WHAT DO THEY MEAN?

They could represent many things, and I would hate to deprive anyone of their own personal meanings attached to them.

My favourite response that comes up a lot is that it reminds people of ‘The Matrix’. I just rewatched the first one a couple weeks ago, and it’s pretty spot on. What a film!

All this said, I am asked what they mean quite often, so, here we go.

They sort of came up “randomly”, as if anything is random when it comes directly from your brain.

As someone who has been somewhat of a ‘late bloomer’ in terms of recognising and labelling emotions or rational thoughts in any kind of organised way, sometimes my brain tells me things that I find cryptic. When someone with slightly more sensibility would likely have no trouble to decipher at all.

I had originally drawn them as little fetuses that lay quietly in bubbles, spurting water from a hole in their heads. This head-fountain was filling their bubble homes up with enough water for them to float, but also seemed to cause an overflow that cascaded down into the pond they’re hovering above. This pond, scattered with Lily pads and a lotus in the centre, emitted steam from where the head-fountain water overflow connected with its otherwise placid body.

I still don’t really know what this means, however, I liked it a lot. I decided to call it a ‘painting plan’, and used it as inspiration for my painting ‘Incubation’, which at the time had the proposed title ‘Rebirth’.

This was the first time that fetuses had appeared in my work, that I can recall.

I began this painting in November, 2018, but it wasn’t until May 2019 that I figured out what it was telling me. I only know the month because I’ve virtually documented my entire career as an artist via my instagram, and May is the time stamp that I posted about my ‘epiphany’, brought on by listening to Chet Zar interview David Van Gough on the Dark Art Society podcast.

David talks about the endless treadmill of doing the same thing daily, cradle to the grave, which sparked something in me. He was talking about having a day job with no other source of fulfilment. For me, I realised that although I had been pushing myself to make art as much as possible, I had been letting myself take the ‘easy route’ by avoiding the thing that really hurts.

And that is to be brutally fucking honest in my work.

All of a sudden I could see exactly what the painting was trying to tell me. I wasn’t painting babies, I was painting myself, and my brothers.

Safe and sound, they lay quietly inside the bubbles. There’s also a feeling of a kind of longing to be nurtured, and undertones of absent self-belief. The fetuses don’t believe they can grow out of their assigned bubbles, and so they don’t.

“…the psyche’s regressive longing to be reborn through the mother” - line taken from an essay on Jung, by Robert F Meade

Finally, I felt I had found a way to truly explore my identity and my experiences in a very real and honest way, without being too “on the nose”.

I kept on sketching babies in bubbles, sometimes with umbilical cords wrapped around them like shibari ropes. Bound by self doubt. Complacent, their own growth is restricted, but they show no resistance.

They just accept. 

People bound by ropes are nothing new to my usual reserve of symbology. 

I recently found some very old drawings I’d done of women tied up from when I was about 16 years old. I feel the meaning hasn’t really changed much since then. Maybe slightly less ‘emo’.

All this baby stuff lead me to be reading about Jung’s incest theory - which is metaphorical, not literal - and I fully realised the concept that these babies are actually just adults who are refusing to ‘grow up’. They’re not taking care of themselves, they can’t see themselves as adults, they just want to stay in the womb, a time of zero responsibility.

Late June, on a flight from Melbourne to Sydney, I doodled a faceless baby inside a cube on a napkin. It was this rough sketch that really ‘solidified’ the concept, the decision to encase them in cubes instead of bubbles.

I should also note that I realised I wanted to move away from them being depicted as straight up babies, have their figures be more elongated but still with infantised heads. Paedomorphia. This thought led me to their new look, fleshed out in the next couple of paintings (shown further down this post).

In July 2019 I painted two cube-babies on the 3 week Academy of Visionary Art painting intensive held in Torri, Italy. They sit with their backs to us, their little heads just popping out the top of the cube.

The babies never quite fit into their assigned cubes, but they also lack the confidence to grow out of them.

We’ve set up this society and forced each other to fit the mould, how many of us actually feel like we fit in?

What’s worse is how many people just want to drag each other down.

A heart wrenching analogy that a friend told me, was about how the crab is his hometown’s mascot. It is in reference to what’s known as the ‘Crab Mentality’. When a cast of crabs are kept in a bucket, the bucket doesn’t need a lid. This is because when one crab pulls itself to the top of the bucket, the others will always drag it back down.

There is no escape when you allow others to define you.

