Lucas EL Camino

My work is meant to be a kind of armament against futility and despair, those swamps of the human psyche where anyone can sometimes stray, but there is no reason to linger there. I started painting only recently, when I was forced to break my life in half and quit alcohol for good. There was some kind of coronavirus in China at the time. But I've been doing computer graphics since I was a student.Alcoholism was the result of my shadow, which is emptiness and hopelessness. Despite some brightly won battles, I was losing the trench war for a long time. The human world is truly in a terrible state. But in the end, I decided that I didn't have to contribute to it.Alcohol has taken away the vast majority of my problems, yet my psyche sometimes, for no apparent reason, falls into the futility of all the striving that is life.So I have been looking for positive emanators to help the depressed mind regain hope and prevent it from falling back. Primarily positive imagery doesn't help here, it either seems unattainable or trite. Nor do concrete scenes work because the mind labels them and eventually stops perceiving them. Children's drawings work, until they plunge us into regret over lost childhood, aging and approaching death :-)Eventually I arrived at a technique that uses chance to exclude ego and reason from the creation, and resists both in the subsequent interpretation, because it produces shapes that defy description, that no one could deliberately create, if only because they couldn't find a reason to do so. Perhaps it is this purposeless yet deliberate existence that at least awakens curiosity in the depressed mind. And to a healthy mind, which only occasionally threatens to stumble and fall, it provides a solid support. I have called the technique distance action printing.The shapes thus produced seem to mature over time, and I often come to love an image that I initially didn't like at all. It's as if the shapes themselves, unlike anything one consciously creates and whose creation is not preceded by any idea, have difficulty penetrating reality and only come into full existence some time after their creation. They certainly resist "enchantment" longer than abstractions created by hand, even in action painting.