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