The artist's aim...

...after lots of practice, is to be able to believe what you see, then draw it with enough conviction to communicate to other people what you have seen...

Sounds easy, is not so always...

esoterica...

"The Garden Lover's Companion" (1974, ed. Peter Hunt), has an amusing story: "in Oxford in the 1880's ... a root of the ivy which then covered the masonry of Magdalen Tower penetrated the wine cellar beneath, groped its way through the cork of a bottle, and brazenly drank up all the exellent port inside."

cheers!

Our very existence is based on ignorance of where we are going. what's important is having the fortitude and patience to dig around and try to find out... as someone more clever than I wrote once: personal refinement of vision makes creativity worthwhile.

These women in Samburu, though, know what they are up to: the main task of the day is to transport water back to their remote villages... and as you can se, they use quite a lot of creastivity loading those donkeys!

Art and Landscape

Continuing with my philosophical musings... sorry! Just skip if tooo booring...

M. Andrews says of art and landscape in the book ”Landscape and Western Art” (1999) that the idea of ”Landscape” itself is a construction:

…”A ‘landscape’, cultivated or wild, is already artifice before it has become the subject of a work of art. Even when we simply l o o k we are already shaping and interpreting.
A landscape may never achieve representation in a painting or photograph; none the less, something significant has happened when land can be perceived as ‘landscape’. …

Whether or not we are artists, we have been making this kind of mental conversion for centuries. The habit is part of the whole history of our relationship with the physical environment – and landscape representation is a vital element in that relationship. “

It is true that we look at our physical surroundings with a different eye related to our interest in it. Homers description of Odysseus surveying of the foreign lands he visited during his long and windy way back home tells the story of a colonizing people looking for opportunities to settle and use the land. Personally I look for something significant and focus on that element in the piece I am making as that feels like a way to tell a story about what I have seen, what I have felt being in that place, that time, looking the way I did on familiar shapes perhaps altered by the light of the day, the clouds or my own mood… losing myself in contemplation yet finding myself again through the process of creating a physical object that later can be reflected upon in its own right.

Martin Buber (1878-1965), was a Jewish professor of philosophy, a reviver of the mystic Hasidism and an authority on dialogue. He studied art in his youth and we find in his classical and very beautiful "I and Thou" (1958) some thoughts about art that I would like to share for the beauty of it.

"...This is the external source of art: a man is faced with a form which desires to be made through him into a work. This form is no offspring of his soul, but is an appearance which steps up to it and demands of it the effective power. The man is concerned with an act of his being. If he carries it through, if he speaks the primary word out of his being to the form which appears, then the effective power streams out, and the work arises. The act includes a sacrifice and a risk. This is the sacrifice: the endless possibility that is offered up on the altar of the form. For everything which just this moment in play ran through the perspective must be obliterated, nothing of that may penetrate the work. The exclusiveness of what is facing it demands that it be so. This is the risk: the primary word can only be spoken with the whole being. He who gives himself to it may withhold nothing of himself. The work does not suffer me, as do the tree and the man, to turn aside and relax in the word of it; but it commands. If I do not serve it aright it is broken, or it breaks me. I can neither experience nor describe the form which meets me but only body it forth. And yet I behold it, splendid in the radiance of what confronts me, clearer than all the clearness of the world which is experienced. I do not behold it as a thing among the "inner" things nor as an image of my "fancy", but as that which exists in the present. If test is made of its objectivity the form is certainly not "there". Yet what is actually so much present as it is? And the relation in which I stand to it is real, for it affects me, as I affect it. To produce is to draw forth, to invent is to find, to shape is to discover. In bodying forth I disclose. I lead the form across - into the world of it. The work produced is a thing among things, able to be experienced and described as a sum of qualities. But from time to time it can face the receptive beholder in its whole embodied form."

I just love this book. There is something delicious yet down to earth that delights me in ways not easily found elsewhere. It is strange, it needs pondering, some sentences and passages seems muddy and then all of a sudden a revelation come and I see clearer than before and I know it is not his or that’s’ writing or thoughts that are obscure but that is all on my own behalf and shortcomings - my perception was blurred and sidetracked until the moment of insight or clarity came through the meeting with the text, creating a merge of intellectual and emotional delight I can feel in a physical way in my body as a release. And after such a moment I can create better, see clearer, I feel more energized - it is a delving into the soul through time that leave my senses refreshed and focused.

Ah. Almost forgot. I bought this book 2nd hand on internet through Amazon and when it arrived I found a personal note inside… “Mariane, Thank you for your order. God bless you! Peggy, The Uncommon Book”. I’ve kept the note. I felt the blessing. Still makes me feel warm. Thank you, Peggy, and bless you too!