencil on drawing paper.

This is way more polished than my other cartoons. I am going for "polished" for the next 44 drawings I make.

Bill's Day, Very Nice Day with Very Old Things

2009-06-26T17:50:00.005-04:00

Making a watercolor copy of a Vincenzo Campi painting from 1575 of Christ being grabbed by the guy nailing him to the cross, so that he can pound the nail in.
I picked it because, 1. It was an incredible and moving image, and 2. because Campi is really great at setting up a powerfully believable shallow forground and a dramatically framed background. This painting has so much going for it, I just wanted to pick up some "moves."
I mean, it looks like Christ is about to stand up from the surface, crazily well composed image.

Also I cleaned Roman coins, which I have been working on for about 3 years. Everyday I work on them they reveal, in a tiny incremental shift, a little more of the relief sculptures on their surfaces. It is very exciting to have a coin go from a green encrusted blob to a miniature portrait, complete with individual hairs. The faces remind me of Robert Crumb ink drawings.

Studio Video. Bill Donovan, June 2009

2009-06-24T13:43:00.001-04:00

Hi gang! ;)

Coupla New Doodles

2009-06-24T03:38:00.004-04:00

Here is a couple of new doodles. I have been cutting them apart, and then pasting them into big drawings. Sort of like Christian Schumann or George Condo.

Christian Trinity, and the Psychology (Psyche = Soul, Ology = Study of) Behind It

2009-06-22T11:55:00.016-04:00

My biggest ideas come to me in the shower. This morning I finished Carl Jung's autobiography. Right after I closed the cover I ran a hot shower, and fell into ruminating on the final couple of chapters where Jung discusses, as a very old man, his life in terms in the major myths of Western Culture, and I was feeling good about the book, and that there was some truth and wisdom in it.

Thinking about Carl Jung's writing frees up the imagination. (Hermann Hesse's books were the product of analysis by Jung.)

I had the thought that the idea that a person is really a relationship between three separate pieces: (persona = Latin for actor's mask)
1. The body
2. The unconscious
3. Awareness

I will try to define these three ideas: The body is the living form in this world. The unconscious is that part of ourselves that we cannot observe, and that sends us thoughts. Awareness is the quality that makes us more than animals, it is the ability to know you are thinking, observing, and being.

Three, of course, has a huge significance to Christianity, and having attended St. Stanislaus Kostka Catholic School as a child, I have my fair share of indoctrination in Catholic concepts. Although, with Catholics at least, the number three seems to remain a fundamental and intentional mystery, and the Holy Ghost is the most mysterious of the three entities of the God-Image. That mystery has always made the Holy Ghost seem very important to me, and I always perk up when someone has something to say about this entity. Strange old creature that no one could explain to me.

So, three distinct pieces make up each person, and I was quite surprised to find myself very convinced about this! Being a painter I am always looking to integrate, synthesize, and systematise concepts so that I can use them, so my mind went on its little route with this idea of three pieces to a person, and the more important and practical observation that a person is really the relationship between them has been a paradigm shift lurking around me for months, although many people emphasize or live mostly in one section or another, a psychologically healthy person honors all three pieces: The body, the unconscious, and the awareness. You can feel it when a person is calm, smart, and in control; that person has a relationship where the three pieces honor each other.

What could the three pieces of a Human Being and the three sections of the Christian God-Image have in common? Our Western story of the explanation of life has been entwined with what we today would call a psychological myth of wholeness. Parables are kind of the comic book version of theological thought, and meant to reach most people, however, when approached with some spiritual/psychological structure parables bear fruit and become interesting again.

Christianity personifies important concepts, and then uses the personifications to teach the concepts. So, for instance, Jesus is a personification of the human body; God is a personification of the unconscious; and the Holy Spirit/Ghost is a personification of Awareness. To me this is the most important lesson: the structure of the internal relationship in each person, and how you need to build a relationship where the three pieces honor each other. I couldn't deal with the way it was presented in Church or Catholic School as a kid, and have continued to keep my distance as an adult.

One problem I still have with parables is that they are meant to be taught easily, and that easiness doesn't force people to understand through personal experience, and therefore encourages group egoic structures to form in the crowd that superficially "gets" the lessons, and what happens is you get a primitive and hierarchical group structure. I prefer an emphasis on self-knowledge, and think any value that comes from spirituality/religion comes from understanding yourself.

The lessons of Carl Jung or Eckhart Tolle make more sense to me than parables, because while they both teach basically the same lesson as Christianity, they refrain from building a narrative, and instead both men look to their direct experience and first hand documents from great spiritual leaders, and use those two sources to teach concepts.

I made this diagram to illustrate the synonymous relationships between the pieces of each human, and the three sections of the Christian God-Image.

