'we are born into a sacred world'

'But say there is no Creator, that Life created itself in great bursts of variation and selection, and filled the sky with midges and birds and filled the seas with—not just fishes—but the most extraordinary collection of creatures too inventive to be imagined, the creeping, chirping things with thin legs or sucking parts. If this is so, then this world is astonishing, irreplaceable, essential, beautiful and fearsome, generative, and beyond human understanding. If the good English word for this combination of characteristics is “sacred,” then that is the word I will use. We are born into a sacred world, and we ourselves are part of its glory....

Kathleen Dean Moore

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'our flaws and weaknesses, while often obstacles to getting our work done, are a source of strength as well.'

'But while talent - not to mention fate, luck and tragedy - all play their role in human destiny, they hardly rank as dependable tools for advancing your own art on a day-to-day basis. Here in the day-to-day world (which is, after all, the only one we live in), the job of getting on with your work turns upon making some basic assumptions about human nature, assumptions that place the power (and hence the responsibility) for your actions in your own hands. Some of these can be stated directly:

ART IS MADE BY ORDINARY PEOPLE. Creatures having only virtues can hardly be imagined making art. It's difficult to picture the Virgin Mary painting landscapes. Or Batman throwing pots. The flawless creature wouldn't need to make art. And so, ironically, the ideal artist is scarcely a theoretical figure at all. If art is made by ordinary people, then you'd have to allow that that ideal artist would be an ordinary person too, with the whole usual mixed bag of traits that real humans possess. This is a giant hint about art, because it suggests that our flaws and weaknesses, while often obstacles to getting our work done, are a source of strength as well. Something about making art has to do with overcoming things, giving us a clear opportunity for doing things in ways we have always known we should do them.'

David Bayles & Ted Orland, Art and Fear

a process that works itself

One of the things I'm observing as my content arises is different qualities of line, and I often wonder about the processes of control or otherwise over such qualities. When I'm not thinking at all, doing something like trying out a pen, images appear that wouldn't have come from a different frame of mind.

Below is one such pen-trying-out image. I would never have made this if I'd had any even partial thought of 'maybe selling' or even  'maybe sharing'. Both the line and the use of colour were made pretty much without thought.

The second image below has some of these qualities but not others. It wasn't intended to become an image that might be sold or shared. It was an experiment on canvas, a material which is still new to me, especially when using a pen. But though I had no plan for the image before I started and no idea about how it would turn out,  I was very conscious of the line moving more slowly and carefully on this more permanent material.

I have to acknowledge that I made a whole lot of similarly experimental images in my first years back at painting, and many of them ended up being exhibited and sold. Much of what I currently sell or share follows the same process of experimentation; of trying not to think, hoping to surprise myself etc, and it's only afterwards that I select.

The qualities that most interest me appear much more in the first of the two images above than in the second.

Some people might say that what I'm doing are 'studies'. But studies for what? If if I find that the freer, less intentional drawings have the qualities that I want, and the more conscious ones usually don't, what would I be making studies for?

All of my working is a kind of learning-by-doing. The qualities of materials that I want to learn about can't be understood in any other way. To some extent it doesn't really matter to me at the moment what image arises, or what colours and marks end up on the page. The main thing is just to keep making lines and putting on paint. Something emerges, moves and grows, just in the act of keeping going.


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emergence

It is time.

Crawl up from the underworld.
Depart your long stay in
thick darkness and clay.

Find your roots.

Find your roots.

Follow - straight or
spiralling - to the surface and
into the humid,
star-storied night.

Proceed, slowly, yes,
but with the unyielding intent
to become the amazing thing
that you have never before
seen.

Can you feel your soft, tender body
up against the inside of your
dry, tight, skin?

The edge. The tightness.
It tears you apart...

this back-splitting longing to
be larger that that which has
contained you.

I know that dream.

The one about having wings.

So, find that place where you will,
consciously,
take the last step
as who you have been,
unfold your future,
and cast the old story behind you.

Emerge. Break free.

Surrender to your destiny,
lifting your long struggled forth form
onto a tree trunk,
or a flower stalk.

The moistness.
It is always there -
conception, growth,
birth, life, death.

Notice the eyes.

Red.

Let the soft dawning breezes
caress your sensitive nature,
as you unfurl lacy,
iridescent dreams.
So clear.

