A Pre-Bretonian Advocacy of Automatism in Art: Spare and Carter's "Automatic Drawing"

(1916)
Author(s): Joseph Masheck, Austin O. Spare and Frederick Carter
Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 38 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 179-185
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Peabody Museum of
Archaeology and Ethnology
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 Documents and discussions
A Pre-Bretonian advocacy of automatism in art: Spare and
Carter's 'Automatic Drawing" (1916)
JOSEPH MASHECK
All that one needs to be reminded that just happening
to occur is par for the course in surrealism is to have
something merveilleux fall right into one's lap. This is
exactly how I felt (though this was hardly my first such
visitation) when in a favorite secondhand bookstore a
few years ago, I had to look twice at the title and date of
an essay advocating nothing less than "automatic
drawing" rather amazingly early: as a matter of fact, in
the spring of 1916, three years before Andr? Breton and
Philippe Soupault's production of the first automatically
written book, Les Champs magn?tiques (initially
serialized in Litt?rature in 1919) and eight years before
Breton's influential discussion of autosuggestion in the
"First Manifesto" of surrealism (1924).
I am referring, by way of introduction, to "Automatic
Drawing," an essay with graphically integrated drawings
in the first number of a short-lived English journal titled
Form: A Quarterly of the Arts, distributed by John Lane
in New York as well as in London; the article itself was
written by Austin Osman Spare (1888-1956) and
Frederick Carter (1885-1967).1 Appropriately enough, I
cannot exactly claim to be quite the first discoverer of
this stil I-startling early piece of automatist advocacy in
art, in which?to invoke the great exemplar?Andr?
Masson's ropily spontaneous linear drawing style of the
1920s is uncannily anticipated in illustrations or
illuminations, even as the text adumbrates Bretonian
theory. A generation ago, it was entertained just
sufficiently for dismissal, presumably as threatening a
then still dreadedly untheorized influence, in an inquiry
into Masson's "origins and development" as an artist.
Thus with the following anxiously blurred,
pseudohistorical diagnosis bursting its syntactical blood
vessels, Austin O. Spare and Frederick Carter's
1. Austin O. Spare and Frederick Carter, "Automatic Drawing,"
Form: A Quarterly of the Arts (London and New York), 1/1 (April
1916):27-30. A Kraus Reprint edition (New York, 1971) of presumably
all of the intermittent run comprises vol. 1 (April 1916?April 1917)
and n. s. vol. 1 (October 1921-January 1922).
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For T. N. and). R.
"Automatic Drawing" was rejected in 1976: "The work
and theory of Spare and Carter seem to come from
Blake and the tradition of English spiritualism which
often ran parallel to the cultural wellsprings of the
Surrealists but whose lines of intersection were mostly
confined to the contributions of German Romanticism."2
Now, first, let it not be overlooked in an effort to
normalize the given attribution that Spare and Carter's
very graphic unity of typeset print and calligraphic
drawings images is, on an admittedly more modest
scale, akin, not only to all sorts of "exquisite corpse"
procedures as essentially collaborative but even to Les
Champs magn?tiques itself, in the engendering of which
Breton and Soupault were inspired by Pierre Janet's
clinical L'Automatisme psychologique (1889), from
which in fact their surrealist term "automatic writing"
derives. When the British essay appeared, Breton and his
"automatic" collaborator-to-be were both still occupied
with soldiering during World War I, as was Masson,
who, indeed, had a very hard time surviving through the
year 1916. But it should not be forgotten, either, that
part of what was just then begetting Dada out of the
wits-end incongruities of La grande Illusion was the very
carrying on, side by side with the horror, of civilities of
an utterly "aesthetical," high cultural sort. Even from
across the Channel, British officers' subscriptions to The
Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs (as it used to be
fully styled) were never interrupted at the front.3
The ephemeral quasi-avant-garde quarterly in which
this advocacy of "automatic drawing" appeared declared
itself a "magazine containing poetry, sketches, essays of
literary and critical interest, together with original prints
and woodcuts, lithographs, calligraphic decorations and
initial letters."This first number presents itself with an
2. Carolyn Lanchner, "Andr? Masson: Origins and Development,"
in Andr? Masson, William Rubin and Carolyn Lanchner (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1976), 79-206, with fig. 12 on p. 208.
3. Raul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975; reprint,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 67.