The mystery of Christianity seems to be the obfuscation of Gnosis (or self-knowledge) in favor of group Egoic structure.
Updated on 6/24/2009

Carl Jung Quote

2009-06-20T19:06:00.003-04:00

Carl Jung's ideas should be taught to all high school students.

From "Memories, Dreams, Reflections," p.336:

"...Such experiences have a helpful or, it may be, annihilating effect upon man. He cannot grasp, comprehend, dominate them; nor can he free himself or escape from them, and therefore feels them as overpowering. Recognizing that they do not spring from his conscious personality, he calls them mana, daimon, or God. Science employs the term "unconscious," thus admiting that it knows nothing about it, for it can know nothing about the substance of the psyche when the sole means of knowing anything is the psyche. Therefore the validity of terms such as mana, daimon, or God can neither be disproved nor affirmed. We can, however, establish that the sense of strangeness connected with the experience of something objective, apparently outside of the psyche, is indeed authentic." - Carl Jung

Iran

2009-06-20T13:24:00.003-04:00

photos from Tehran, I found this on the website www.iranianyoutube.com

Ancient Iranians made the most beautiful coins, and since I am a coin collector I thought I would post a few images, because here in the West maybe it is easier to give into Jung's shadow, and not notice that other people in other egoic groups are capable of being quite full of art and culture.

These are all from the 3rd and 4th centuries AD. These coins are very thin, less than a milimeter thick. I just love the graceful drawing, and when I see the good stuff that comes from Iran today, I notice a gracefulness there too.
For instance, one of the most famous poker players on television comes from Iran, Antonio Esfandiari, and he is also a magician. He constantly says how much he loves America on television. There is a lightness to his presence that I see even in the videos of protest that are coming out of Iran.
Just because there are some bad apples calling for war and building nuclear weapons, doesn't mean that the rest of the people - who aren't caught up the Jungian shadow don't have a lot to offer.
We should take note, because I think a lot of Americans are just as beligerant as anyone on the face of the Earth, and are not adding to consciousness, art, or a thoughtful world, but are instead encouraging a kind of mindless anger. It can feel very good to be angry, when you are angry you think you know who you are, but that certainty is an illusion, you are the most lost.

Cece's Studio with Jamie and Cece

2009-06-19T12:30:00.005-04:00

Yesterday I spent the whole day with two of my best friends. We made drawings, and here is a video of a quieter moment. Cece's studio is picturesque, with a huge array of artworks leaning against other art, boxes, colorful tapes, drawings on everything, and beautiful colors everywhere. In the video Cece is making a gouache, and Jamie is standing in the doorway reading an email from Jesse Albrecht, who wrote a funny comment about oil sticks and pastels, because Jamie hates oil sticks and Jesse was kidding around with him about it.

Mail Order Monsters Install Video

2009-06-11T00:40:00.001-04:00

I have, and like, the book from this show, which was also in NYC and Athens, and had different work each time.

TateShots: Glenn Brown

2009-06-11T00:20:00.001-04:00

Jimi Hendrix Poster, Leslie Bell

2009-06-06T11:20:00.002-04:00

9 new sketchbooks, 8 pages condensed onto 1 jpeg

2009-06-06T11:02:00.000-04:00

Time

2009-06-05T18:32:00.003-04:00

I have changed my relationship to time. Instead of being lost in thought, and in things that have happened, and things I want to happen, I am being present and alert. Being present and alert is a rather transformational viewpoint for me, as I have been lost in thought for years, and I am enjoying it.

Vision of an Old Man

2009-05-31T12:48:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, I was lying on the bed in my bedroom, staring at the ceiling, and practicing dis-identification with thought. Dis-identification with thought is a way to catch the run away train of thinking, and corral it for a little while.

As I was lying there staring at the ceiling, which had a lot of yellow light on it, a purple haze began to form. This is an interesting optical effect which happens when your eyes become oversaturated with a color, you perceive the complementary color of whatever has oversaturated your sight, in my case I saw purple which is the complementary of yellow. It looked like a shear purple gossamer cloth with dancing trans-substantial edges. After a few minutes the ceiling disappeared entirely, and I was staring into a fuzzy yellowish-gray field.

Then, when staring into the field, and with my mind no longer trying to force me to listen to words, I had a frightening vision which seemed very real. A giant head of an old bearded man with long light brown and gray streaked hair, its head was about 3 feet across, and took up my entire vision vertically, appeared and stuck a huge finger right into my face. This lasted about half a second, and then the room was back to normal.

I felt like the “place” that conjures up word thoughts became so frustrated with me not listening to it that it sent me an image.

Philemon, Carl Jung

2009-05-29T12:11:00.002-04:00

p. 183 of Memories, Dreams, and Reflections by Carl Jung and Aniela Jaffe

"Philemon and other figures in my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in my psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in a forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, "If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them." It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. Through him the distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my thought. He confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me."