MY INTENTION

I hope to use the cube babies to inspire change, to light a fire. To help wake people up. This is not the 1999 blockbuster ‘The Matrix’, this is real life… and most of us are just watching it float on by.

Maybe you’ve been asleep, that’s okay, I was too for most of my life. There’s always NOW to wake up. Accept that change is difficult, but the path of least resistance might mean spending too much of your precious life inside the cube you were assigned at birth. Maybe it’s simply not the cube for you. Only you can make that decision.

"You can give people the best encouragement in the world, hand them the best tactics, techniques, and strategies, but it still won’t work until the pain of staying the same outweighs the pain of putting in the work and making a change." –Ramit Sethi

THE HOW

My approach to most of my paintings varies, so there’s no general ‘how to’ guide for my work. I do tend to prefer to begin my paintings in acrylic and then switch to oil, to save time. I also like to generate lots of base texture using the ‘decalcomania’ technique I mentioned in the previous blog.

I painted over the top of an old unfinished painting for ‘Incubation’. One I had made back at TAFE in 2011 when I was studying for my diploma. It was a massive canvas that I’d built myself from scratch, I had held onto it because it was so large, I felt it would be a waste to not re-use it again some day

Something came from my intuition that said it was going to be a green body of water. So I bought Old Holland’s luminous colour ‘Green Gold’, and felt it was going to be the staple of the piece.

I began this painting in oil with just a giant green and yellow horizontal gradient, like day break over a swamp. Then I began a kind of ‘grisaille’ approach. 

Grisaille

a method of painting in grey monochrome, typically to imitate sculpture.

Except I used paynes grey, which is a kind of dark blue. From here I to-and-fro’d using home-made tempera grassa with titanium white pigment and raw umber for the shadows. This inclusion of egg tempera or tempera grassa defines it as ‘mischtechnik’, a common approach to painting in the visionary art world.

I finally finished Incubation at the end of July 2020. That’s just 4 months shy of 2 years!

I think it took so long because I made a few major changes, mostly when switching from bubbles to cubes, and during this time I was also using a resin based medium which meant that layers were taking their sweet time to dry completely in between. I’m not sure I’d ever elect to paint this way again, just due to how long it was in between layers, and the stickiness of the resin.

The other cube babies were painted mostly in acrylic. CUBISM I was about 90% acrylic with touches of oil to finish, and CUBISM II was about almost entirely done in acrylic, with only the steam done in oil.

I like to utilise all the different ways to paint - starting with random texture from decalcomania and abstract mark making, to building tones in grisaille, followed by glazes, sometimes egg tempera detailing, with also direct painting wherever necessary.

Is doing “all the things” it’s own kind of technique?

WHY CUBES THO

The final thoughts I’m going to leave this post with is this, the very awesome, very relevant, advice from the excellent book by Austin Kleon ‘Steal like an Artist’.

“Don’t steal from one, steal from many” –Austin Kleon

This is advice I live by as an artist. I don’t pretend to be the most original artist in the world, and I get my ideas from EVERYWHERE.

Words, lyrics, music, books, cartoons, and of course, other artists. I ravenously devour the work of other artists. I never steal directly, but I get massively inspired by them.

The babies ended up being in cubes after spending some time with my good friend and awesome artist Charlie Mowatt. Check him out!

Watching him obsessively build worlds in perspective planted the seed I needed.

I believe he suggested to me that cubes would better define the space they exist in. Which is to say, you can tell where a cube is in relation to its surroundings, a bubble is way harder to describe in perspective.

He also gave me some epic visual instructions for learning different types of perspective. Thanks for introducing me to this rabbit hole, Charlie!

The cubes help make the landscape more convincing, because they show depth. Aside from getting the perspective correct, the trickiest part was describing the non-geometric elements in perspective ie. the actual babies themselves. Trying to imagine them from different angles without photo reference.

I feel I will keep exploring this concept until I have built an entire universe of cube babies, or feel that the cathartic aspect of it has served me fully. I also have stuck to this concept thanks to this (highly recommended!) youtube video by Struthless. 

And be sure to check out  the full making of ‘Incubation’, mostly in timelapse. Featuring STAUNCH track ‘Switch Foot’

"Since we can never hope to understand why we're here, if there's even anything to understand, the individual should choose a goal and pursue it wholeheartedly, despite the certainty of death and the meaninglessness of action."
–Kierkegaard

Written by Ash Darq, with special thanks to my editor Visaic