GARY BORSE: EXOCONSCIOUS ART EXHIBIT

      This is a process I am learning all the time and next week I will set up and do it again. Slightly different than the Florida landscape works I create which are more representational and have pre-existing conditions in that I know I am creating a landscape on a hill or on the coast and like many artists I use remote viewing to see those things and record them on the canvas. 

      I am in the studio listening to classical music I love, it could be a piano sonata or full- blown oratorio and I am connecting my emotions to the feeling I get from that music. My chores are all done on the farm and I have my physical needs met as well as water and green tea on my desk. My iphone is nowhere in the studio, it is crucial you are not interrupted during the session or it’s over. I can ignore most animal noise on the farm unless someone shows up and the dogs go wild or there is a bad squall and lightning comes close.

     I setup the stretched and primed and toned canvas flat on the table lower than the palette table, which is behind me at wrist height built for ergonomic painting for me. I do not want the palette near the piece because I do not want color bias. Remember there are no rules here so don’t make your own. I squeeze out all the colors I want and make a full broad palette for something like this with Pyrole Red and Red Light, Cad Orange, Cad Yellow, Pthalo Green, Pthalo Blue (Green Shade and Red Shade), Ultramarine, Quinacridone Magenta and Titanium White. 

     I have two buckets of water for color rinse and one holding brushes. This can also be done with any amount of colors or none at all, this is just my setup for this experiment I did with this series and I like that palette as it is wide spectrum. I have several brushes of different sizes but prefer a two-inch brush with a short handle to start moving paint everywhere then I grab smaller ones later when I see things that need clarification but a large brush gives more freedom and less chance of using your mind to quickly fill up the canvas with colors and shapes.

     When I am all ready to go I sit and breathe into a relaxed state for just a few minutes to get my excitement down and get away from my monkey mind, comfortable I can be standing here for three to four hours if possible. For my large pieces I sometimes play Beethoven’s Consecration of the House to get me into the sacred space and mood that I will create something grand and powerful like the piece I am listening to. As you create you are one with the creator and to hook up you must let go of your shit so you can allow yourself to be a radio receiver and take instructions to use your body to create something and not your mind.

     I played music all my life and jazz for several years with some of the best players in the business and when you are playing music with others you are connected through that dimension of music that is created by using the intellect and your emotions at the same time connecting those feelings and skills with the other musicians. When you do that’s real magic and music that moves people as well as the musicians that play it. I have had season tickets for the Florida Orchestra for sixteen years until Covid, and every time I went the feeling of being present with all that energy and emotion from all those musicians is a high in itself for me just listening to them warm up sets me into that sacred space and as I look around me I can see others going to the same space I am headed. This is the connection you are seeking here. When you are at the concert you are the observer and this is what you must become in this game.

      I look at the canvas to get a screen shot of the color field tone and then I turn around and start mixing colors on the “dance floor” as I call my palette, and pouring water all over the palette sloppy sloppy, mix it all up, make a mess.

     I dip into the paint and turn around and start dropping colored water everywhere smearing and dabbing colors and water to cover the whole canvas while I am disconnecting myself from those pre-existing conditions and eliminating my fear. Remember, no rules. I am just throwing color and paint and looking for what I am supposed to see as I start intuitively reaching for a blue and a yellow or a green over there and red dots or orange streak of paint or blue smears making shapes and placing colors close to others that ask for those colors. 

     I am not mixing any particular color at all, when I dip I just turn and place it somewhere quickly. It’s not a race but the point is to stay connected to the divine in that you are the observer watching someone else paint a picture by staying slightly above your own body and watching yourself paint you will start to see images appear and enhance them just to see what they are.

     Because you know how to move and create shapes you are now starting to get your pre-existing conditions mixed up if not relaxed and unafraid, the fear of the unknown must be gone. This is an exciting unknown journey and you are not supposed to know where you are going or you will get lost. Each time I start to develop something like a figure I turn away and mix more paint so I do not fall backwards or lose the thread of continuity by trying to make what I know rather than what is showing up. The development must not be confined to one area, so each time I turn and dip I go to another part of the canvas and lay it out to remain unbiased with color and shapes. If I develop an image more it is simply because I turned to the left rather than the right more times with color on my brush, whether intuitively or as instructed and where I laid it down. I may see something and place a piece of paint there with a big fat brush and it will become a head or body.

