The Fine Art Blog of Daz and Holly

Art therapist Elizabeth Beck was explaining to me how one of the tools that she uses to help her patients is a theory of creative and mental growth created by Lowenfeld & Brittain (1987).(she wrote) What this theory postulates is that all children go through specific cognitive developmental levels that can deduced by the stage they are in artistically. There are 6 developmental levels:

1. The scribble stage (age 2-4)
2. The preschematic stage (age 4-7)
3. The schematic stage (age 7-9)
4. The gang stage (age 9-12)
5. The pseudo-naturalistic stage (age 12-14)
6. The period of decision (14- )

above "The decaying theatre" (working) and below "The red room" also in progress!

I wrote this on the fledgling Flickr group called ART, THERAPY, PSYCHOANALISYS AND AESTHETICS

I think the very process of creating something is healthy. The connection of your mind directing your hands to make something, anything, allows your subconcious an outlet (other than just dreams!).

You can perhaps see an example in graphitti, that is often portrayed as just vandalism, gang tags or a result of ‘frustration’ or hopelessness etc. I’m not necessarily talking about the brilliant stuff, the artists who have the bravery to go large on trains and walls but the other stuff too. The signatures on mailboxes, the names carved in rocks and trees -the things you might have done when you were young and perhaps ‘grew out of’.

The idea of you changing your world, adding organic lines to ‘boring’ spaces and often spontaniously using creativity where society frowns upon it is healthy in my opinion, it shows you in a small way that things can change and that you are an agent of change and that is an empowering feeling.

Green Love 8 inch x 10 inch canvas board by Darren Daz Cox – Pekin Illinois artist.

This was a random sketch made with two Mr. Sketch scented water color markers, the dark green one has an apple smell and the yellow one has a lemon smell (of course).

The canvas board allows the "juice" from the markers to stay wet longer than if it was on a piece of paper that absorbs the ink. This allows the artist great flexibililty to smudge, smear and mix the two colors. In addition, you can use a stylus to scrape away some ink or a wipe to blend or remove some areas of ink.

You will probably need some hand wipes as your hands will totally turn green as you work on this type of art! There is synergy between these markers because they are so juicy that the dark green merges with the yellow to make a light green and the yellow dissolves the dark green when it’s dry to make a light green. All in all there are countless shades of green to be made! If you are an artist looking to inspire and or motivate yourself then you should try this. If you are a teacher or an art therapist (hello Liz!) you should consider something like this (if you don’t already do so) because it is pleasurable in many levels and teaches that you can ‘color outside the lines’ and sometimes ‘messing something up’ is a good thing and I’ll explain why.

One of the things you learn by doing this is that you have to make the yellow marker ‘dirty’ or mixed with the dark green to have the light green shades. Luckily the bright yellow comes back to full strength after a while but for a time it will be ‘contaminated’ with the more powerful dark green, this is the only way to get the full spectrum of shades and might be upsetting to people with OCD and those who, as the Dead Milkmen sang about, might go to hell if they color outside the lines.

But you have to be messy to do this type of art! yea~!

Below are some lyrics from the mighty, awesome, and forever cool, Dead Milkmen.

You’ve got a methodist coloring book

And you color really well

But don’t color outside the lines

Or God will send you to Hell

‘Cause God hates war

And God hates crime

but he really hates people

Who color outside the lines



You’ve got a methodist coloring book

Don’t color outside the lines

‘Cause if God doesn’t strike you with lightning

He’ll at least make you go blind

Good people get sent to the attic

Bad people will roast in the cellar

But there’s a special kind a’ Hell

For those who just won’t learn to color

The title of this post comes from a comment by noted art therapist Liz Beck who suggested that kids tend to give up on art at this age due to "the realization that there are better artists in your class than you, so why bother?"

I remember that point in my life, pre-pubescent, aware of girls but not feeling any pressure to chase after them, taking my family situation for granted, starting to really appreciate music and fiercely wanting to be a good artist. but no thanks to the school system that tried to tell me I was of average ability. My best friend was Richard Winton and he tended to draw vehicles and the ‘cross section of a vehicle or head-quarters building with bonus action’ genre which is similar to an opened up doll house, but obviously a lot cooler.

Richard’s brother, Edward aka Wod, was an artist too, in fact he was the best artist I had ever seen, which is saying alot because I had been to Florence Italy and read Jack Kirby/Stan Lee comic books! Wod had a keen imagination as well as a confident art style. Have you drawn comic books with a ballpoint pen? You don’t make mistakes!