 180 RES 38 AUTUMN 2000
all-too-artily taste-crafted, quasi-Edwardian indulgence
in lavish printing and presentation on behalf of mostly
embarrassingly deficient poetry. Except, that is, for
William Butler Yeats, who might have been welcomed
for the debut issue by virtue of social cachet yet who,
himself involved with the occult, was soon to wed a
known practitioner of automatic writing of the "mystic"
sort. And let us face the fact, without condoning bald
superstition (as if that were the basis of today's
hostility!), that just such turn-of-the century
"spiritualism," which made even William James take
notice, was apparently just where Spare and Carter's
automatic drawing as well as Mrs. Yeats's automatic
writing were, broadly speaking, coming from. The result
however, which (Breton would have been relieved to
know) has nothing much to do with spirit except as
possible warrant for a perhaps fearful irrationality, is if
anything literary beyond a point of affectation?even
curiously so, for a certain piquant weirdness.
No doubt owing to the primacy of literary culture,
especially in the English-speaking orbit, it tends to go
without saying that the more "literally literary" poetic of
the automatic or the spontaneously engendered verbal
text has priority, and that any equivalent "visual-art"
poetic should simply follow suit. Here however, in a
precocious case of automatic drawing (not automatic
writing), announced precisely as such, were the
practitioners Spare, a painter, printmaker, and illustrator
(he supplied Beardsleyesque illustrations as well as
initials and decorative "ignudi," like the less automatic
images at hand, for Ethel Rolt Wheeler's volume of
poetry The Veil, 1906) and Carter, also known as a
printmaker and illustrator. As a matter of fact, this Spare
(who as "a young Apollo" was rumored to be taking
drugs and dabbling in the occult as a student at the
Royal College of Art around 1910) is said to have
already shown in his first solo exhibition, in 1914, so
called "psychic" drawings?that is, "a kind of linear
automatism which he later called 'automatic'
drawings."4 Appended to their article is a non-automatic
drawing by each artist, as if for comparison (if not more
squarely as credentials of less radical competence): first
Carter's self-consciously outrageous Imagination in the
4. "In View: Spare a Thought," Art and Artists 221 (February
1985):5, telling that after a fashionable phase he came to be "decried
as a degenerate," "seedy" at that, though in his last ten years he at last
attained some second recognition.
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symboliste manner (a combination female nude-cum
worldtree in crucifixion posture with serpent-twined
arms and burning hair, rising from a writhing mass of
nudes), and then Spare's Bacchae, a suspiciously
normal-looking academic female nude. And yet both
these practicing artists also maintained literary identities:
Spare edited The Golden Hind as well as Form; Carter
wrote both The Dragon of the Alchemists (1926) and, as
a friend of the novelist, D. H. Lawrence and the Body
Mystical (1932).
The artistic results yielded by Spare and Carter's
experimentations are to be seen in some half dozen
drawings illustrating "Automatic Drawing." Most have a
definite spontaneous character of one shaping thought,
as it were, melting suggestively into another (while one
is merely a conventional piece of fin-de-si?cle book
illustration). It is not possible to say if any were
collaborations between Spare and Carter, in the manner
of the surrealist "exquisite corpse" drawings, with one
person extending a line already entailed in an enfolded
image of he-knows-not-what. Two of the drawings,
including the one shown here, bear the single "AOS"
monogram of Spare (where a scribbled signature on two
others plausibly identifies Carter alone). Interestingly, in
both of the monogrammed cases, and not in two other
drawings otherwise stylistically similar, the image proper
is accompanied by a no doubt willfully mysterious,
deliberately enigmatic, quasi-textual inscription in what
are surely pseudo-hieroglyphic characters beneath.
Insofar as these would-be characters evoke ancient
writing, hieratic or demotic, I would suggest that this is
so just because they are not so top-of-the head
"automatic" and probably derive from some established
occult source.5 The surmise seems reasonable (provided
the characters are not merely an intellectual joke) in
view of the prominence occultism did have in turn-of
the-century culture, alongside its rationalist equivalent,
the scientific interest in subconsciousness and
suggestion. Rather than pursue either affair, however, I
would prefer to call attention to that more specifically
literary aspect of Spare and Carter's situation, which
tends, I think, to be underexploited?owing perhaps to a
justifiable suspicion on the part of modernists in the fine
5. Such as the neoplatonically influenced Cornelius Agrippa's
"alchemical alphabet" (in De Occulta philosophia, 1529); cf. Johanna
Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and
Imagination (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), p. 191 (with illus.).

