I am an artist by trade. Saws and brushes and cameras are some of the tools I use. The aesthetic quality of the things I make is determined not by my skill with tools but by the dynamic relationships I establish among space, color, tone, and shape.
Of those elements, shapes are the most important because they are the first thing a viewer notices and the chief vehicles for transmitting sentiment and artistic intent. Stylized shapes, like those in popular art, may induce superficial responses in the viewer. Taut, Euclidian shapes suggest their author is of a higher mind; the Parthenon and Pantheon exemplify this type of shape making.
But mysterious, previously unknown shapes that resist categorization—shapes that make the viewer wonder why or how or what in hell (Is this really art?)—can accomplish something extra-important: They can expeditiously direct the viewer’s mind to that difficult-to-pinpoint place where thoughts are just about to slip free of conscious control.
Sleep and dream researchers call that subtle psychic junction between will-directed thought and the deeper realms of dreams hypnagogia. Hypnagogia is a vivid, transient state of mind characterized by a sense of enhanced creative lucidity. In my art making, hypnagogia is where ideas are spawned and problems solved—where mystery and understanding coincide.1 It’s a place where everything makes sense, but I can’t explain it.
My job as a visual artist is to fashion objects that direct viewers’ minds to that place, to set a stage in front of them to keep them scanning the object, indefinitely, for its hidden structure, artistic intent, and some measure of shared artist-viewer understanding.
I discovered what I just described not by reading books or studying old masters in museums but by playing Miles Davis’s fusion recordings (especially In A Silent Way from 1969) where each passing burst of sound energy, each instrument’s singular momentary contribution, is an expanding energy shape—a kinetic dream incubator—moving through an imagined, velvety-black soundscape.
As I wrote the words above, I was stopping every few sentences to lie on my bed and listen, eyes closed, to (MFSL LP 1-377) with Dan Clark’s new closed-back Stealth planar-magnetic headphones. Logging into this Miles recording was easy: It began as I lowered the tonearm on the Linn Klimax record player; seconds later, as my head settled into the pillow, the first hints of hypnagogia kicked in. This is the beauty of great recordings and fine headphones: I don’t have to force my noisy, awake brain into silence. Artists like Miles Davis and headphones like Dan Clark’s Stealth can do that for me.
