The Aimless Meander: The creative process involved in composing Dr. Daydream Prescribes Aggressive Psychotherapy

Meditating on the concept of daydreaming conjures all kinds of stereotypes, mostly those perpetuated by pop culture and the associated canon of symbols established by TV, music, movies, and comics. A reclined child staring into the clouds and seeing shapes appear is the standard cliche, which I wanted to avoid.

Dr. Daydream Prescribes Aggressive Psychotherapy — Stephen Gibb, 36″ x 24″, oil on panel, 2022

When I decided to explore the concept of daydreams for a painting I began with the idea of a figure in a daydream state, emersed physically, into the stuff that daydreams are made of.
My initial figure took shape as an old man, eyes closed, lost in his imagination, represented by an eyeball floating in liquid, where his brain should have been.

Line work for the painting “Dr. Daydream Prescribes Aggressive Psychotherapy” by Stephen Gibb, 2002

Dr. Daydream

I christened him Dr. Daydream and I set about imagining his world. I envisioned a guide leading Dr. Daydream through his dream, which could be none other than his own brain. Astride his brain a jovial Humpty Dumpty takes his hand to help him navigate the bizarre landscape. Humpty steers the brain but is oblivious of his duty since he looks backwards instead of at the road ahead. This represents the meandering uncertainty of where a daydream will lead us. The journey is an adventure without destination.

From Dark to Light

I wanted Dr. Daydream moving away from the darkness and into the bright future ahead. This is kind of illustrating an escapist view of daydreaming. Rather than dealing with the foreboding darkness, his attention is directed away at the bright colours and the large happy face that dominates the right side above him. Mr. Moonlight looks down with sorrowful eyes as the Doctor moves away from the darkness of the woods and wilderness behind him.

Time Doesn’t Fly, it Floats Away

Dr. Daydream was wearing a wristwatch, but it has detached and is floating away. In a dream state, time has no domain over the dreamer…

Title Just Isn’t Cutting it

Things from here out started to get more and more associative and detached from the pure notion of daydreaming. I decided to expand the title to encompass the broadening scope of the content. Dr. Daydream Prescribes Aggressive Psychotherapy works better, and now adds more width for tangential exploration. The vast realm of psychology can now be conjured, and my diversions of whimsy can be excused away.

Walking is A Time-Space Activity

Dr. Daydream steps forward and his most recent footstep is ghosted by a bare foot stepping in sticky goo. My thought here was to represent a movement through time and the bare, primitive foot being a step back in evolution, contrasted with the present-time foot.

Protective Headgear Recommended for All

I like to insert interlocutors into the foreground of my paintings—seemingly detached observers helping the viewer link with the overwhelming weirdness going on behind. Enter Helmet Head.
Helmet Head is more concerned with the wondrous object in his grasp but helps add to the general mystery of the overall image.

Idea Thief

OK, sometimes I rehash an idea that I’ve used before and by that action, I become my own idea thief. Helmet Head has a socket in his dome, from which a slimy creep removes a lightbulb. Symbolism borrowed from cartoons and comics, probably dating back to Edison. I said I wanted to avoid symbolic cliches, but here is an exception.

A Phallic Rocket Becomes a Knife

In rough sketches I positioned a rocket in the sky above the good Doctor’s head, leaving a trail that swirled around his head, between his legs and to its beginnings, somewhere over and beyond the trees. As things progressed in the sketch, I decided to turn the rocket into a knife, a more aggressive phallus, and have it sail between his legs in a psychosexual trajectory but embed it into his brain. I’ll let you do your own psychoanalysis of this. A certain F word may help.

The Red Balloon

Another symbol of floating along…the balloon is a reference to the aimless meander of daydreaming. In this case the balloon drifts through the air and makes it impossible for a caretaker to keep Dr. Daydream’s head corked. His essence is released in a psychedelic burst of colour…setting the stage for the multicoloured right-hand side of the painting.

Building Out the Composition with Unencumbered Impulses

The basic image was composed pretty much as it was chronologically described above. At this point there was some need for smaller details and compositional elements to be added for balance and interest. The Brain crawls along the ground but is distracted by a skull with the cap removed and examines the contents as he pours it out. This could easily represent psychotherapy. The symbol for the Greek letter Psi is added to the knife, which is also widely understood as a symbol for psychology. Clouds form from stars and hearts in a cheesy reference to seeing shapes (Pareidolia) where they don’t really exist. A spaceship bears witness to the events below, representing a naïve or innocent bystander. Dr. Daydream’s left hand is grounded by a tap root, symbolizing the roots of everything with nature. He also wears an interesting signet ring of no real importance but will keep viewers challenging themselves to formulate a meaning. Human nature demands meaning from the things in its environment, however, there is no direct line to interpreting the painting “correctly”. Some symbolism may come easily to the viewer and the meaning may be more commonly held than others. The true joy is identifying things through your own idiosyncratic filters and biases and deriving your own meaning. My paintings give you permission to explore yourself by mulling over the images.