arts toward whatever in the way of representational
content might be critically questionable as "literary."
Simply to state the matter thusly will also point up the
possible special appeal of "hieroglyphic" characters,
such as at least Spare here indulged.
But there is the literary, and there is the literary. It
deserves to be recalled that while surrealism was a
basically French and literary-affiliated movement of
major importance to painting, in England there was also
an essentially visually attuned literary "imagism" (in its
own right stimulated by symbolisme). Apropos of the
compacted intensification of "concrete" terms in imagist
writing, a significant detail in "Automatic Drawing" is
the nonverbal scribble serving as a marginal
illumination to the word "Sigil." Starred with an asterisk
in the text and likewise in the margin, like a discursive
textual gloss, is this roughly calligraphic
nonrepresentational linear drawing, which, however
lively and spontaneous looking, is actually no
spontaneous scribble but, apparently, a little image cut
in real time, as it were, without reproductive mediation,
as a notably nonobjective woodcut.
Especially as a point is made of this as a "sigil," from
sigillum (Lat., "seal") as condensed diminution of
signum, "sign," this has a special imagist interest?like
the refreshed historiographie appeal of Renaissance and
baroque emblemata in the time of the fluorescence of a
modernist abstract painting of immediate and holistic,
and sometimes also seemingly arcane, signification,
though here even more condensed than emblemata. The
emblemata were part and parcel with the Renaissance
neoplatonic fascination with the very idea of the ancient
Egyptian hieroglyphics?and the rather abstractly
iconographical question, which would arise after World
War II, of whether such were (negatively) all too
inscrutable except to the initiated, or else (affirmatively)
wonderfully self-evident to view, at least to those in the
know.6 The pictogram as well as the hieroglyph thus
held an especially visually qualified form of "literary"
6. In "Plastic Art and General Culture," Art Criticism 1 (1981 ):11-19,
reprinted in Joseph Masheck, Historical Present: Essays of the 1970s
(Ann Arbor: U. M. I. Research Press, 1984), pp. 281-288, I have
situated as contemporaneous with abstract expressionism the then
heated argument involving E. H. Gombrich and Edgar Wind, over
Ficino's glossing Plotinus on the Egyptian hieroglyph?specifically,
whether the hieroglyph conceals meaning or reveals it (pp. 283-284,
with refs.).
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Masheck: A Pre-Bretonian advocacy of automatism in art 181
appeal. It was at about this time that Ezra Pound, on
return from America after meeting the widow of Ernest
Fenollosa in London, was editing, among other
Fenollosa manuscripts, the important imagist essay "The
Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry," first
published in Pound's Investigations (1920) after several
refusals by journals.7 In the imagist light, Spare and
Carter's automatic drawing project does indeed hold
special literary as well as artistic interest (one rightly
hesitates to say "pictorial"), not simply generally as
?criture but in timely terms of the development within
literature of an explicitly "imagist" poetic.8
Beyond the special "imagism" of the Anglo-American
literary avant-garde, there was also the older British
adumbration of automatic drawing in the recourse to
chance-formed "blots" as starting points for generating
inky hypothetical landscape drawings according to the
pre-romantic "method" of Alexander Cozens (circa
1785),9 whose rediscovery in the 1950s was a little like
finding an adumbration of Dr. Rorschach's
Psychodiagnostics (1921 ) in the England of Sir Joshua
Reynolds. Then too, in the literary sphere, both Horace
Walpole and, as Breton was aware, Carlyle, had already
approximated to surrealist automatic writing.10 Even
invoking Blake, however, will not explain an irruption in
7. Lawrence W. Chisolm, Fenollosa: The Far East and American
Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 223. Fenollosa's
aesthetics touched several generations of young people in America
and beyond as part of a populistic postimpressionist modernism
broadcast in the field of art education by Arthur Wesley Dow in his
influential Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the
Use of Students and Teachers (1899); see my introduction, "Dow's
vWay' to Modernity for Everybody," to the new edition of Composition
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 1-61.
8. On British literary imagism in relation to surrealism, see Joseph
Masheck, "Magritte in an Imagist Light" (1974), in Historical Present:
Essays of the 1970s (Ann Arbor: U. M. I. Research Press, 1984), pp.
