Unconscious Influence
---------------------
Back when I was studying painting in university I would
regularly check out the art magazines to see what my
contemporaries were up to. One of those magazines was of
course the venerable "Canadian Art" (formerly ArtsCanada).
It ceased publication in 2021 after a 78 year run but its
parent body, the Canadian Art Foundation, still exists and
makes some of the old content available online.
Anyhow, one of the articles I remember reading was about the
landscape painter Paterson Ewen (1925-2002, so not _exactly_
my contemporary) written by Adele Freedman and published in
1987 [1]. And the main reason I remember it so well, is
that it taught me something about unconscious influence.
Toward the end of the article Ewen talks about how his
latest 6 works reflected the influence of the American
Romantic painter Albert Pinkham Ryder. Well, all but one of
the six. There was one called "Ship Wreck" that, according
to the article, "didn't begin as a specific image, found in
an old book or an old memory ... but just came out of
[Ewen's] spinning head while he was working." An
illustration of the painting accompanied the article.
But ... coincidentally I had just been reading a book on the
American Eccentrics, and one of the illustrations therein
was of a painting by Pinkham Ryder, "Moonlight Marine," that
bore an uncanny resemblance to Ewen's "Ship Wreck".[2] Now,
I'm sure Ewen was being entirely honest here and truly had
no recollection of ever having seen that particular work.
But I'm also pretty sure that was the source, whether he
remembered it or not.
And the lesson I took from this was to be somewhat
suspicious of my own spinning head, whenever it generates
images and ideas seemingly out of nowhere. Maybe such
things do sometimes arise out of my sheer creative
brilliance, but I'd wager more often than not I'm dredging
up memories of other people's works, lodged in my
unconscious even if I have no recollection of having seen
them before.
This all came back to me some 38 years later when, browsing
gopherspace, I came across an artwork by xwindows at
tilde.club, called "Sunset of Cyber Wasteland" [3]. An
artwork that looks a whole lot like the image I had in my
head when I created this phlog back in 2023, called it
"Cyber Scrapheap," and wrote up the little descriptive
passage on the top level gophermap. Since "Sunset of Cyber
Wasteland" predates this phlog by over a year (and an
earlier version, "Cyber Wasteland", dates from 2020) it is
certainly possible it was the source of my 'inspiration' and
I just forgot.
Or maybe not. One way or another, it scarcely matters. But
influences should be acknowledged, if such this be, and
perhaps more importantly, this gives me an opportunity to
recommend you check out "Sunset of the Cyber Wasteland" and
other xwindows' artworks over at tilde.club. For ease of
image viewing I'd recommend using dillo in either gopher
mode [4] or via this newfangled protocol "https" [5].
References
----------
[1] Paterson Ewen featured in Canadian Art, 1987
https://canadianart.ca/microsites/cover-stories/1987-winter.pdf
[2] The book was "The Eccentrics and Other American
Visionary Painters," Abraham A. Davidson, 1978. The painting
by Pinkham Ryder is on page 136. Although, it appears I am
not the only one to see Ryder's influence on "Ship Wreck".
You can see both works reproduced here:
https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/paterson-ewen/key-works/ship-wreck/
[3] xwindows, Sunset of Cyber Wasteland
gopher://tilde.club/1/~xwindows/art/sunset-of-cyber-wasteland/
[4] xwindows, art (gopher)
gopher://tilde.club/1/~xwindows/art/
[5] xwindows, art (https)
https://tilde.club/~xwindows/
Sun Mar 23 13:57:58 PDT 2025
Revised: Wed Apr 9 15:54:34 PDT 2025