     Then I keep placing the paint wherever I feel it needs to be with how it pleases my eye like looking at a garden of flowers and keep doing that as these images start appearing I am seeing something so I keep looking each time to see what it is as I keep laying paint on top of the images it matters not what color I use anymore now, it’s all about amplification and clarification of something I can see but I still don’t know what it is. So color is irrelevant and I do not question that because it’s none of my business until I look at it when it’s finished and I am back in me again.

      Once I start getting more direct in my painting and catch myself doing something I am not supposed to do then I know I have lost that thread and the painting session is basically over. If I am interrupted I will get started again as soon as possible. I clean up and look at what I did on the easel now and decide if I can work on it or leave it alone. I enhanced each piece on the easel after I did them lying flat, but I did not spend hours on them like I did when I was in that state of “pure allowing” when I was letting myself totally go into that place I was looking at appearing on the canvas while I worked on it. I can now see that place and something going on there like I was there myself in a dream.  

     I touched them up to define the edges or add more white to an orb that I liked or a splash of color somewhere for balance. I wanted to leave them as open to interpretation as I could and leave everything up to your own reality to determine what is going on here. I did not see the observer on the right in purple until the next day and that may have been my channel for all I know, showing me this event or parallel reality of sorts. 

      “Clearing Negativity” is my second foray into the unknown and I am letting the viewer figure this one out. The negative aspect could be either one of these two different entities.

I started by washing the canvas in bright reds and orange splashes of color with some magenta and blue then I started scribbling really quickly with some really dark blues kind of like a pen and ink dance and as I scribbled I started to see some kind of structure on the top like buildings or trees. Then the scribbles at the bottom started to look like those little guys in the first painting and I was totally amused and all in so I continued to paint into these shapes creating what looks like a load of these little beings on the move. Emphasis being very sketchy as I do not know what I am looking at here yet and where the piece is going. The marks on top started to turn into other beings not structures and then I was looking at a story of some sort.

      After several hours I was losing the thread because I had many interruptions working on this piece. I quit until the next day and then put it on the easel to look at it. To create a painting now I had to emphasize and highlight parts of the story so I started my usual routine of settling down and trying to allow this image to develop by itself. Looking at the shapes (beings) on the top those solid shapes became more broken with lighter values as the little shapes became more detailed in the emphasis of their movement was in bright solid pigments. 

The palette is still loaded with color and water and anything goes but there is more control of me and some of the left brain bleeds through now in the painting because I slowed down the painting from scribbling to making a deliberate effort to get more detail out of this piece going to smaller brushes and more pigment. Orbs came out where the splashes hit the canvas while I was painting. Those could be supervising or just watching as witnesses. 

      I am not as happy with this piece as it turned out because I painted it with too much of me thinking at the end. This endeavor I am attempting requires the left brain to shut down and go into the right brain controlling the creation as this is the primary function of the right brain to connect to the universe and pull out inspiration and insight from the universal consciousness. Children are still in their right brains until about age 5 when they start to use their left brain to analyze and sort it all out and their creations are uninhibited and uncensored by the left brain.

      The other thing I thought about during this piece was BLM because there was so much of it in the news I have been thinking about it subconsciously and that may have something to do with this piece with all the beings together, commotion and smoke etc. Remember there is no definitive activity here it’s all subjective to the viewer’s imagination (I’m a viewer too) and either entity could be troublemakers. After this was done I decided my series would be called “Parallel Worlds” because there are so many similarities as the universe is infinite and full of life around every star which we should not call stars, but suns because that’s what our star is called and that would help people understand the dynamics of the universe a little better.

     “The Visitation” is 36 x 36 acrylic on canvas. This is my third shot at channeling images in my work and I was thrilled when I finished it because I felt I really had a breakthrough here in quieting my mind to bring something out of the unknown and it happened quickly. This piece took about three hours straight uninterrupted painting with almost non-existent easel enhancement when I was done. The image could not be improved after the session was done, there was simply nothing else there to see but what is already there and I did not want to disturb what I brought out in the raw. I wasn’t attempting to make a pretty painting, I wanted to play in the woods and see what is there and felt I had accomplished this goal whether the piece was colorful or not had nothing to do with it. I was learning to fly.