33-45. Something that I would like to develop on a more appropriate
occasion is how imagism may relate to the analytical emphasis on
the "logical content" of statements in then-contemporary Anglo
American philosophy.
9. Alexander Cozens, A New Method of Assisting the Invention in
Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape (London, n. d.),
reprinted in A. P. Opp?, Alexander and John Roben Cozens (London:
Black, 1952; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954).
Thanks to Dario Gamboni for reminding me of Cozens, as well as for
other helpful comments.
10. Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andr?
Breton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), p. 104. Thanks to
Barbara Lekatsas for a reference.
 182 RES 38 AUTUMN 2000
the maiden issue of a periodical, which, if anything,
looks unpleasantly upper-crust, of a seeming paean to
anarchic irrationality in art production. (In surrealist
circumstances of automatic or spontaneous engendering,
a present-day jargon of artistic "production" begins to
seem amusingly clinical, as somehow commonsensically
irrational as the way excitements can manifest themselves
in the condition of the mucus membrane by quite other
than-logical necessity.)
It does seem curious how much latitude was here so
happily offered, in Britain in 1916, and in classy
letterpress at that, to the seemingly anarchic or
irrational. In this regard, I wish to call attention to a
certain psycho-cultural observation of special pertinence
to the condition of surrealism in England, before
proceeding to Spare and Carter's "Automatic Drawing,"
which anticipates even Breton's abiding emphasis on
automatism as liberating.
In respect to the insular appeal of surrealism, there is
a remarkable theory framed by a British assistant of Carl
Jung. Wondering why Jung's work should quickly have
found wide reading, though little public discussion, in
England, where the national character has such a strong
component of aristocratic introversion, H. G. Baynes
proposed that the very notion of "accepting and
reinstating unconscious functions and elements that
have been suppressed by an exclusively social
adaptation" was "seen as a new extension of the
principle of fair-play," while "Jung's integration of living
concepts from undirected dream- and fantasy
representations" was "recognized as the necessary
extension of the empirical principle to the realm of
spiritual phenomena." In Baynes's view, "the idea of
relating to the anima and, through the anima, to the
denizens of the unconscious is cogent to the English
mind under the aspect of the knightly quest," including
"the idea of giving fair-play to the repressed functions."11
It is worth noting that Herbert Read, that major critic
and advocate within and on behalf of the British
surrealist movement?and not only on behalf of the
hearty Protestant, air-force-type surrealism of Henry
Moore's ilk?himself became an editor of the Bollingen
edition of Jung's works in English.
11. H. G. Baynes, "Analytical Psychology and the English Mind," in
Analytical Psychology and the English Mind and Other Papers
(London: Methuen, 1950), pp. 34-60, esp. 47, 51, 55.
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In Surrealism and Painting (1927), Breton would
maintain that as much as a bird's nest under instinctual
construction, or as a musical melody unfolding
according to intrinsic structural necessity, does
automatism access the pleasure principle as if
untrammeled: "I maintain that graphic as well as verbal
automatism ... is the only mode of expression which
fully satisfies the eye or ear by achieving rhythmic unity
(just as recognizable in the automatic drawing and text
as in the melody or the nest). . . . And I agree that
automatism can enter into composition, in painting as in
poetry, with certain premeditated intentions; but there is
great risk if the automatism ceases to flow underground'
(emphases in original).12 There remains the more purely
critical fact that, for all their manifest originality in the
sense of blunt priority, and quite apart from the question
of influence, however reformed, the Spare and Carter
"source" drawings actually do seem forced and even
fatally self-conscious in the sense warned against by
Breton, whereas drawings to come soon after from the
hand and brain of Andr? Masson, though interestingly
"retroactively" adumbrated by these, are among the
finest drawings of the twentieth century.13
The wartime displacement to New York of Breton and
Masson, in 1941, but also of others as different in
outlook as Piet Mondrian (already in 1940), served
famously to stimulate the consolidation of "New York
School" abstract expressionist painting, in the formation
of which surrealist automatism was vital?not that
Breton was assumed to preside over that (a town with
more than one bishop is no pushover for a self
appointed pope). Apart from personalities and party
politics, the obvious inevitable aesthetic difficulty, in
terms of a practically theological commitment to pure
abstraction, which to this day, despite postmodernism, is
still strong in New York, was Breton's?sorry!?
