Taking pics of unfinished painting

Colourful automata

my recent automatic drawings, oil sticks and pen on paper

Painting with my athame

ritual-painting from xgeronimo on Vimeo.

2 step painting evolution

2 superimposed layers, acrylics on canvas, 1 x 1 meter

Night drawings

last night experiment, drawing on paper while sleeping:

12345

Untitled painting

acrylics on board, 100 x 100 cm

Big Bang Theory on coffee stained t-shirt

Big Bang is an instance of appearance of visual phenomena of the Universe.

Automatic drawing and painting time-lapse

Automatic drawing is a drawing which is produced from a subconscious, and/or external and/or spiritual source without conscious awareness of the content. In this session I mix it with sigil magick.

The following video is a time-lapse of a ritual painting with the following stages:

1. Getting myself blindfolded and performing a shamanic spinning around dance to get myself into a state of trance (gnosis).
2. Starting to draw figures and shapes (still blindfolded) while mentally repeating my SOI (statement of intent) and letting my hand to move freely as it wishes.
3. When the drawing part is done, removing the mask and enhancing the lines (some didn't turn out very clear).
4. Colouring the shapes.

Automatic drawing and painting time-lapse from xgeronimo on Vimeo.

Soundtrack: Fluorescent Records, World View EP - River Gods

Random dice drawing experiment

throwing dice in 3s to create triangles

Idea: From memorial of fear to memorial of wisdom

Last year I published a post Love instead of Fear about Berlin's  Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe .

Here's an alternative proposal:

Why not use the medium to promote the ancient Jewish teachings of enlightenment?

Kabbalah is a set of esoteric teachings to explain the relationship between an unchanging, eternal and mysterious Ein Sof (no end) and the mortal and finite universe (his creation).



The grey blocks would be covered with ancient artistic drawings, symbols and charts explaining the mysteries of life and death.

P.S. The wind comes from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_Industry

Self-portrait in gnosis

1x1 meters, acrylics on hardboard

Mystic

Thought Forms

digital rendering of my paintings:

Wizard

dUOs

experimenting with free forms

Ouroboros

ART vs DESIGN (thesis)

Most people of modern popular culture confuse Design with Art.

Both have different origins and purposes.

Design is born out of need to make things better, to improve or make them more comfortable in use (via first craftsmen). It has a local quality.

Art, on the other hand, is born out of need to communicate deeper meaning of existence (via 'accidental' shamans). Its purpose is to transcend the mundane perception of the world and it has a non-local quality.

Here's my thesis: 

The fundamental difference between Art and Design lies in the lack of spiritual mystery of the latter. 

I believe that the first artist was a shaman. Also, visual Art was created out of need to communicate something ‘unusual’ and long before people developed a fully comprehensive speech.

 

This is how I see it happened.

Imagine a person in the ancient world who accidentally experiences an altered state of consciousness through the use of psychoactive plants (i.e. try and error in discovering new foods). Suddenly he experiences a world that is very different from common reality. The experience is so dramatic that this person now wants to communicate it to other persons in his tribe. 

How can he do that? 

Pointing at the cause of it (the plant) is obviously not enough to communicate the inner experience. And so, this person takes a stick (or whatever) and starts drawing! He draws dots and lines that are similar to entoptic patterns caused by ingestion of psychoactive plants. Thus a new spiritual world has been introduced to the consciousness of early humans. And also it gave birth to Art.

Many people think that some form of Art pre-existed the discovery of psychedelics. In my opinion it is not so. And here’s why:

As we know, the difference between animals and homo sapiens lies in the degree of cognition of the outside world (consciousness). Terence McKenna’s theory of Stoned Ape postulates that the transition from ape man to a more conscious being was kick-started by accidental consumption of a psychedelic plant.

In other words, it provided an alternative (supernatural) reference to their mundane perception of reality.

My point is that without this second reference point Art couldn’t have existed. Of course, before the discovery of the 'supernatural' primitive people had made and used some kind of tools and instruments for survival. Craft predates Art.

I also contest that prior the discovery of alternative state of consciousness and the ‘supernatural’  no religious ideas could have been formed in the mind of a primitive man.  i.e. the perception of thunder and lightening was similar to how animals react to it - power, danger, run for life!

In fact, one needs that second reference point to form even superstition.

So, without early psychedelic experience there couldn't have been Art, a religious view or even an abstract thought.

...

If you see beauty in everything, you're a designer. A sunrise is beautiful, so are mountains, but it's not yet Art. It's a beautiful design (of nature). People can make beautiful things too, I call them designers. But Art is more than just about 'beautiful'. Art is about a beautiful mystery.

(Children can see a mystery. Most adults just see a beautiful thing.)

Brief history of art

Our process of cognition of any sort of reality consists of two main parts:

1. Imitation (study)
2. Manipulation (mastery)

What we call ‘evolution’ follows the same pattern.

BRIEF HISTORY OF ART

1. A shaman draws the first picture: imitation with spiritual (internal) point of reference.
Example: entoptic patterns of early paleolithic cave art, aboriginal art, etc.

2. Followed by imitation with physical (external) point of reference.
Example: realistic forms in classical art

3. Followed by manipulation with physical point of reference
Example: free forms, cubism, impressionism, expressionism, etc.

4. Followed by revived interest in imitation with spiritual point of reference
Example: psychedelic art, abstract, etc.

5. Followed by manipulation with spiritual point of reference
Example: kaos magick art, spiritually conceptual art, etc.


note: # 5  is an extension of # 1

Magickal Alphabet of Desire

Automatic drawing, 22 sigils, done using ‘light drawing’ technique of long exposure. How to do: 1. switch off lights and achieve gnosis, 2. focus on your SOI (statement of intent), 3. automatically draw a sigil with your camera pointing at a point of light (i used green LED light of my laptop) while chanting your desire.