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In New Zealand, a gentleman found a direct route to accessing your creativity and innermost expressions, this man is Len Lye. Lye's art-making theory remains an evocative approach in today’s contemporary art world. What I fear is that this mode of thinking is slowly dying due to our current cultures need to consistently act logically. Len Lye is well known for his kinetic sculptures, experimental hand-drawn films (a.k.a “direct” films), and abstract paintings. The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery is home to a collection and archive of Lye’s work, spanning more than 60 years.

The science, art, and philosophy of Len Lye begins with his theory about the “old” and “new” brain. A method he used to by-pass cognitive cultural filter of rationalizations and interpretations by doodling. (Yes, doodlling!) The gift of a child's imagination can be established with training by anyone, which Lye found as way to “retrieve and portray images from realms beyond the capacity of the individual.” By passing the new brain’s censoring of interpretations can allow your old brain to activate your lucid thoughts of subconscious memories, experiences and personal feelings directly through the pencil hand onto paper.

Lye delved further into finding intuitive knowledge by relating to primitive and tribal art as well as identifying with nature. Much of his paintings and films can be related to primitive drawings of forms and shapes because of Lye’s ties with tribal cultures of New Zealand and Australia. He saw these people very in touch with there own bodies, “whose artistic ‘distortions’ were a way of expressing body feelings and other deep insights.” Lye’s hand-drawn films were frequently associated with dancing, where the “lines sway to music, not symbolizing a dancer directly but creating the kinetic feeling that we can we can associate with body movement.” Thus, making art is about finding a visual way to show the feeling or moment of something just like the primitive cultures had done centuries ago.

Lye saw our relation with nature as a way of "descending to a level at which the distinction between nature and one’s self seems to disappear and freer interchange can take place.” Thus, I think of the phrase to be "in touch with nature" means to be in touch with one’s self. Lye saw that an Aboriginal clan shared a common myth about the beginnings of life. As we strive to find inspiration through art, I feel that this desire is to find a sense of our origins, our roots.

It was an experimental film animator who directed me towards Len Lye. His approach towards art-making has strengthened my own insights with using film and video.

*Quoted material in reference to the book at Visual Studies Workshop, Len Lye: A Personal Mythology.

*See interview of Len Lye on "composing motion, just as musicians compose sound."