HOWARD NEUFELD, artist

The Process: The means to form the Chaos that informs the content.

The Process is the means used to inform the content, making the "invisible" internal Reality visible as visual effects or visual phenomena of Being. Abstraction coming from the artist's "internal" Reality increases the odds of a "disclosure" to occur by using simultaneous-receptivity and improvisation as the means used in the Process; one that is not accidental, impulsive, or spontaneous. I see a difference between "discovery," which is about the individual artist, in this case me, and "a disclosure" via Process, something that is revealed by the painting itself. It works by keeping intention out of the equation as much as possible on a conscious level.

In Process as I call it, I make a series of decisions before taking action such as choosing the color(s), or whether to limit the paint to B&W, if there is an underpainting or not, how much paint is loaded into the brush, its viscosity, its hue, its transparency or opacity, the size and type of brush or brushes, etc. These decisions are followed: by using a "patterning" of force, rhythm, and direction by the softer or more forceful hitting of the surface of the Structure with paint and brush (the brush is held perpendicular to the surface of the Structure); the pace of application being faster or slower, along with the intuitive changes of direction. I do all of this just "to see what will happen;" if some kind of an "illusion" results where I sense a reminder of something I might have seen before. The "image" contains a bit of memory, a "trait" of something encountered in my past that also has an illusionistic quality about it. 

The illusions that emerge from this Process are discovered (or disclosed), recognized, and revealed somewhat in the same manner as the cave paintings of so long ago. Something, an illusion begins to form, and then another, each time recognizing and revealing more illusions as the Process interacts with the Structure.

From the beginning, whether I realized it at the time or not, I was drawn to abstraction primarily because it offered the openness to explore the "internal" aspects of creating a painting: as the artist in the developmental processes, the possibilities for the painting itself, and the participation of the viewer in their reception of the painting. Without intention on my part, this Process may provide an opportunity for the sub-conscious to participate, likewise, there can also be a sort of quasi-control in that the artist sees what is happening on the canvas as it occurs and can respond with intuition. Either way, intent is left out of the Process. I'm not sure which one applies in my case since there are times when things just happen without my awareness and are "disclosed" later, while other times I am aware of what is happening on the painting and intuitively respond. This self-awareness while paint is being applied is what I call "simultaneous-receptivity" where responses "on the fly" can be made intuitively as to stopping, continuing a certain action, or modifying it. I see this as also having taken place with DeKooning's Abstract Expressionism and also in Pollock's "all over" approach.

Earlier in history there was the Pointillism of Seurat - dabs of individual color placed next to each other to "optically mix;" to appear as that of an actual mixture of paint. He was inspired by the color/physics of the time to better understand how we actually see or perceive color in the form of light. Light is the carrier/transformer of color and behaves both as particles and as waves.

When I first saw the results of my using improvisation in what I call a Process, it actually reminded me of Seurat's Pointillism. In one approach I use white paint on a dark field that produces a value-range resulting in what I call a visual phenomena of Chaos. The black or dark blue field functions as the pitch blackness of the depths of a cave and the resulting value-range gives it an illusionistic quality that reads as volumetric, kenetic, and spatial; as if constructed of particles in non-objective form.

Note: It's interesting that particles in the context of the theory of Quantum Mechanics do not exist as such, but as a "process" of energy in motion. The visible, therefore, is a process not made of particles, but of energy that we perceive as mass, i.e., something physically present.