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Vengeful Wrath of the Chocolate Gods — 36″ x 24″, oil on panel

The vengeful god in the clouds is nothing new and most often is used in pop culture for humourous effect. It’s really an absurd notion—an angry god? So what could be more absurd than a god of chocolate? In ancient times (maybe even today) there were beliefs that sustained polytheism where a multitude of gods each have distinct functions—the god of the sea, the god of fire, the god of love. Why not a god of chocolate? I love chocolate and why shouldn’t it have its own deity lording over the domain of chocolate land.

The rest of the painting is just silly aspects of chocolate experiencing their chocolate reality—living, dying, being consumed and generally enjoying their chocolatyness.

This got me thinking about the creative process and how some simple prompt can lead you into depths unexplored. People often ask me where my ideas come from and through my grinding teeth I try to answer cordially. Thoughts, that’s all they are. Thoughts that get turned into images and recorded in oil paint—endless thoughts swirling all around you waiting to be plucked and converted into something wonderful.

Brian Eno had a system of cards called the Oblique Strategy cards he formulated with Peter Schmidt that essentially were simple thoughts or instructions designed to help promote creativity. I had been collecting a series of thoughts and when I discovered Eno’s cards, realized I was doing the same thing.

Although they could be construed as motivational in tone, if they are accessed during a point of creative stagnation, they may jump-start the creativity process back into high gear.

Here are my creativity-booster phrases. Pick one at random. Think of them as instructions to open your creative block — or Hallmark Cards from the Twilight Zone:

Surrealism Famous For Stimulating Creativity

Strip away the pre-supposed dignity of art

Celebrate the genius of the audience

Disrupt the universe in your own special way

Art is a veil of obfuscation hiding a prize

Rattle your mental cage and awaken the sleeping philosopher within

Defy the gravity of consciousness

Make art to be photographed and studied later

Challenge yourself with something counter-intuitive

Meditate on you idiosyncrasies

Hold the colour in your mind’s eye

Release yourself of fear by trapping it in your art

Look at clichés from different angles

Revisit a repressed thought

Contemplate the perspective of the art viewing the audience

Mine your soul for a gem to share

Loose yourself in the math of composition

Take the most obvious solution and do the opposite

Bask in the glow of the viewer’s confusion

Consider the chemistry of the brain

Hide something in plain sight

Portray the human side of evil

Invent your own dichotomy

Redirect in response to the last thing you created

Reach through the curtain of time and touch your younger self on the shoulder

Label an emotion that does not yet exist

Let the viewer know that you are watching

Make the art self-aware

Engineer tension

Set traps on the way to the most obvious conclusion

Derail a preconception

Expose a subtle notion with flamboyance

Direct attention to absurdity

Conceal a secret within the content

Distil the uncanny essence of ugliness

Pose a question and leave it hanging

Shine the light on an open-ended conclusion

Fearlessly diminish the precious

Invert the sacred and profane

Investigate a theme that terrifies you

Mock yourself

Listen closely to music that irritates you

Construct 10 answers to the question “Why?”

Let something random dictate direction

Abandon your gimmick

Create as if you are an abstractionist—if you are an abstractionist try surrealism

Look at the pure joy of futility

A childhood game is waiting to be rediscovered

Consider two outcomes and flip a coin

Make an imperfection a focal point

Share a memory of extreme profundity

Dare to confront your inner fool

Invent your own version of reality

Travel one second back in time

Stretch the rules just to the breaking point and let go

Try on a point of view in conflict with your own

Ask yourself a question and don’t answer back

Reduce your complexity to cave-dweller basics

View yourself from 100 years in the future

Sum up your process to a phantom biographer

Tell yourself it doesn’t really matter and is not that important

Let a ghost direct your hand

Contradict your present state of mind

Plan on taking one step forward and two steps back

Ponder the noise and listen for a message

Reflect on all the people you have encountered

Recall an idea you forgot that you forgot about

Surrealism Famous For Stimulating Creativity

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Surrealism Famous For Stimulating Creativity

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St. Germain Gallery: Featuring Stephen Gibb

Surrealism
シュルレアリスム

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Man Ray Bears Witness to a Culture of Take, Take, Take — Stephen Gibb, 36″ x 24″, oil on panel, 2019

It’s all crazy art, isn’t it?

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Happy Moon Face – Stephen Gibb, oil on panel, 2017

Canadian artist Stephen Gibb is a self-confessed inspiration addict and has, by necessity, found it all around him. He gets his fix from the books he has read, the products he is consumed by daily and the chance encounters he experiences at every corner.

