Drawing out Chaos
Emergent system drawings & emerging as an artist
Right now I am navigating a big change in how I work. It can be quite painful to put aside something that was working, but no longer does.
So I am going deeper into past transitions to see what worked, and what didn’t work, hopefully easing this current phase change.
Fascination - Chaos
It's 2010, and I am in love with chaos theory. The world has shifted on its axis, and revelation after revelation is opening up the structure of this universe to me.
The vision is all so brilliant - the simple interactions between agents in a system creating sophisticated, resilient patterns of behaviour - patterns that appear magical or designed by a higher power - can be parsed, thought about, and occasionally manipulated, if you can see the systems.
And I see them everywhere. The systems become visible to me, lighting up tracks around me, creating family structures, financial collapses, and landslides on the banks of rivers. Without intent, without teleological effort; all arising from simple repeated interactions of agents - entities within the systems.
Drawing Out
I was drawing a lot at the time, too. Often, these soothing, repetitive lines would appear in my work.
I would draw a line, and then repeat the line. But each successive line slightly exaggerated the natural bumps and waves that a hand-drawn line has, the slight shaking and blotting. And then, I would exaggerate that line slightly on the next repetition.
Shapes and waves would emerge, and then distinct forms. One line would respond in a simple way to the line before it. And corals, leaves, amoebas, canyons, and dunes would emerge from that interaction.
The process itself created the results, not my own decisions about what I should draw. And it all felt as if I was co-creating with the systems as a partner.
The initial conditions of each drawing as a system were laid down by the first line - a box, a straight line, or a circle. With the tiny flaws in that first line, too. The shaking of my hand, the curvature of my wrist, blots from the ink in the dip pen.
Not knowing how the drawings would turn out kept me fascinated.
And I loved the question of what exactly I was doing, creating an algorithm for myself to draw with, a rule for drawing. A machine could easily follow the same rules, so how was it meaningful for me to draw in this way, algorithmically? How was what I was making different from what a machine would make?
One of the answers to that was that a machine would need flaws, blots, and shakes programmed into it, in order to make similar art. My frail, flawed human system provided all the glitches necessary to create the initial condition.
From where I am now, undiagnosed autism is at play here too. My brain-mind focuses on algorithms and patterns much more strongly than most people. The repetitive, wave-like lines too, are a stim, dramatically soothing and calming me.
Stop
And there came a time when I got stuck, suddenly stopped. The excitement of making the drawings dropped away in a crash. It became too easy for me to predict what would happen in the drawings - the excitement was gone.
Chaos theory had settled peacefully in my mind. I still see emergent patterns and complex systems everywhere, but I experience them as the normal way the world works. No longer a bright light illuminating everything I see.
Physically, I was suffering a bit too. The repetitive strain injury (RSI) that has plagued me since my twenties flared up again - deliberately engaging in very repetitive drawing practice like this was taking a toll.
Be Seen
But I also felt this desperation and the need to be seen as an artist. These drawings were beginning to create that for me. And working to get seen, to be recognized, is nearly always a slow, slow process. Or at least a lot slower than I actually wanted! Staying with one style of art making smooths this path to success. If your work is largely similar from one year to the next, people have a mental hook to hang you on. They like art style A, your name becomes associated with art style A, and the network effect is able to take place. Connections between your name and style A build up, become denser. As long as you stick with style A.
I could see the start of this process happening. And my needy, needy self loved it.
So I kept pushing myself to make more and more of the emergent drawings.
Phase Change
In chaos theory terms, I underwent a phase change: a sudden and dramatic shift from one stable state (of delighted obsession) to a completely different stable state. The art world, I think, I believe, doesn't appreciate the trajectory of this storyline.
A more comprehensible pattern of logical, well-thought-out 'developments' resonates with most of the world. These sudden and dramatic changes of obsessions that rock and lurch through my life do not.
But the triggers for these dramatic fascinations and dramatic drop-offs and switching of 'special interests' (oh how mild that word sounds, nothing like the blazing delight of my actual experience) are barely comprehensible to me as I pass through them. I just know that one day I am obsessed with something, the next day I am not. Without that transformative moment, some sort of growth in the main character's understanding, that is used as the crux for a narrative framework, I don't have a way of telling this story.
The loss of an obsession is an agonising loss in itself, without the difficulty of explaining it to yourself and the world. An obsession conjures up a reliably wonderful state of mind, a brain that is sparkling with delight. So you have to deal with that loss, as well as with the problem of adjusting your external persona. How do you tell people that the thing you have been pursuing with such intensity for years now means very little to you?
Obsessions are not neatly framed by well-understood narratives or storytelling tropes. I am often just embarrassed about the unusualness of my obsessions, their violent arrivals and disappearances, and that shame holds me back.
Perhaps I am just telling myself this, that people find it really odd. Perhaps they are fine with it. But they are not. I can see their responses.
But there is a thing too, when the owner of a story is telling that story with confidence and assurance, rather than shame and despair. People seem to respond to the story then, maybe even love the story.
However I feel about explaining the obsessions, I love my art most where I have been able to let these obsessions grip and move me, and the art that somehow holds the repetitive, soothing experience of a stim within it, too.
And thank you for reading, for letting me work through how to tell this story.
I love keeping my inbox clear(ish) so I really recommend using the Substack app - I open it on my iPad and have a lovely selection of things to read and browse through - the app is available here:
The pain of the obsession leaving you in contrast with the indifference you may now feel toward something that had once been so engaging...I don’t know if I have ever heard someone talk about that phenomenon before. Thank you for sharing Helen. Also - your art lingers in my mind...
Love your art style!