12. Andr? Breton, Surrealism and Painting (1927), as excerpted and
trans, in Ratrick Waldberg, Surrealism (1965; reprint, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1978), pp. 81-88, here 84.
13. I have suggested the notion of "retroactive influence" for
situations in which a "later work influences . . . [an] earlier one,
casting back onto it a reflected light that can enliven latent meanings
that, needless to say, may never have been prosaically intentional
anyway." Joseph Masheck, "Two Blasts from the Past in Picasso (and
Yes, Marcel, You Too)" (1985), in my Modernities: Art-Matters in the
Present (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993),
pp. 213-222, here 220; see also "Notes on Influence and
Appropriation" (1985), in ibid., pp. 223-229, esp. 226.

hopelessly literary outlook as admitting, if not of Dali's,
nevertheless of a still irredeemably descriptive-pictorial
sense of the image. So there was reason for artists to
gravitate instead to such an automatist alternative as the
"psychological morphologies" of Roberto Matta
(Echaurren), the Chilean painter who had worked in the
Paris studio of the constructivist painter-architect Le
Corbusier. Stylistically, one of the closest single points of
contact with New York surrealism would seem to be
between Spare and the rather gothically "far-out"
graphics of Kurt Seligmann (another occultist).
Although even Matta would be found too much a
chairman, he himself seems also to have been
influenced by the thinking of the younger British
surrealist Gordon Onslow-Ford, who in 1940 could
write of automatism as a "scientific poetry" in which
"lies a philosophy" and indeed as worthy of a "bureau
of analytical research."14 In that year, too, the British
printmaker Stanley William Hayter, who belonged to
Breton's and Masson's generation and who had worked
in Paris since 1926, would transfer his Atelier 17 to New
York (1940-1951), where it would stimulate the
automatism of Jackson Pollock himself?no doubt by his
example of springy linear arrays, not altogether unlike
Spare and Carter's, in his own engraving and etching, as
well as by Hayter's famously astute technical tutelage.
And both Onslow-Ford and Hayter would be saluted by
Breton in the New York surrealist journal V7ew in 1941.
Now then what one would really like to know is if
Hayter or Onslow-Ford, not to mention Breton, Masson,
or even Jackson Pollock, just so happened to be
acquainted with the first number of Form.
(In the following version of the original article, a
"sigil" originally occurring in the margin of the large
album-like page is here inserted into the text at its point
of referencing. Except at two excessively awkward
points in the following re-presentation, I have avoided
correcting eccentricities of punctuation in order to
preserve the artifactual integrity of the original text.
Original page breaks are here marked by slashes, and
two notes have been inserted.)
14. Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of
Abstract Expressionism (New York: Harper & Row, n. d.), chap. 2, "The
Imagination of Disaster," pp. 29-43, esp. p. 43 n. 26, with reference to
Gordon Onslow-Ford, "The Painter Looks Within Himself," London
Bulletin 18-20 (June 1940):31.
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Masheck: A Pre-Bretonian advocacy of automatism in art 1 83
AUTOMATIC DRAWING (1916)
by Austin O. Spare and Frederick Carter
Out of the flesh of our mothers come dreams and
memories of the gods. Of other kind than the normal
inducement of interest and increasing skill, there exists a
continual pressure upon the artist of which he is
sometimes partially conscious but rarely entirely aware.
He learns early or late in his career that power of literal
reproduction (such as that of the photographic apparatus)
is not more than slightly useful to him. He is compelled
to find out from his artist predecessors the existence, in
representation of real form, of super- / sessions of
immediate accuracies; he discovers within himself a
selective conscience and he is satisfied, normally, in
large measure by the extensive field afforded by this
broadened and simplified consciousness.
Yet beyond this is a region and that a much greater
one, for exploration. The objective understanding, as we
see, has to be attacked by the artist and a subconscious
method, for correction of conscious visual accuracy,
must be used. No amount of manual skill and
consciousness of error will produce good drawing. A
recent book on drawing by a well-known painter is a
case in point; there the examples of masters of
draughtsmanship may be compared with the painter
author's own, side by side, and the futility of mere skill
and interest examined. Therefore to proceed further, it is
necessary to dispose of the "subject" in art also (that is
to say the subject in the illustrative or complex sense).
