In the early years of the 20th century, Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats experimented with automatic writing. A practice generated decades before but whose popularity was accelerated by the body count precipitated by World War I, automatic writing seemed to many people on both sides of the Atlantic to be a sure way to make contact with lost loved ones. As the theory goes, the dead would use such writing as a vehicle by which they could "speak" to the living by guiding the pen of a sensitive intermediary.

Yeats and his wife Georgie, who served as the medium in this case, generated around 4,000 pages of automatic writing in the first three years of their marriage. Of course, if they had had the counsel of Sigmund Freud -- his highly influential "The Interpretation of Dreams" was published in 1900 -- the Yeatses might have come to the conclusion that the texts that they ascribed to spirits was more likely generated by their own subconscious minds.

The Surrealist painters of the 1920s, like Andre Masson and Hans Arp, experimented with automatic painting by letting the hand move freely across the paper or canvas, freeing the artistic process from conscious control. It was these artists and their counterparts in his native Argentina that influenced Marcelo Novo in the development of his mature style.

Novo talked about the process by which he creates his paintings in a recent conversation with Columbia artist Michaela Pilar Brown at her gallery Mike Brown Contemporary, where a special exhibit of his newest work is on display until Jan. 3.

Usually starting with a black canvas, he applies his brush to the surface, allowing what he calls "internal shapes" to emerge. The circles, tubes and coils that first appear evolve eventually into recognizable representational images: a profile that is half horse and half woman, or the foam from a cup of café con leche transformed into a tango-dancing couple.

Marcelo Novo asserts that he usually sets aside at least four hours for each painting session because it takes that long for the trance-like state to dissipate. Each work is thus largely the product of one session, and it is only after the artist steps back from his canvas, perhaps with a glass of wine, that he is able to analyze where his brush has taken him.

"What is going on here?" he might ask himself. Why does this woman have six fingers? Why does the cascading hair of one figure merge with the circular tattoo on the back of another?

"Where does this come from?" he may also ask himself. In the latter regard, Novo has been able to recognize over time the significance of certain recurring symbols and images in his work. Dancing couples obviously spring from his father's fascination with the tango; women with high heels can be traced to a time when as a toddler he visited his mother in her hair salon.

Certainly, Novo's attraction to black and white -- some of his paintings are rendered totally in gray scale and others feature a central monochromatic image framed in color -- springs from his graduate work in printmaking at the University of South Carolina, where he was under the tutelage of Boyd Saunders. And too, in his even earlier training in his home country, Novo was always adept at rendering the human figure. These factors are constant and predictable.

Yet, the act of automatism remains a mystery. Marcelo Novo just lets himself go, abandoning himself to a multi-sensory experience. Indeed, in making marks upon the canvas, Novo attests that he engages not only his inner eye but also his senses of smell and touch. In the latter regard, for example, he once "felt" the glove that appeared on the hand of a painted figure. Such synesthetic moments contribute to the general understanding that no artist can ever understand the creative act in its totality.

"InterPLAY": The Art of Marcelo Novo" is the latest exhibition to be featured at Mike Brown Contemporary, a gallery that features the best in contemporary art. Gallerist Michaela Pilar Brown also hosts monthly "conversations" about a wide variety of engaging topics, all open to the public. Visit the gallery's website or Facebook page for additional information.