Take the iconic moon face—the anthropomorphized version of that familiar circular object in the night sky. Whether it’s portrayed as an observer from above, blithely engaging in a detached gaze or an active participant, reacting in emotional display as if it actually cares what is happening down below—the omnipresent moon acts as a witness, an agent of oversight, the audience.

The moon face is an extension of nursery-rhyme imagery, in which objects are often portrayed with cartoon-like expressions for a more benign, humourous effect and occasionally with more human-like features, resulting in a more disturbing, unsettling face.

Lunatic Moon Face – Stephen Gibb, oil on panel, 2017

It’s this unsettling boundary that Gibb is interested in—the point where cute meets with creepy and the observer vacillates between the two diametrics in a speed-of-mind frenzy. What are the characteristics that tip the scales in one direction or the other?

“This is my frontier, my untamed wilderness”, says Gibb, as if to distance himself and inoculate his art from the endless sea of nature paintings produced by other Canadian artists. “My interpretation of nature always has a human component, I’m trying to see inside and express it in a way that urges some kind of response.”

As simple as his moon face paintings appear, when physically encountered they assume an unexpected presence. Created as circular cut outs they become more like objects than just self-absorbed artworks contained in an “I-AM-ART” frame.

Green Cheese Moon Face – Stephen Gibb, oil on panel, 2017

Embrace your inner circle

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2018

---

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Visit Sideshow Fine Art for prints of selected works.

Index of paintings by Stephen Gibb 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009

Stephen Gibb – Artist Statement
(Or, at least a feeble attempt to excuse my behaviour to those present with good taste)
My artwork weaves an eclectic tapestry of cultural and social influences. At one moment it may make a
single-punch-line comment on pop culture while the next it may construct a complex and playful diorama
probing into the outer perimeters of human nature.
My work is often categorized as pop surrealism but I’d begrudgingly prefer to tag it as existential editorial
cartoon realism, just because it sounds more intelligent and funny at the same time. The work holds
a certain reverence and faithfulness to reality mimicry but leans away enough to fall in the shadow of the
“uncanny valley”, the area where the mind is unsettled by what looks real enough but couldn’t possible
be. It is in this realm, theoretically, that the mind’s gamma waves are super-stimulated and brain activity
resembles fireworks. I resolve that this accounts for the broad reactions my work garners from observers,
that ranges from contemptuous dismissal to enthusiastic exuberance. We are all wired differently.
The medium is the method, which has been a faithful deployment of oil painting and traditional oil painting
techniques, such as glazing and the occasional dalliance into chiaroscuro. The richness achieved
by layers of thinned oil paint on MDF panels always adds an interesting luminous quality to the final
piece.
My direction as of late has been to devote more to composing on the panels rather than in pre-sketches.
I’m intrigued by the more spontaneous and gratifying results of ideas presenting themselves in the process
rather than in the planning, hence the falloff in the recent output of sketches. Often a core image or
concept dictates subliminally as to how the composition manifests itself.
see stephengibb.com for more 2018 paintings

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Canadian cuisine: What is truly Canadian?
These are not easily answered questions, since so much of what Canada boasts as cultural signifiers have been adopted from it’s big sibling, the USA. The close proximity of the US and the cultural dominance of American culture in western society have often eclipsed the accomplishments and advances made here in Canada.

One thing I wanted to do in honour (notice this the Canadian spelling of honor) of our 150th birthday is paint tributes to Canadian foods—items often associated as being invented here and commonplace enough to establish a certain national identity with these items.

Maple Syrup

Butter Tart

Poutine

Nanaimo Bar

Canadian Bacon (back bacon) and Peameal bacon
Everyone always sites this as a Canadian cuisine item but I thought it was just too gross to paint.

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Here we go round the prickly apple at 5 o’clock in the morning – Stephen Gibb, oil on panel, 2017

Canadian art is more than the Group of Seven. It is more than our glorious indigenous art. It is more than the stereotypical landscape and wildlife painting that dominates reproductions on calendars and postcards and garner top rankings on Google searches.

The Canadian art identity is subtle. To an Asian it would likely be identified as “western” and to a European it would likely be construed as American. It would probably take a fellow Canadian to extract the Canadianness from artwork that doesn’t rely on typical geographical cues (wildlife, wilderness) and symbols (hockey, poutine etc.).

There is a state of mind represented that could loosely be identified as “not American”. It is a perspective of detachment and distance that allows Canadian art to pry up the corners of North American culture to expose the hidden elements that jiggle in the shadows of the periphery. Outside the glow of the spotlight, in the American blind spots, lurks the forgotten, the disenfranchised, the marginalized; the alienated…that when brought into sharp focus tells another story altogether – a Canadian story.