Now firm in the daylight.
You are seen.

Listen.

The world is calling to you.

Let yourself be heard.

Trust in what you have been
gifted.

Trust in what you have been
gifted.

Take flight -

with this core truth:

Where you land
and what you do
will determine
how well grounded
we are in the future.

Jamie Reaser, Wild Life

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exactitude

I can draw 'accurately'. But learning to draw accurately always seemed strangely wrong for me. The act of making precise ('exactitude is not truth') , or attempting to make precise, seemed to kill something. That's why I was so excited when my line broke free in India. Something felt different, began to live. Many years later, a friend would look at those Indian drawings and say that they were in some way naive. I was quite taken aback, because for me the line had advanced towards something much more exciting.

I guess people look at Indian folk art and similarly say that the images are naive. For me this misses the point. This is a symbolic world, a world where images can provoke resonance, deep within the viewer. Or they may not. But the image emerges from a complex human/larger world interface (Kapoor's 'content arising') rather than being the result of a concept or a willed intention.

Someone said to me recently, 'Oh, you don't do real things do you'? But for me the images I make are just as much about reality as a portrait or a landscape. I'm working not so much 'from life', as with life, with the experience of things that are living...

The living line of my emergent content seems to deliberately flout exactitude. 'Exactitude?', it seems to say, 'Ha! take this!'.

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'this back-splitting longing to be larger than that which has contained you'

It is time.

Crawl up from the underworld.
Depart your long stay in
thick darkness and clay.

Find your roots.

Find your roots.

Follow - straight or
spiralling - to the surface and
into the humid,
star-storied night.

Proceed, slowly, yes,
but with the unyielding intent
to become the amazing thing
that you have never before
seen.

Can you feel your soft, tender body
up against the inside of your
dry, tight, skin?

The edge. The tightness.
It tears you apart...

this back-splitting longing to
be larger that that which has
contained you.

I know that dream.

Jamie Reaser, Wild Life

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'much of life is ruined for us by a blanket of familiarity that descends between us and everything that matters'

'For Proust, the great artists deserve acclaim because they show us the world in a way that is fresh, appreciative, and alive… The opposite of art, for Proust, is something he calls habit. For Proust, much of life is ruined for us by a blanket or shroud of familiarity that descends between us and everything that matters. It dulls our senses and stops us appreciating everything, from the beauty of a sunset to our work and our friends.

Children don’t suffer from habit, which is why they get excited by some very key but simple things — like puddles, jumping on the bed, sand, and fresh bread. But we adults get ineluctably spoiled, which is why we seek ever more powerful stimulants, like fame and love.

The trick, in Proust’s eyes, is to recover the powers of appreciation of a child in adulthood, to strip the veil of habit and therefore to start to look upon daily life with a new and more grateful sensitivity.

This, for Proust, is what one group in the population does all the time: artists. Artists are people who strip habit away and return life to its deserved glory.'

How to stop letting habit blunt our aliveness 

not achievement but freedom

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do it now

'Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible'

Doris Lessing

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'Strangely, we find that all along, we had what we needed from the beginning'

THE HIDDEN GIFT IN GOOD WORK

A true vocation always calls us out beyond ourselves; breaks our heart in the process and then humbles, simplifies and enlightens us about the hidden, core nature of the work that enticed us in the first place. Strangely, we find that all along, we had what we needed from the beginning and that in the end we have returned to its essence, but an essence we could not understand until we had undertaken the journey.

No matter the self-conceited importance of our labours we are all compost for worlds we cannot yet imagine. Ambition might take us toward that horizon, but not over it - that line will always recede before our controlling hands. But a calling is a conversation between our physical bodies, our work, our intellects and our imaginations, and a new world that is itself the territory we seek.

A true vocation always includes the specific, heart-rending way we will fail at our attempt to live our lives fully. The humility earned through failure means we look for both visible and invisible help, that we cannot be complete without meeting and being helped by someone or something other than our selves and as its final gift, metamorphoses both ambition and failure into a generous compassion and understanding for others….

...

from ‘AMBITION’ From CONSOLATIONS: 

The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press 2015

play

'The purpose of the universe is play. The artists know that, and they know that play and art and creation are different names for the same thing - a thing that is sweats and agonies and ecstasies...

