On Rorschach, Art and Non-Meaning

Inkblots have been synonymous with the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach but other artists have been invested in them.

British landscape artist, Alexander Cozens even wrote A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape.

Victor Hugo had a creative outlet back in 1848 with his "soleils d'encre". "A chance of blot of ink," he wrote, "will soon be subject to the most startling metamorphoses, art coming in to finish what fancy begun."

Justinus Kerner, a physician and poet published a book called Klecksographien, it was a compilation of part inkblots, part sketches along with some poems.

In 1984, Andy Warhol showed his series of Rorschach paintings.

"I was trying to do these to actually read into them and write about them, but I never really had the time to do that. So I was going to hire somebody to read into them, to pretend that it was me, so that they'd be a little more...interesting. Because all I would see would be a dog's face or something like a tree or a bird or a flower. Somebody else could see a lot more."

Supposedly, Bruce Conner's work might have inspired Warhol, and in response to Warhol's, Adam McEwen's work:

There's the work of Cornelia Parker, as part of her "Pornographic Drawings" which are Rorschach blots made from confiscated videotapes.

Even, John Langdon got inspired from Warhol's  work in 1996: "I had been unaware of that work, and was awed by it. In addition, I was reminded of having done some Rorschach-like work in the mid 70s that had played its part in my early investigations of symmetry, but that I had not pursued directly".

Of course there are other artists, iPhone apps and there's even a Processing sketch done by Kryštof Pešek.

All in all I think inkblots allow for imagination to flow, I quote Marina Warner from her book Phantasmagoria, "The brain balks at non-meaning... and reason, seeking to abolish it, generates fantasies".