The last post I wrote here was after my trip to Venice in the spring of 2019. In that post I said that I needed to stop writing and sharing, that I needed to go to ground. And so I did.
I've still been working, focussing on just making the images, and sharing them regularly on my Facebook page and Instagram This has become the way I work. Theorising and thinking and writing less, at least most of the time; making something, sharing it, and then moving on.
A few days ago though, I found myself wanting to write again. I put my thoughts onto my Page, and a few days later it happened again. This stuff is really not for Facebook, so I thought I'd try putting it here.
'I don't often try to put into words what I'm interested in in art, or what it is that I'm trying to work with. Today I learnt that Picasso expressed it pretty much perfectly for me after seeing an exhibition of African, Native American and Oceanic artists:
'After seeing this exhibition, he confessed: “I forced myself to stay, to examine these masks, all these objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose, to serve as intermediaries between them and the unknown, hostile forces surrounding them, attempting in that way to overcome their fears by giving them colour and form. And then I understood what painting really meant. It’s not an aesthetic process; it’s a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires. The day I understood that, I had found my path.”
Art as something not focussed on aesthetics but on power/some kind of magic has been my path since I rejected the art mores of St Martins School of Art in the 1970s. It took me over thirty years to work out how to even begin to respond to my fascination with tales of Chinese paintings that were so alive that dragons flew off the page; with Indian rituals that used aesthetic forms and processes to overcome human experiences of duality and pain.
This is why I'm still experimenting, still going back to the beginning, again and again.... trying to get myself out of the way in the hope that bigger processes might be able to use me for the purposes of magic. I suppose it's also why I work so much with ancient artefacts, because we can't reduce them to any kind of explanation about what they were 'for'; they were made by humans living in the midst of forces we no longer even recognise.'
I don't know if this will continue, but here I am again, just following my nose...
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