Dr Mike Tremblay
painter & innovation advisor
I deal with a complex array of issues in my professional work and this is reflected in the problems familiar to those of us who either work in the health sector, interact with it as patients, or act as informal carers. The challenges we face daily making sense ofcom
plex issues is reflected in my pursuit of artistic expression through abstract processes.
I like the Abstract Expressionists for their honesty and urge to get to the core of meaning. While the Supremacists played with the dynamism of the world, the early Gothic
art lacked technical ability to be truly abstract despite an apparent inclina
tion. Years of figurative realistic representational art has distracted people from the fundamental and more natural desire to explore the meaning of the world, rather than what it looked like.
Abstract art does go beyond perspective, as it alters our perceptions of reality; from physics we learn that the world is not quite what our senses suggest it is, and while Cubism sought to interpret relativity theory, we have yet to make artistic sense of M-theory and superstrings and what that means to our sense of reality. And there is much still to learn about cognition and what passes for our psychological sense of the world.
We think Newton’s 3D world is the real world because our brains seem to prefer it, and perhaps because it is the
world from which figurative work derives its form — it seems obvious. But we should not think that this is really the way the world is, fundamentally.
Therefore, abstract painting isn’t really abstract. Abstraction is the most natural form of expression of the human mind.
I come to my art from formal study of mathematical logic, philosophy of language and science, and scientific methodology. I did graduate work on boundary logic (true, false, both, neither) and further studies which led to my career in health, technology and policy, which I do now.
Artistically, I see art as communication between minds, full of elusive transient meaning — art speak to us across eras (think of the cave paintings and the minds of the people who made them).
In the end, the success of any art is in its reception, and the challenge for an artist is to know when they have said what they intended, and no more.