It wasn’t a competition, not like school where they would give you a C for your best effort, we just accepted that Wod was the ‘best’ as we would whomever was the best at sports. Me, Rich, Wod, my sister Sonja and our friend Mark Elliot all collaborated on the first of a series of spontanious sci-fi graphic novels that Me and Wod continued. War was the basic theme,  our generation had grandparents who had served and tv glorified WWII as it glossed over the aftermath of Vietnam.

I remember what we drew, it was pretty horrifying if you didn’t know how utterly innocent we actually were. Bullets flying everywhere, heads exploding, severed limbs, corpses, various stages of torture and the loss of sanity.  Years later I was the main artist for my high school newspaper and somehow managed to have a full page sci-fi comic with a similar anti-social theme. 

I was thrown off the paper by religious fanatics pressuring the school to do so after they noticed ‘eata featus week’ wriiten on the t-shirt of a character in my comic. The gore and smoking and alcohol drinking characters somehow went unnoticed! Ha! I was a punk kid but the editor should have been fired not me, I’m a rock star! Deal with my glorious eccentricities! ~Thanks to Nicola Aaron for being as cool now as she was then!~

There’s a lesson to be learned here, namely that no one bothered to explain to me why what I did had offended people, they simply kicked me off and that was it, nice and clean. That didn’t stop me from drawing but eventually I outgrew drawing violence as a source of pleasure.

What strikes me most about the suggestion that kids give up on art around age 11 is that,  to me that was the pivital moment in my life, and now some 30 years after that point I can’t think of anything more important to my ongoing happiness than sticking with art.

Art by Darren Daz Cox formerly of SDME+RCC (Sonja, Darren, Mark, Edward plus Richards Comic Company)

I was thinking that collages are conscious versions of dreams.  Dreams serve to keep us healthy or at least are the manefestation of a process that serves to keep us mentally healthy, so collages are a positive activity (if nothing else!).

There are at  least three different types of collages I’ve found.

1: Wish fullfillment/visualization of a goal collages.

You can help solidify what you actually want by collaging words and pictures, focusing on the goal with this type of collage. Sometimes you might actually find out out you want something different when you are forced to think about the elements that make up the collage of your goal.

2: Art collages.

From Pablo Picasso’s early work  to modern day scrapbooking, it’s fun and satisfying. I’m pretty proud of society making scrapbooking such a popular hobby. It trips me out to see how many pre-made bits and pieces there are now for scrapbookers. It’s not my scene but it is art and art is good.

3: Connecting with your subconcious/therapy collages.

We all have degrees of trauma, repressed memories and things we don’t even know we have deep inside that might be making us unhappy in some way. One of the tenets of psychiatry is that if the patient becomes consciously aware of what is in his subconscious it helps the healing process. I’m not an expert but I have found that if you arange random things it can sometimes trigger feelings, good and bad, this seems to be a healthy endevor! Liz Beck is an expert on art therapy and has a nice little blog you guys should visit!

Most collages are a combination of these, have I left anything out about collages?

Here’s a digital on digital collage I did a few years ago. I took some pictures in SecondLife, collaged them and then pushed the pixels around in Photoshop (the smudge finger in Photoshop’s liquify filter). Make sure you check out the digital creations of Wynx Whiplash when you visit secondLife!

~*Blue Silver Hearts – digital liquify filter art and collage by Darren Daz Cox*~

  I have several cork boards in my apartment (aka my art studio) with pictures from art books and various paper ephemera that inspires me.

The act of arranging art and things helps formulate ideas in my mind, I’m sure Liz beck has some art therapy techniques that involve collage! I think this Facebook app (that extends beyond facebook obviously) is nice artistic tool for artists and especially for people who don’t think they are so artistic but suddenly discover that they do have a sense of composition when they are allowed to rearrange motifs! Maybe you guys would like to make a vision board and share it with us! Mine had (fbefore the app borked..)

"The studio under the eaves" by Henri Matisse, painted at his financial low point it shows a positive future through the window – brilliant!, a chakra diagram to help me meditate and inspire me to think about the infinite potential of reality, madame Grand by LeBrun, one of the most brilliant portraits ever done and one of my faves in the Met, Blow your cool by the Hoodoo Gurus, a cool cd I love!, The reincarnation of Edgar Cayce (book I’m reading, slowly and thoughtfully), Michelangelos Creation of Adam, just to remind me that we are all given the divine power to create and a still from the cool movie ‘The science of sleep’.