This is the playground in which many Canadian artists build their sandcastles. The underbelly of Pop culture super-saturation, the dark corners out of the line of fire of the relentless mass-marketing assault.

It just happens that my surreal sandbox is full of childhood remnants and symbols drenched in literal word and image play.

The painting above is entitled “Here we go round the prickly apple at 5 o’clock in the morning”, a skewed reference to T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men which some of the imagery also alludes to. Whereas Eliot’s allusions were more relevant to post World War I, my reading of it is more post Cold War and contemporary.

My central figure, the hollow monstrosity, blindly lurching across the landscape, is a figure of despair with his beard of honey and skullcap shredded from his “mind-blowing experience”. The honey has run past the mouth and now drips away, like the passing of time, no longer a sweet sensation but a receding memory.

Guided by the whispers of the serpent coiled on his arm, the tongue-in-cheek biblical symbolism is continued with the apple, rendered inedible by the spines it is covered with, yet the double-ended serpent is poised to bite regardless of the pain. Out of the serpent’s mouth flows the river of life in which swims a progression of evolving creatures from amoeba, to tadpole, fish to humanoid. This relates to the story of the Garden of Eden, original sin and the flow of life from that mythic origin. An eaten apple (the sin already committed) seems to want revenge on the prickly apple, perhaps in some cannibalistic tit-for-tat in order to vindicate his symbolic death.

Below the apples is a large lab rat, lured by unusual bait. The eyeball hovering over the trap is a point of perspective, which we all know can be a trap in itself. Lab animals are often used metaphorically to mock human’s primitive, behavioural nature.

To the hollow man’s left elbow is a toppling totem of emotions. At the bottom is anger or rage, then sadness, happiness, a sort of hybrid of disgust and contempt and lastly fear, which is in imminent peril of falling. Read into this the chaotic spectrum of emotions that we are dealt in life and the tenuous balance that must be kept for self-preservation.

At the far left two canisters of goo tumble sideways, spilling their toxic contents on the landscape in a gesture too familiar in our times, where pollution is reviled but ignored at the same time. Next to the cans an over-sized crow rips at the garments of a scarecrow, mocking its purpose, rendering it useless and making the scarecrow worthy of it death’s head crown.

To the far right Humpty Dumpty doesn’t fall because of his precarious perch on the wall. He falls because the integrity of the wall is degraded; crumbling beneath him which in some way represents the frail foundations on which we depend so often yet fail to support us securely just the same.

The sky is a duality of night and day with both the sun and moon as passive observers of the activity below. Their double presence represents the continuum of time, constantly flowing in perpetuity.

Between the sun and moon, Mother Goose takes flight like some benign fairy tale witch. She acts as a thematic thread, connecting the symbol-drenched stories of childhood nursery rhymes and fairy tales with the contemporary, adult-themed imagery in the painting. And yes, that’s a Canada goose…

What more can you expect from us fur-trading hockey players chugging maple syrup, scarfing poutine and watching the northern lights astride a seven foot bull moose?

Return to main gallery

The post Canadian Art appeared first on Stephen Gibb.

2017

---

Return to main gallery

Visit Sideshow Fine Art for prints of selected works.

Index of paintings by Stephen Gibb 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009

Stephen Gibb – Artist Statement
(Or, at least a feeble attempt to excuse my behaviour to those present with good taste)
My artwork weaves an eclectic tapestry of cultural and social influences. At one moment it may make a
single-punch-line comment on pop culture while the next it may construct a complex and playful diorama
probing into the outer perimeters of human nature.
My work is often categorized as pop surrealism but I’d begrudgingly prefer to tag it as existential editorial
cartoon realism, just because it sounds more intelligent and funny at the same time. The work holds
a certain reverence and faithfulness to reality mimicry but leans away enough to fall in the shadow of the
“uncanny valley”, the area where the mind is unsettled by what looks real enough but couldn’t possible
be. It is in this realm, theoretically, that the mind’s gamma waves are super-stimulated and brain activity
resembles fireworks. I resolve that this accounts for the broad reactions my work garners from observers,
that ranges from contemptuous dismissal to enthusiastic exuberance. We are all wired differently.
The medium is the method, which has been a faithful deployment of oil painting and traditional oil painting
techniques, such as glazing and the occasional dalliance into chiaroscuro. The richness achieved
by layers of thinned oil paint on MDF panels always adds an interesting luminous quality to the final
piece.
My direction as of late has been to devote more to composing on the panels rather than in pre-sketches.
I’m intrigued by the more spontaneous and gratifying results of ideas presenting themselves in the process
rather than in the planning, hence the falloff in the recent output of sketches. Often a core image or
concept dictates subliminally as to how the composition manifests itself.
see stephengibb.com for more 2017 paintings

The post 2017 appeared first on Stephen Gibb.