Not So Subliminal

I have, after a shamefully long procrastination, photographed the first paintings of my new series which will soon be uploaded to my website and Facebook, tweeted to my followers on Twitter after much prompting from friends there, posted to Posterous and pinned onto my newly formed board on Pinterest, if I can work out how to do that. Oh, and now there’s my new Google+ page too. What took me so long? Wasn’t that painful was it? Why do I always fanny about so? Talk about letting the grass grow under one’s feet – a whole meadow has established itself under mine whilst my peers have been wowing me with their abundance of work. Anyway, nuff of that, I am three quarters the way through the series and it has been an interesting exercise. Part of the reason it stalled for so long was because I hadn’t thought the concept through well enough and a much valued crit of the first three from a fellow artist, @iantalbot , stopped me in my tracks and made me question what exactly I was trying to say. Unfortunately I had no ready answers and was confusing a number of issues and ideas I was interested in. My interest in textile design and colour as form influences my work a great deal and those early three were a mere dip into that, my love of words, and my obsession with everything that has been written about colour. In an over simplistic and lazy conclusion, I had grabbed some favourite excerpts and used the text as an accompaniment to some equally shallowly thought through gestural marks on the canvas. Dear reader, I am not intentionally lazy or unwilling to put more thought into things, more to the point, I was constraining my thoughts on the subject instead of allowing them to flow in all directions and taking some time to play and experiment with where it took me. If I go back to my college days, it was always through repeated experimentation and playing that the best ideas surfaced, whereas with this series, I was trying to bypass this tried and tested method of working and get straight to the finished concept. Alas, they were dismissed kindly, but firmly by Ian as not really working and not really making any kind of statement. Bless him for making me face up to what I already knew.

The project had started as an extension of my I’m Talking To You painted text series, which layered random and not so random, or subconsciously suppressed thoughts; the resultant undecipherable words being a metaphor for those things we keep to ourselves, hidden for one reason or another.  (See http://tiny.cc/xffuy ) This idea of having to read between the lines of what people say and what is really going on in their minds in certain situations, the misinterpretation and confusion this can lead to when it’s as though they are talking in a different language, inspired the idea to use a different alphabet as an expression of this ambiguity and to evoke more curiosity from the viewer. I was still enjoying very much working with text as art, but needed to move forward and develop a different concept or perspective on this notion or hidden or forbidden thoughts.

I love the decorative element of calligraphy and especially Chinese and Japanese, so I was satisfying another interest in choosing to use a loose graphic interpretation of some of their symbols for the imagery. This continued a format I was still happy with, and my now established style of combining abstract forms and text. One of the features of my work is the use of various consistencies of extended paint so that with some layers I have only limited control and can enjoy that element of surprise, the accidental, or unplanned component of how a selected colour breaks away from the boundaries of my own gestures and strokes and creates its own shapes and lines on the canvas, adding to the abstract forms of my own creation. So here, I had the joy of working with some beautiful symbols, but also the new experiences of not being able to lay them down automatically as I do with my own alphabet so that there was the anxiety and risk of botching it, and then the pleasure of creating unique abstract forms that I wouldn’t see until the paint had found its own limits on the surface and drawn its own negative spaces in which I was then able to work in a more controlled way. My love of pattern never leaves me.

  

I had been discussing previously with a psychotherapist friend, the subject of subliminal imagery and text used in art and particularly advertising. In fact the latest in the I’m Talking To You paintings is made from a short poem I wrote on the subject called Head Noise:

Head Noise

Subliminal intrusion

Unchallenged, unseen

Slips in

Nestles between the synapses

Releasing a subtle whisper

With the power to roar.

He told me how the theory that ‘sex sells’ is used shamelessly in subliminal marketing campaigns and showed me several examples, one of the earliest being the shaping of the Coca Cola bottle like the hourglass curves of a woman. There were many more less innocent examples but I won’t go into that here. What I did see though was the use of the word sexhidden discreetly in many of them, so that although it wasn’t discernable at a glance, or even a careful study in some cases, the brain is programmed to pick it up subliminally.

“Aha!” I joked, reflecting on the lean year I had in 2010 with sales, “that’s where I’ve been going wrong, I haven’t been putting enough Sex into my work.”

Of course, sex is used overtly these days to sell almost everything, but the subliminal perspective struck a chord because of the work I had been doing with suppressed thoughts, and with this in mind I painted the word Sex into the last layer of text in this new series, not just as an element of humour, but as a serious questioning of the issue. (I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I had also been inclined by the secret hope that it would indeed prove the theory and I would be able to make a contribution to the mortgage this year.)

I have called the series Not So Subliminal because I made no attempt to disguise the word, but was making a very open statement about this exploitation of unwitting consumers. Within a few days of putting the first four on my wall at home, a visiting friend who has reservations about a lot of my work said she loved them – one in particular. I was so delighted I gifted it to her, not just because of her genuinely enthusiastic response but because she had recently been very kind to me in a difficult situation.

But . . .  she didn’t spot the ‘Sex’ word.

Or did she? I haven’t until now revealed to anyone what I have done with these paintings, and although they haven’t been exhibited publicly yet, nobody coming to the house has said, “Ooooh, look, I can see the word ‘Sex’ in there. Even in our highly “sexed-up” society, are we still too embarrassed to remark on it when we perceive something sexual in an image in case it reveals something not quite ‘decent’ about us?

As I release them into cyberspace, I’m interested now to see what kind of reaction they get, and I shall be even more eager when they’re exhibited to see if somebody’s wallet opens at the subliminal prompting of one of the marketing world’s most potent tools.

Sexting off,

Rosy, August 2011