I am in a comfortable place with my fusion of digital images and egg tempera. As I approach my first large fusion painting on canvas, 40" square, I am making sketches of some of it's elements. It's all play as the images reveal hidden treasures.
I love this from Edward Petherbridge:
"Descriptions of sketching throughout history have emphasized its spontaneous, exploratory, unfinished, indeterminate, contingent and/or disordered qualities; often characterized by loss of control or openness to the unexpected. Modern art also focused on aspects of the sketch to isolate, capture or value “the essential” as even more important than the finished work. In design disciplines, sketching is commonly seen as an interim activity; making images to assist in the creation of something more 'real'."
The lacy pink becomes enclosures for who knows what? And tendrils emerge and caress.
Stickiness and emergence yesterday, who can say where this is going? Open source!
This month's Art Review has an installation by Michelangelo Pistoletto, pretty interesting. It's images from a labyrinth installation called The Mirror of Judgement at the Serpentine Gallery.
When I ponder the question of the meaning of art as a child of it's time I come up with many ideas. Michelangelo's idea is pretty timely, and thankfully he has the audacity to bring spirituality into the dialogue.
"There is no longer a need to think of an author as being external, but rather as being embodied in every detail of the work. If the work and the universe are closely identifiable as one, then our presence is also part of this authorship. What we are doing is therefore the beginning of an artistic spirituality that offers an alternative to religious spirituality."
Lofty but perhaps he has reached the point where postmodernism explodes into post-postmodernism. Where conceptual art concealed it's rebellion in irony post-postmodernism offers a faith beyond the rational.
After seeing an ad on a train in Boston for the Chihuly show at the BMFA I've been revisiting his work. I, without doubt, love pretty much all of his work. And I admire his business sense. I've been entranced by the image of "the kiss" from his website. Oh to have been in Venice for this installation.
The installation has been called "the kiss," an open dialogue with the eighteenth-century chandelier hanging from the ceiling of the sumptuous room, made by the famous glass masters of the Serenissima Repubblica.
Odd how this stuff happens. Last week in response to seeing a sketch of my current work (as yet unveiled to the public) a new friend said it reminded her of Kandinsky. This led me to think about two artists: Kandinsky and Henri Rousseau. I never really got Kandinsky's connection to Rousseau until now. So in organizing the shed for winter I came across a bag of old books and there was Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Here's what has been inspiring me since:
"Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated. Efforts to revive art-principles of the past will at best produce art that is still-born."
". . . a similarity in the inner feeling of any one period to that of another, the logical result will be a revival of the external forms which served to express those inner feelings in an earlier age. An example of this today is our sympathy, our spiritual relationship, with the Primitives. Like ourselves, these artists sought to express in their work only internal truths, renouncing in consequence all consideration of external form."
Which explains to me why Picasso admired Rousseau, even if only in a sort of mocking way. Anyway he goes on to say:
"This all-important spark of inner life today is at present only a spark. Our minds, which are even now only just awakening after years of materialism, are infected with despair of unbelief, of lack of purpose and ideal. The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul in its grip. Only a feeble light glimmers like a tiny star in a vast gulf of darkness. This feeble light is not a dream, and the gulf of darkness reality"
That was written in 1914 just prior to WWI. I imagine the world looked pretty bleak to Wassily. Yet he understood that art could serve to mirror what was present or point to that tiny star, the inner spark. Today I look around the globe and see what feels like our collective soul awakening, finally. And in this awakening a renewed nobility of spirit with a compassion of understood interconnectedness. We really are in this together.
The work has shifted. Art, can imitate, as we have seen with the post-modernists mocking culture with an effort to awaken. The work of the post-post modernists is to fine tune what has awakened.
"Such works of art at least preserve the soul from coarseness; they "key it up," so to speak, to a certain height, as a tuning-key the strings of a musical instrument."
In the light of recent events in Libya I’m thinking about the difficult choices and actions required to restructure our world.
I’m pondering the idea that women in the White House are seen as “emotionally” leading the U.S. to war. And I’m questioning a world where the idea of being moved to action by the suffering of fellow humans is construed as weak.
I’m wondering how we redefine beauty and grace and what place it now has in the world.
Yesterday I played all day in the studio. Play can be slow and delightful. It can have sudden bursts of energy. It can have long periods of stillness.
For me it feels as if I am playing with spirit as the wave of life (prana).There is a moment before the playful energy gels and comes into existence. I'm fairly cerain this is where I play; then the dream and then living into it.
For me every hope and desire and dream I have expands me and moves the wave forward.
Below are a few iPhone snaps of Ice Jelly Four in process.
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