7

2009-05-27T23:36:00.003-04:00

chastity

temperance

charity

diligence

patience

kindness

humility

extravagance

gluttony

greed

lust

wrath

envy

pride

sin: to miss the mark

Eckhart Tolle on Drama vs. the Now

2009-05-19T18:27:00.001-04:00

Greek Pottery at the Met

2009-05-14T14:12:00.001-04:00

Jeffrey Lewis

2009-05-13T11:20:00.005-04:00

Nehil Novi Sub Sole (nothing new under the sun)

2009-05-10T23:13:00.002-04:00

The Babylonian prophet Mani started a religion that sounds a lot like the stuff I have been complaining about, haha, but he did it in the 3rd century. So I guess seeing material objects as the enemy of spiritual fulfillment have been around as long as people have been around.

(The info below is from the Wikipedia Page on Manichaeism, I know it looks boring but read the whole thing - it is worth it.)

Cosmogony

Manichaeism presented an elaborate description of the conflict between the spiritual world of light and the material world of darkness. The beings of both the world of darkness and the world of light have names. There are numerous sources for the details of the Manichaean myth. There are two portions of Manichaean scriptures that are probably the closest thing to the original Manichaean writings in their original languages that will ever be available. These are the Syriac-Aramaic quotation by the Nestorian Christian Theodor bar-Konai, in his Syriac "Book of Sects" (eighth century)[3], and the Middle Persian sections of Mani's Shabuhragan discovered at Turfan (a summary of Mani's teachings prepared for Shapur I[2]). These two sections are probably the original Syriac and Middle Persian written by Mani.

The Manichaean cosmogony has been described by Mircea Eliade in his A History of Religious Ideas (Eliade is summarizing bar-Konai's Syriac narration[3]):

In the beginning...the two "natures" or "substances", light and obscurity, good and evil, God and matter, coexisted, separated by a frontier. In the North reigned the Father of Greatness...in the South, the Prince of Darkness...the "disorderly motion" of matter drove the Prince of Darkness toward the upper frontier of his kingdom. Seeing the splendor of light, he is fired by the desire to conquer it. It is then that the Father decides that he will himself repulse the adversary. He...projects from himself, the Mother of Life, who...projects a new hypostasis, the Primordial Man...With his five sons, who are...his "soul" and "armor" made from five lights, the Primordial Man descends to the frontier. He challenges the darkness, but he is conquered, and his sons are devoured by the demons...This defeat marks the beginning of the cosmic "mixture", but at the same time it insures the final triumph of God. For obscurity (matter) now possesses a portion of light...and the Father, preparing its deliverance, at the same time arranges for his definitive victory against darkness. In a second Creation, the Father "evokes" the Living Spirit, which, descending toward obscurity, grasps the hand of the Primordial Man and raises him to his celestial homeland, the Paradise of Lights. Overwhelming the demonic Archontes, the Living Spirit fashions the heavens from their skins, the mountains from their bones, the earth from their flesh and their excrements...In addition, he achieves a first deliverance of light by creating the sun, the moon, and the stars from portions of it that had not suffered too much from contact with obscurity. Finally, the Father proceeds to a last evocation and projects by emanation the Third Messenger. The latter organizes the cosmos into a kind of machine to collect - and...to deliver - the still-captive particles of light. During the first two weeks of the month, the particles rise to the moon, which becomes a full moon; during the second two weeks, light is transferred from the moon to the sun and, finally, to its celestial homeland. But there were still the particles that had been swallowed by the demons. Then the messenger displays himself to the male demons in the form of a dazzling naked virgin, while the female demons see him as a handsome naked young man...fired by desire, the male demons...give forth their semen, and, with it, the light that they had swallowed. Fallen to the ground, their semen gives birth to all the vegetable species. As for the female devils who were already pregnant, at the sight of the handsome young man they give birth to abortions, which, cast onto the ground, eat the buds of trees, thus assimilating the light that they contained. Alarmed by the Third Messenger's tactics, matter, personified as Concupiscence, decides to create a stronger prison around the still-captive particles of light. Two demons, one male, the other female, devour all the abortions in order to absorb the totality of light, and they then couple. Thus Adam and Eve were engendered.[14]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo

Spiritual Crisis

2009-05-09T10:51:00.008-04:00

Spiritual Crises:

1. In Catholic school, eighth grade, my Nun told me that everyone that wasn't a Catholic was going to hell, sorry, but that's the way things are.
I asked, "What about Protestants?"
"I'm not sure."
"What about all the people in India?"
"Yes, they are going to hell."
"But they don't even have access to Catholic teaching."
She didn't say anything else.
After that conversation I knew something was very wrong with everything I had been taught up to that point.