Thus to clear the mind of inessentials permits through a
clear and transparent medium, without prepossessions
of any kind, the most definite and simple forms and
ideas to attain expression.
Notes on Automatic Drawing
An "automatic" scribble of twisting and interlacing
lines permits the germ of idea in the subconscious mind
to express, or at least suggest itself to the consciousness.
From this mass of procreative shapes, full of fallacy, a
feeble embryo of idea may be selected and trained by
the artist to full growth and power. By these means, may
the profoundest depths of memory be drawn upon and
the springs of instinct tapped.
Yet let it not be thought that a person not an artist
may by these means become one: but those artists who
are hampered in expression, who feel limited by the
hard conventions of the day and wish for freedom, who
 184 RES 38 AUTUMN 2000
strive for self expression but have not attained to it, these
may find in it a power and a liberty elsewhere
undiscoverable. Thus writes Leonardo da Vinci:?
"Among other things, I shall not scruple to discover a
new method of assisting the invention; which though
trifling in appearance, may yet be of considerable
service in opening the mind and putting it upon the
scent of new thoughts, and it is this: if you look at some
old wall covered with dirt, or the odd appearance of
some streaked stones, you may discover several things
like landskips, battles, clouds, uncommon attitude,
draperies, etc. Out of this confused mass of objects the
mind will be fur- / nished with abundance of designs
and subjects, perfectly new."[15]
From another, a mystical writer!:] "Renounce thine
own will that the law of God may be within thee."[16]
The curious expression of character given by
handwriting is due to the automatic or unconscious
nature that it acquires by habit. So Automatic drawing,
one of the simplest of psychic phenomena, is a means of
characteristic expression and, if used with courage and
honesty, of recording subconscious activities in the
mind. The mental mechanisms used are those common
in dreams, which create quick perception of relations in
the unexpected, as wit, and psycho-neurotic symptoms.
Hence it appears that single or non-consciousness is an
essential condition and as in all inspiration the product
of involution not invention.
Automatism being the manifestation of latent desires (or
wishes) the significance of the forms (the ideas) obtained
represents] the previously unrecorded obsessions.
Art becomes, by this illuminism or ecstatic power, a
functional activity expressing in a symbolical language
the desire towards joy unmodified?the sense of the
Mother of all things?not of experience.
This means of vital expression releases the fundamental
static truths which are repressed by education and
customary habit and lie dormant in the mind. It is the
means of becoming courageously individual; it implies
spontaneity and disperses the cause of unrest and ennui.
The dangers of this form of expression come from
prejudice and personal bias of such nature as fixed
15. This rendition of one of the favorite topoi of the surrealists,
borrowed from Leonardo's Treatise on Painting, may come from the
once-popular English version of John Francis Rigaud (1802), though
seeking to verify the point would risk a pointless pedantry.
1 6. Meister Eckhart, perhaps?
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intellectual conviction or personal religion (intolerance).
/These produce ideas of threat, displeasure or fear, and
become obsessions.
In the ecstatic condition of revelation from the
subconscious, the mind elevates the sexual or inherited
powers (this has no reference to moral theory or
practise) and depresses the intellectual qualities. So a
new atavistic responsibility is attained by daring to
believe?to possess one's own beliefs?without
attempting to rationalize spurious ideas from prejudiced
and tainted intellectual sources.
Automatic drawings can be obtained by such
LA
methods as concentrating on a Sigil?
by any means of exhausting the mind and body
pleasantly in order to obtain a condition of non
consciousness?by wishing in opposition to the real
desire after acquiring an organic impulse towards
drawing.
The Hand must be trained to work freely and without
control, by practise in making simple forms with a
continuous involved line without afterthought, i. e. its
intention should just escape consciousness.
Drawings should be made by allowing the hand to
run freely with the least possible deliberation. In time
shapes will be found to evolve, suggesting conceptions,
forms and ultimately having personal or individual style.
The Mind in a state of oblivion, without desire
towards reflection or pursuit of materialistic intellectual
suggestions, is in a condition to produce successful
drawings of one's personal ideas, symbolic in meaning
and wisdom.
By this means sensation may be visualized.
 Masheck: A Pre-Bretonian advocacy of automatism in art 1 85

Figure 1. Austin Osman Spare, Untitled pen and ink drawing illustrating
Austin O. Spare and Frederick Carter, "Automatic Drawing," 1916.

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