Milner, Marion. On Not Being Able to Paint. 4th ed. New York: International Universities Press, 1979.
This book is an intriguing account of the author's attempts to come to an understanding of her own creative process through painting and art. Milner chooses her own art, rather than referring to prominent masters for her subject matter. She closely scrutinizes her work through intimate journal entries and random writings that she openly shares with the reader. After each journal writing, she explains to the reader her thoughts at that exact moment and where they fit into the framework of her creative process.
There are many feelings and thoughts expressed by Milner that I can closely relate to and have experienced myself as an artist. Many of the in-depth questions that she poses to herself are the same ones that I've asked myself and haven't had any answers. Milner's ability to look deep within herself and analyze her paintings and drawings is truly an art in itself. The answers and conclusions that she comes to about her creative process are helpful to me in clarifying questions about my own art.
One of many conclusions that Milner comes to is that our waking lives and what we "image" in our own "waking" perception is actually a representation of our subconscious selves. She believes that the unconscious mind is constantly bombarding the conscious mind with thoughts and experiences. To clarify her thoughts, Milner quotes three excerpts from Santayana's Little Essays: The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men:
Perception is no primary phase of consciousness: it is an ulterior function acquired by a dream which has become symbolic of its own external conditions, and therefore relevant to its own destiny.... Such relevance and symbolism are indirect and slowly acquired: their status cannot be understood unless we regard them as forms of imagination happily grown significant.... In imagination, not in perception, lies the substance of experience, while science and reason are but its chastened and ultimate form. (26)
This was a frightening thing for me to read and had to reread these passages a few times to comprehend them. Milner has truly set my thoughts "on their ear." Everything that she has stated has a justification with my own perception when drawing or painting. This also ties in with the constant struggle between right and left brain for dominance during the creative process. This explains why so many people feel uncomfortable drawing for the first time. In the process of realizing their subconscious minds (right brains), their conscious minds (left brain) can't adjust to this shift in power and retaliate by trying to shut down future upheavals from the subconscious. Milner writes:
So I could only suppose that, in one part of the mind, there really could be a fear of losing all sense of separating boundaries; particularly the boundaries between the tangible realities of the external world and the imaginative realities of the inner world of feeling and idea; in fact a fear of being mad. This same fear was to appear again in connection with the imaginative perception of action in nature, the fear that letting in imaginative perception of action in nature, the fear that letting go common sense appearances and letting in imagination meant letting in madness. I wondered, perhaps this was one reason why new experiments in painting can arouse such fierce opposition and anger. People must surely be afraid, without knowing it, that their hold upon reason and sanity is precarious, else they would not so resent being asked to look at visual experience in a new way, they would not be so afraid of not seeing the world as they have always seen it and in the general publicly agreed way of seeing it. (17)
Milner has given me many answers to the discomfort that I feel when trying to produce abstract art. My left conscious mind will not accept the results of my experiments into this unknown area of my art. Although I am consciously aware of the transition from left to right mode of perception when producing representational art, I haven't yet been able to do this while producing abstract art. Milner's book has given me many answers and clues to getting closer to my goal of painting meaningful abstract art.