“I get that my work looks ‘mainstream’ on the surface, but that’s actually the point. I practice pure automatism—I don’t plan these panels; I ‘channel’ them directly from my dreams. To force a ‘weird’ style just to look ‘indie’ would be a conscious ego move. By keeping the line-work clean and ordinary, I’m making sure my subconscious material isn’t buried under aesthetic posturing. It’s a direct transcription of the deep mind, unfiltered by what’s currently ‘cool.’‘
My work has a post-ironic viewpoint that centers around authentic integration of my subconscious with the conscious in my mind while I use my automatism to create the message that my subconscious hands me, in full regalia of a normal styled piece of comic book fiction. Most people’s automatic handwriting or drawing is only as realistic as their conscious mind’s ability to render the data that is handed off by the subconscious mind. Before I started using the subconscious automatism techniques, my style was actually less realistic. But both my style and my content has changed. It has to do with what that trickster of my subconscious mind is up to.
If you check, the work of René Magritte, Greta Stern, and Salvador Dali all used a style that was realistic. But they were all surrealists. Why did they then choose their subjects to look ordinary? Because these surrealists used a clear, academic, or “boring” style specifically to make their subconscious visions more unsettling and believable. They called this Veristic Surrealism.
I use this technique, too. All my work is channeled during my process from my subconscious, in one way or another, whether by writing the subconscious, or by drawing it directly. I practice a sort of mediumistic automatism in order to ensure accuracy. I let my hand paint or draw or write, and don’t subject my hand to ordinary conscious mental control.
The reason such material appears constrained to a normal, realistic mode is because even in my dreams, things are not random. My dreams themselves are somewhat realistic. But even though they may appear normal on the surface, there are associative, subjective perceptions and feelings that bypass the rational method of understanding. Even the most normal dream, when I dream it, seems surreal to me. So much so, that when I channel my preconscious mind when writing or drawing, it naturally expresses itself in a normal way, but so that I can’t reject it with my conscious mind’s traditional defense mechanisms. It then forces me to allow it to portray situations and ideas that normally I would be very defensive about to manifest in my drawings. I can’t reject them as “abnormal.” They are normal, they bypass my rational, waking mind’s defenses, and subvert my own expectations, so that they work directly on my subconscious mind, in a kind of feedback loop.
This, in turn, creates new dreams. Think of this: if you were my unconscious mind, and you knew that I had a very cinematic style of rendering and academic style of writing, wouldn’t you try to use these to your advantage, if I gave you the chance to create using some form of automatism, where my hand would be controlled by you directly?
Perhaps someday I’ll be ready for the more unfiltered kind of work, and my conscious and subconscious will get along better. Or maybe my subconscious mind or my conscious mind will defect or rebel against the other.
My conscious mind is a surrendered instrument to my subconscious mind. And I believe yours is too, whether or not you are currently aware of what your subconscious does with you when you write or draw.
If you have seen David Cronenberg’s “History of Violence,” then you will know that he and I both share some similar Veristic Surrealist methods. His movie seems like a Hollywood movie on the surface. But under the hood, the film is jarring, disorienting, and speaks directly to the subconscious. He uses the conscious mind to talk to the subconscious mind, not the subconscious mind to speak to the conscious mind, which I have found to be always defended against by the same defense mechanisms of almost everybody who isn’t some kind of artist.
I have a feeling, though, that my subconscious mind will have the final word and the last laugh. And I hope you will be laughing in a most pecucaliarly unsettled, but cordial manner, too.