Levity is the result of spiritual and aesthetic poise. All progress is towards levity through gravity. Weight, then wings. But it is wings that are the goal.'

Don Marquis

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five projects against disconnection

I just came across this draft which I wrote in 2014 but never posted.....

In relation to my post on 9th October, 2014, here's a summary of the things that matter to me.

• Human disconnection from nature, from the planet as a connected organism; from life, from the life force

• The increasing dominance of referred/mental experience: living in increasingly virtual worlds

• Disconnection from personal life force in the body: from voice, music, movement, dance, singing, creativity:
• less and less connection to the body - sitting at a computer all day long; lack of natural movement as part of this kind of work; exercise as something which treats the body as a machine that has to be mechanically put through its paces at the end of the day
• less and less connection to our own creativity - the dominance of cultural ideas which tell us that only a gifted few are 'talented' enough to 'be creative'

Looking at what has come out of the instinctive process that I've been following, I seem to have sown the seeds of five potential projects/areas:

1. Creation. Performance/painting based on a creation hymn from an ancient Hindu text, the Rig Veda.

A three thousand year lament about meaning and purpose, focussing on the mystery of the creation of a mysterious world.

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2. Into the pink. A series of paintings exploring the colour, forms and feel of the human body.

A visceral exploration of the cellular reality of human life forms.

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3. The trashing of creation. A series of images exploring the follow quote from George Monbiot:

'Our consumption is trashing a natural world infinitely more fascinating and intricate that the stuff we produce' (2.10.14)

A visual confrontation/articulation of the destruction of the wonder of the world.

A related theme, explored in the sand painting, is the fragility and transience of life. 

_________________________________________________________________________________

4. The human body as an emanation of life

Classical texts for Indian artists dictated that the artist's line in painting a body had to be executed in such a way that it was possible to distinguish a living body from a corpse. Whereas in the Graeco/Roman tradition (which still informs EuroAmerican aesthetics today) the emphasis was on accuracy of anatomical detail, the Indian painter was concerned with portraying the movement of prana  (breath) through the living body.

The body as the container of a continually emerging life force

_________________________________________________________________________________

5. Alankara: beauty and ornament as protection. In classical Indian aesthetics, jewellery, perfumes, colours and other forms of body ornamentation were not seen as superfluous extras, but as conferring power and protection on the wearer (beautifully explored in 'The Body Adorned' by Vidya Dehejia).

Human creativity as a foil against the dark. 

_________________________________________________________________________________

6. Something about proportion and measurement

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Putting all this another way, I'm interested in painting, performance, and activities that explore, highlight, or celebrate the following:


1. The miracle of the biological form that is the body

2. The body as a fractal emanation of planetary life processes; not just 'connected to' those life processes, but a manifestation of them; an embodiment of life energy

3. The extraordinariness of biological and physical life

4. The transience and preciousness of biological and physical life; for the individual, for the group, for the environment, for the planet

5. Creativity as an expression of life energy: dance, song, painting, poetry, comedy, performance, movement - not as 'talented' celebrities but as a means of connecting with self and community

'Becoming an artist consists of learning to accept yourself, which makes your work personal...'

'But while talent - not to mention fate, luck and tragedy - all play their role in human destiny, they hardly rank as dependable tools for advancing your own art on a day-to-day basis. Here in the day-to-day world (which is, after all, the only one we live in), the job of getting on with your work turns upon making some basic assumptions about human nature, assumptions that place the power (and hence the responsibility) for your actions in your own hands. Some of these can be stated directly:

ARTMAKING INVOLVES SKILLS THAT CAN BE LEARNED. The conventional wisdom here is that while 'craft' can be taught, 'art' remains a magical gift bestowed only by the gods. Not so. In large measure becoming an artist consists of learning to accept yourself, which makes your work personal, and in following your own voice, which makes your work distinctive...'

David Bayles & Ted Orland, Art and Fear

I'm thinking about this today in relation to something that Paul Oertel says on his new CD, Reflections on Artistic Expression. My notes from listening to this say:

'The more specific you can become, the more the universal is revealed... 

(you get to) something that is real...not something that is limited in scope...'



There's something very important and complicated in the idea of a personal that does not make the observer/viewer/listener feel like a voyeur.

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content arising

Content continues to arise. Through arising content I begin to find my way back in, after a period of personal disruption.

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