Other artists

The importance of Daphne

October 11, 2010

Our Oldest Friends

Our oldest friends — the great gods
who never tried to woo us –
shall we reject them because our tools of steel
do not need them? Or shall we seek them on a map?

Those powerful friends, who receive our dead,
play no part in our wheels and gears.
We have moved our banquets far from them,
and pass their messengers with such speed

we can’t hear what they say. Lonelier now,
having no one but each other, not knowing each other,
we no longer meander on curving paths, but race straight ahead.

Only in the mills do the once sacred fires still burn,
lifting ever heavier hammers, while we
diminish in strength, like swimmers at sea.

Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I, 24

As Rilke suggests, our contemporary world culture — so fixated on scientific, mechanistic reductionism and linear thinking — might benefit by re-earthing society into the ancient Greek myths; myths so replete with tales of interconnections of Gods and Goddesses with all things Earth.

Peneus was a river God. Creusa was a naiad (from the Greek “running water”) and daughter of Gaia. Together they had a daughter Daphne who, because of her beauty, was pursued relentlessly by Apollo whose infatuation was caused by an arrow from Eros. In desperation she prays — in different versions to either the river god Peneus or the earth Goddess Gaia — and is transformed into a laurel tree.

“a heavy numbness seized her limbs, thin bark closed over her breast, her hair turned into leaves, her arms into branches, her feet so swift a moment ago stuck fast in slow-growing roots, her face was lost in the canopy. Only her shining beauty was left.”
Ovid, Metamorphoses

To me, the essence of artwork, and its contemporary importance, is to remind us humans in a very visceral way of our intimate connection to earth, water, air and fire.

We are star dust. We are inextricably linked to all the elements of the cosmos.

The love beating out of our human hearts is but a minor heart of the great Heart.

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Entering the dark

January 11, 2008

Just last week Sally’s and my kayaks cruised languidly along the sandstone shoreline in the relatively protected waters of Norfolk Bay (as opposed to “Storm Bay” where we live). Looking at the below photo where she is lulling about at the entrance to a shallow cave got me thinking about how every new artistic endeavour requires paddling into the dark unknown and having a peek and poke at what might lie within. Whether holding a palette in the painting studio or, more simply, an omelette pan in the kitchen, creativity demands it.

kayak_1

Embroidered onto the heart and stitched into the fabric of body and mind is all of our life’s history and it aches for inspired expression. Inspiration doesn’t just happen though. It is nurtured and coddled into being through the tiniest acts of bravery to overcome inertia, fear and the risk of failure. (Success, by the way, is going from failure to failure with enthusiasm.) Chance and luck play a part, but first and foremost, inspiration needs one to be an intrepid explorer, willing to enter into the mysterious, darker recesses of the many interior or exterior landscapes that lurk everywhere.

Today’s burnt offering inevitably leads to tomorrow’s gourmet sensation.

Kayak_6 kayak_9

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An artist’s reality

September 5, 2007

As the Philosopher says,
He who contemplates a statue
Shares the thought of the artist;
The statue itself does not.
As the soul contemplates nature,
The spirit the light, and the mind
The stars, every eye sees into
The matrix from which it was born.

Kenneth Rexroth

sally_jerry_7 Norfolk_Bay_3

Wild Roaring Beach faces south towards the great Southern Ocean. If one walks north over the sand dunes and forested hills, one drops down about five miles later to the northern side of the Tasman Peninsula and the serene waters of Norfolk Bay. Surfers find this calm section of the peninsula dead boring, but kayaking across these waters over to the Forestier Peninsula is a sublime experience. Once there, it is only a couple of miles overland to the home of Jerzy Michalski, a painter of extraordinary skill and depth whose urban existential motifs contrast sharply with his studio nestled into the natural landscape.

Sally took one of her mandala paintings over to Jerry this past Sunday for some technical advice and, while seeing the two of them converse over some of the alchemical processes of painting, I was struck by the power of Jerry’s paintings—seen strewn about the walls of his studio in the above photo—to convey the utter desperate quality of the human experience when it is confined to the urban prison edifices of corporate temples of power.

The matrix from which I was born allows me to empathise with the desperateness of Jerzy’s solitary male figures. This very personal matrix of mine, however, also allows me an “exit strategy”, so to speak, down the fire escape, out onto the road, out of the city and into the very real healing community of wild nature. From this vantage point, I am more likely to achieve a more capable compassion and touch the outskirts, at least, of poet Kenneth Rexroth’s other words:

Ultimately the fulfillment
Of reality demands that
Each person in the universe
Realize every one of the
Others in the fullness of love.

Both above quotes excerpted from the epic poem, The Dragon and the Unicorn.

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Power of art

July 28, 2004

On Saturday last, my friend and comrade in arms Heather Rose (spokesperson for Artist-for-Forests), gave me the great honour of reading the just finished manuscript of her latest novel, ‘Dispossessed’.

On Monday, late in the afternoon while curled up in a cushioned chair with a quiet winter sun flooding into the room with a soft tenderness, I sobbed uncontrollably as the last few pages were read.

How is it, that what I know as fiction, can touch the deeper recesses of a buried sadness within my soul and bring it to the surface of the physical realm manifesting as great balls of tears, wet cheeks and guttural howls?

In moments like this, despite revisiting old pains, I marvel at how art, in the fulness of its creativeness, can move mountains and can bring to the forefront those aspects of our lives that can get lost in the hurly burly of today’s world.

Art is a reminder that a little more attentiveness be given to the ethical and moral responsibilities behind the priorities we have placed on ourselves.

The power of art is its ability to help us see more clearly what needs to be seen.

Peace fire dawn

This morning, while sitting by the Peace Fire watching the dawn’s light slowly advance from the distant hills toward the shadowed flames in front of me, I reflected on these words written by Heather in ‘Dispossessed’:

“What is true, is that it is but a fortunate few of us who make peace with those we have loved, and those we have hurt, before we die.”

“The curse of growing older is that we must live not only with what we have become but also with what we will never be.”

“Two fluid things, me water, it water, hearing one another, like two instruments lying side by side, a flute and a cello maybe, finding the sound we shared and playing it.”

“But was it a matter of struggling? Or was it about forests, and going when your time was up? Did a giant eucalyptus lament its passing? Did an oak, split in two by lightning, long for something other than its destiny?”

When I walked away from the Peace Fire, I left behind a simple prayer that somewhere there was a publisher who would allow the greater world an opportunity to read what I was able to read and found so moving.