     I started pouring water with pthalo green and blues with some pyrole red acrylic over the canvas to go into the darkness. A full color live and messy liquid palette but mostly using the blues and greens here for the whole piece. I was not moved to go into other brighter colors in this piece or the next larger one I did either and most of my acrylics on the palette dried without being used. I think it was a sense of place I was feeling the whole time that kept me from adding colors. I felt like this scene was real as it developed quickly right before my eyes, no preconceived notions at all and after I was done I probably have spent more time looking at it than I did painting it. Where did this come from? How did I do this?

     As I started scribbling aimlessly with a 2” brush and making marks I saw an angel or what I thought was an angel begin to appear and then there were all these marks and splashes at the bottom that started turning into those little guys that were in the last two pieces. I let it happen by itself by constantly dipping into the paint and laying it out flat letting the paint pool where it wanted to and each time I turned back to the painting I saw something else that was showing up and I would quickly add more paint there and turn back to the palette for more paint trying to keep my mind out of it by allowing myself to be in the music I was listening to and ignore my thoughts. It was very hot and humid that day and little drops of sweat from my forehead make some orb splashes around the painting, some later enhanced on the easel to bring up the intensity of the orbs a little for clarity.

     This looks like a gathering of beings that are having an experience being visited by another entity thus the title I gave it. Your interpretations are welcome, you might know more about this picture than I do from your own dreams or experiences.

     The Explorers is acrylic on canvas 48 x 36 and my next painted piece into the unknown. This piece was done the same as the last piece pouring acrylic-tinted water all over the canvas and pushing it around with a two-inch brush to see what is hiding behind the curtain. I asked for a story that was clearer than the others and actually feel like I got an answer in this piece. Although I cannot really say what is going on here because I am an observer like you, I can get an idea that there are many beings here in all kinds of forms that appear. But the two out front look like hikers with all kinds of things sticking out of them, the power wand appeared at the end. It could be a protection tool. Each time I looked at those two beings I was enhancing them and seeing more but I kept being attracted to the wand that was part of what I thought was an arm. All of a sudden it had light on it with a dab of paint and then it made more sense what was going on and I had a title for the piece. 

     Each creature seemed to appear easily and I just smeared the paint a little more and laid a few brushstrokes on top of an area and voila I had someone there and moved along constantly poking and dabbing while the water was drying in some of the areas faster than others. It was like I was attracted to the areas that were drying faster to pull something from them or add more color and water from the palette behind me.

      Again those little guys came into this piece that appear in the other pictures. They are like ants or some kind of bug. This time they look like observers and maybe they are children playing or a group of curious villagers watching these guys walk through the darkness that also have bug-like characteristics. They all look like they have personalities, when I look at them individually they all exhibit idiosyncrasies that give them each character.

     As I painted this piece I was dripping with sweat because it was so hot and humid and some of the splashes of sweat turned into cool orbs. Each orb another being, I was grabbing all the dots that I saw and putting emphasis on them, the bigger the splash the bigger the orb. Part of the process, don’t look back. There are lots of beings here and each one is so different than the others it’s like taking a photographic slice out of the species that live within this realm.

The Explorers took about five hours with a few necessary breaks always keeping the palette wet and starting up again by relaxing into the fold and when I came back the next day and put it on the easel and enhanced only the orbs as to not disturb the actual piece the way it transformed from water and color to images that tell a story that is based on your own interpretation of your own reality.

      This piece was another confirmation for me in that I find it is better to stay in the liquidity to pull something out rather than directly painting images that appear to come from nowhere because the water allows more possibilities and there is less involvement with the other part of the mind you are supposed to close while working like this. Like having something appear in the clouds while you are lying on your back dreaming and you can barely make it out but you see or feel an image you relate to.

     One of the most fascinating parts of this is when I look at it days later I see something I did not see previously and that adds more fuel to the mystery again.