2. After 9/11/2001 I saw the president on television, and he was asking for people to volunteer for the National Guard. I have never felt connected to my country, I thought maybe something was wrong with me, and I saw his request as an opportunity to see if I could feel connected. My expectations were that I would end up guarding a base for a few months if the war with Afghanistan got bad enough, but then we all know how things unfolded - we got war fever as a country and invaded Iraq (Jung called it "Wotan," after the German pre-Christian war god, and defined it as a collective, national psychosis directed as a passion for war. People slip into the collective unconscious archetype of the Shadow, and as a group agree to do evil). My expectations about only having to guard a base were wrong, and I had to leave grad school in my final semester to go to Texas and train for a year long deployment in Afghanistan. This left me feeling really ambivalent because:

My expectations were wrong

I felt bad about fighting in a war

It felt really great being outside and exercising and shooting rifles. I had a great time.

Having really strong feelings in two directions usually not identified together, brought on a period of intense self-reflection, which probably looked like depression to other people, but in retrospect I was unsure of what I was - and what looked like depression was more of a lack of commitment to a personality. I was pretty sure I should be nice to people, so I was nice when possible, but besides that it was all very vague. I felt vaguely humiliated that my country lionized pop-stars, and designer clothes, and felt that something Orwellian and sinister was happening to the world. My circumstances wouldn't allow me to resolve the internal conflict, but now that I am out of the National Guard I am internally able to understand my conflict more accurately.

When I came home for a two week leave, in the middle of my deployment from Afghanistan, I went to a Border's bookstore and walked straight to the philosophy section and picked up:

Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil"

Foucault's "Power"

and then I walked over to the psychology section, and not knowing very much about the subject bought every book authored by Sigmund Freud in the store.

I went back to Afghanistan with a backpack full of books. It was time to solve the riddle of existence, haha. The other soldiers didn't even really notice my reading, or if they did, they didn't say anything about it. Except one overnight guard shift, when I was reading the in the radio room, and the colonel came in and saw I was reading Foucault's "Power," and laughed. While reading the books in Afghanistan I got a lot more out of Nietzsche and Foucault than I did Freud, who seemed to be writing generally about an experience I wasn't having, if anything there wasn't enough "repressed drives."

But now I have found Carl Jung, and I feel a little like a religious convert - I want to spread the word, because Jung's explanations are very helpful while examining my life. I feel like a new person, like I can now clean my house/mind.

I can now identify when my witness consciousness is rambling/complaining, and just understanding that one concept, is saving a ton of time and struggle + I can get to my more productive thoughts easier - because I have started to be able to filter that little voice (witness consciousness) that complains and compares. Also, I can identify it in other people, and I can filter them, and have sympathy for them and their internal struggles instead of being annoyed.

I am in the process of seeing how far I can take a rejection of rational materialism. I would define rational materialism as the desire to spiritually fulfill yourself with two things:

facts

objects

I think rational materialism can work well in some specific cultural contexts, like medicine and science. But it is stupid for someone like me, an artist, to waste my time thinking like a scientist, because they are two different processes. Jung calls them directed and undirected thinking. The moment when an artist needs to use directed thinking is when they are editing work, or organising logistics for shipping work. The rest of the time they use their imagination/undirected thinking.

What we need as a people is a spiritual infrastructure that can survive in a non-isolated, multi-cultural, non-religious enviroment. This means we have to come to terms with the unconscious parts of ourselves which rational materialism either denies, tries to feed with objects, or explain with materialistic science, none of which can fill the void of the God-Image when trying to live a good and meaningful life.

I found this video after I googled the phrase "witness consciouness" and the word complaining, he wrote a popular book called A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle:

I should be in bed, but I am blogging.

2009-05-07T02:02:00.006-04:00

"Map of Nowhere." There is one now on Wooster St. It's by Grayson Perry, who is a transvestite and ceramicist, I didn't know he made prints, but this print is completely amazin'.

" Shitload of Chinese Food," from Right to Left: Dan, Cece, Jamie, and Me.

Gawd is surprisingly small.

"Bill gets an idea," Dan named this picture.

The American League. I like the guy's face in the middle.

Grayson Perry Etching detail, from "Map of Nowhere," which I saw today in a shop on Wooster St. about 3 doors down from the Drawing Center, and it blew me away. You can't see the stuff in the photo of the entire etching, but it has little notations like: "excessive logic leads to despair," and it will have an image of an old giant sailboat like the ones Columbus used sitting in a black sea. Another was the word "shopping" written on the penis of a cat/monkey, not exactly a subtle critique of rational materialism, but a man after my own heart. It was funny and poignant. It was awesome.

Grayson Perry's: Map of Nowhere.