“This is not the antidote (or a collage)” random fine art by Darren Daz Cox.

I painted the organic frame shapes on these three canvases today. I enjoy the womb like quality of this motif. It might seem a little claustrophobic especially in the ones where there is more frame than actual space for the central art (which really isn’t as important as the frame). Oh sure you can psychoanalyze this and find a reason for why I make these shapes, and they are purely random subconsciously guided shapes. Below is the intro to a documentary on Christiana Morgan made by a local Monmouth artist Karin Jervert. Psychology is always a fascinating subject especially when it manifests in a romantic tragedy with famous people and artwork to look for ‘clues’ in.

This is an illustration, I think used in the Thematic Apperception Test which was also co-invented by Christiana Morgan. What strikes me, is how similar it is to Raymond Pettibone’s work (or rather the other way around!) Pettibon has been a major influence on my life just ask Biff Brown! (who uploaded a whole new set of songs to his MySpace profile today btw!). I don’t do work that is similar to Pettibon, lord knows I’ve tried (anyone remember my Captain Vigilante comic books? probably not haha!) but I enjoy peeking into the dark side of humanity for entertainment and self analysis. What I have learned about psychology and the nature of reality in the past two decades is that the more you try to find out what is really real the more you see that it isn’t what has been taught to you in school.

The very idea that the subconscious is something primitive and buried under the layers of reality doesn’t hold water anymore except by die hards of the old teachings. The same people who still cling to the fantasy that the great pyramid was built by slaves when it’s just not possible, even today with machines and computors to build it. It’s more likely that the subconscious is the truth and the conscious is the dream, a lucid dream at that, one where we create it as we go along. Oh sure, you can say that you live in a random universe of unconnected events and definite parameters such as ‘the speed of light’ but facts like synchronicity, pre-cognitive dreams and telepathy keep poking their little gremlin heads into this perceived reality.

If you have studied the basics of quantum physics you can see how faster than light speeds are possible when all matter is part of a zero point field, and you can see that by looking at something, even in ‘laboratory’ conditions changes the outcome of the experiment. Consciousness affects reality, it really does, just try to have a good day, consciously will yourself to have a positive attitude and things will go better for you than if you choose to be grumpy. People with positive attitudes heal faster, doctors can tell you that, and you know it too. Yet we still choose to create scenarios where we are left unhappy and make up excuses such as ‘unrequited love’ to maintain the negative consequences. One reason for this is to learn something from it. If you were happy all the time would you really dig so deep into your soul?

How much of Christiana Morgan’s depression and alcoholism was a result of her own vanity? Seems to me that she could have lived happily ever after and wrote great poetry if she had wanted to. I suggest that the belief that karl Jung and Henry A. Murray somehow awakened the ‘muse’ in Christiana Morgan was actually just wishful thinking on their part designed to satisfy their lust and a rationalization for the guilt in their ego. Because both great men were so ‘rational’ and respectable they had to create a reason for their lust to use the woman. In order to alleviate their subconscious guilt for manipulating her they placed her on a pedestal as some mythical muse and shrouded the affairs with a veil of mysticism. Is it any wonder that she turned to alcohol? Is it any wonder her inner pain, from subconsciously realizing she was being used manifested into physical pain? Just like Freud and his addiction to cigars leading to oral cancer, Jung and Murray couldn’t see how they were using the vain and vulnerable Morgan. Jung and Murray rationalized their process of seduction and ego-gratification and Morgan herself justified her ‘other woman’ status in the way we see that rock-star groupies do, women who are willing to accept a role of being used because their ego is being stroked.

In the big picture this was a lesson for them all, how to be your own person without needing others to make you into someone ‘bigger than yourself’. The world doesn’t need a woman to make a great man like Henry A. Murray it needs people who realize that how they do what they do is the most important thing, not what they do and for what reason.

"you finally got some ice but mine is frozer!" – Dirty

Ok so my roommate DJ Disaster and I have a crib that is pretty shabby compared to the other houses on our street, but we have gold pumpkins now!

I was going to move these pumpkins to the back yard but they are frozen to the porch thanks to the ice storm and unrelenting winter so I spray painted them gold. We don’t have any Christmas decorations so this is my artistic contribution to the season!

Here’s a painting I’m working on. It’s kind of a dream for warm summer breezes!

