Posts Tagged ‘Dalai Lama’
Mysterious things and ordinary things
The mysterious rock-like substance in the beach that seemed to eat up the rubbish, as if it were lava
“What science finds to be nonexistent, we must accept as nonexistent, but what science merely does not find is a completely different matter. …It is quite clear that there are many, many, mysterious things.” Dalai Lama
Yesterday I was reading my Google reader which is like a personalized news paper, it is amazing! James set it up for me, now all I have to do is click two buttons every day and I have as much or as little as I want to read about every day. Yesterday, it lead me to Gerhard Richter’s artist’s statement. The bit that caught my short attention span probably because it resonated with me, was where he said how when painting his abstract works he did not start a painting with a predetermined vision in mind, but over many applications of paint up to 20 or so sometimes when something became recognisable, emerging almost organically through the paint then he would stop painting it. According to him his work forms from structures and ideas around him, nothing more profound than that. He has a dislike of any doctrine preferring nature without the prejudices that people have. Maybe that is why he paints as if imitating nature itself.
Why is there thought to be such a separation between the ordinary and the mysterious or profound, is it not a seamless continuation?
Art and the middle way
Art often seems to encourage extremism and obsession. Art schools say to their students, take it further, push it to the limits, make it more so! This can all be very good, but then cant it be very bad too? When I went to see the Dalai Lama speaking to an audience in Barcelona last year, and he said something like, that making art could be bad because it caused angst, this was not the encouragement that I would have liked to have heard from His Holiness the Dalai Lama! Yes it can cause angst, but does it have too? The dichotomy that art can be therapy but also cause angst, where is the middle way to be found? More then therapy, less then angst, or less then therapy, more then angst, depending on how you see it!
I am attempting to create art without the angst! I am also attempting to make art every day and make every day more art! Yesterday, I embellished a skirt that my friend gave me along with the small green disks of wood that had been a neck lace once, but our son changed that! I stitched on the disks to form the word peace across the front of the skirt. I have decided to start designing my own clothes. If the people wont go to the Secret Gallery, the Secret Gallery will go to the people! I am not extreme at all! I like the idea of wearing art like it was normal everyday behaviour, maybe one day it will be!
The Wall paper scroll series
While we were living in Spain, I made a series of works on wallpaper. Much of these were of words repeated over and over like: Love and Unity,using the Burgundy stain from an almost black corn on the cob, which James had bought for some exotic cooking!Sorry I stole it from him! Along with indigo pigment. I mixed these two colours to get the transitional colour, so there would be kind of waves of colour going down the scrolls.
I also made this drawing of a woman (left) as if from the inside out; thoughts and feelings are brought to the surface with words. I did a piece about sort of New Years resolutions, which hints at the almost absurd expectations that we and society put on each other! This is called Be Good! I wrote a Shamanic type conversation I had with a tree, called advice from a tree. Followed by piece where I wrote single words I chose from Herman Hesse’s book, The Alchemist, and which I also questioned the idea of using other peoples’ work in the piece itself. I also did on on the possibilities of a Free hour, and some of the this I could have done! The scrolls are all 6 or 7 feet in length.
I have recently bought another roll of wall paper, so I will see where this elongated series of work goes to! The first attempt has been as a very long piece about the difficult and dangerous journey that many Tibetans have taken from Tibet to Daramsala through the Himalayas, including the Dalia Lama. This piece has been inspires by James and his site Peacerider, to be inspired too!
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