Tree Love – oil painting on canvas by Darren Daz Cox

Oh just a note, DJ Disaster worked on that song by Dirty, they outsourced some production to him! That song is one of my favorites, really great beat and hilarious lyrics that are ‘anti-social’ in the best tradition of songs that are too good to be hits!

You got some pumpkins man, but mine are golder!

I remember reading a sci-fi story in my scandalous youth about how humans were offered a trade of advanced knowledge for something the aliens didn’t have and the aliens finally accepted the idea of paint from us. I think that is so cool, after all, if you had the technology to make things non-corrodible and had holographic 3D artwork etc you could totally miss out on (or forget) the magic of paint!

~*gold starfish and box and ceramic mutant made in 1984 by Darren Daz Cox*~
Trust me, if you are feeling bored, depressed or have writer block, try this, buy a can of gold spray paint, get some rocks off the ground, or those old seashells laying around, and spray them (outside! safety first!!). Spray paint dries very quickly! Then gather up your handful of treasure and gloat! Gold makes you feel better, it just does, and it doesn’t have to cost you a lot of money. There is something magical about making something old and ‘worthless’ look shiny and precious, it will make you happy!
~*The Tempest – acrylic and tinted glue over an old framed print by Darren Daz Cox plus gold painted figures made by an artisan lost to history but still appreciated!*~

Gold paint unites all things it touches, from the humblest plastic toy and rusty Zippo case to archaeological artifacts that The Antiques Roadshow obliges us to keep in their ‘natural state’ if only for the sake of monetary compensation.

These clay figures, above, had been collected by my step-dad and passed on to me. They had spent decades in a satin-padded glass-covered display-box, a coffin, and while they might have some historical significance to a particular scholar, they are now painted gold. When you think about what they represent, a proud family, it seems to be a nice tribute to the artist because I’m guessing that had he owned a 7 dollar can of quality gold spray paint he would have sprayed them too, rather than to have them remain scorched from the fire.

Oh I know how ‘authentic’ works but really, we spoiled modern world people totally romanticize the external parts of primitive living. What primitive cultures have that we can’t exploit we are generally taught is merely base superstition, yet the chances are you’ve had some pretty deep thoughts and even profound experiences while sitting around a campfire under the stars and heck, the Dogone tribe in Mali, West Africa, has more astronomical knowledge than 99.99% of our college graduates and they don’t even have electricity or a written language ha!
~**~

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This is a sketch by artist and Art Therapist Liz Beck, it describes in metaphor a disease she is healing from and, because she is important to me and I want her to be well I have some suggestions that might be fun and possibly therapeutic.

First of all we already know that all art is good and that you can connect with your inner self by drawing what you feel (the essence of art therapy I guess).

In some cases you can literally come to terms with your physical self by drawing your disease in terms of metaphors and dreamscapes. So by consciously accepting the disease you can learn to live with it (instead of pretending it doesn’t exist and deal with just the symptoms) and if you allow yourself to, you can inspire yourself to have the will to beat it.

The placebo effect proves that intent is a very powerful healer, or rather, you do have the power to heal your physical self but must truly want to and believe that you can. David Wilcock mentioned this on his Jan 27 interview on Myth or Logic Radio with Tom Murasso.

Where science and faith intersect we can see the process of miracles!

We know from quantum physics that intent is, like the placebo effect proves, the most powerful tool we have to change our situations. Knowing this and knowing the healing power of art therapy, I suggest this… try using ‘richer’ looking art materials instead of pens with weak colors and plain white paper etc, it looks clinical and enclosed (to me).

If you draw yourself then use vibrant colors and glitter and gold leaf and flowers and then maybe a tiny black dot to represent the disease! Trust that the art is merely a tangible symbol of your intent to show the real you and not the you suffering from a disease. Allow the joyful abandon of watching light interact with the colors and materials as you describe yourself on the canvas rather than having the canvas be the brightest part of the picture! This is the most amazing time for art as there are so many amazingly vibrant and happy art materials out there, glitter glue is flowing like wine, puffy paint, stickers, tinted glue, beads, fake gold leaf – all of it cheap cheap cheap!!!! Leave the white paper and office pens for the memo’s and paint yourself with things that represent the real you!!!

Liz is actually working with fibers and a new sewing machine so her new art will be a lot happier looking and she’ll be healthy again soon (she always knows what works best!).

Check out Liz Beck’s art therapy blog!