I use this title to illustrate what I am thinking about and
artistically challenging recently. Being so far from home in a land that is
vastly different from my own, I still have been strangely uncomfortable and I
don’t know why. I find myself reading a lot working on art or nothing at all just
sitting and thinking. I have my spots around the Wellington area that I go to
just to think and meditate for hours on end. The amount of artistic freedom I
have here in NZ is fabulous, but can be partially paralyzing. I have racked my
brain for new inspirations, or cool new design ideas to work on, but I have
been getting nothing. I like living in new possibility, I hunger for context
and thrive from discovery. This notion keeps me moving in a forward direction. Now,
however, whether by divine intervention or something else I appear to be frozen
in my footsteps. For example, in Maori Art: I feel bound by rules, yet free to
explore. Constricted by tradition yet able to offer my interpretations. When I,
a Pakaha (white person), create I feel as if I am in a no mans land surrounded
by cultural booby traps. This void
I feel is uncomfortable. In each creative turn I take I feel as if a
traditional land mine is about to explode underneath my very feet, resulting in
a negative vibe towards me and more so members of my own country. This
unintentional ignorance of the lines of Maori Art tradition keeps my mind and
body from finding its place.
It
seems, maybe, that I need to stop mindlessly working and pull my head out of
the canvass to look up and observe what is around me. That is what I am doing
and what I have found is that, unlike Wheaton, student life is raw especially
in the art students. It’s an extreme blessing and a curse to be an artist. We
see, feel and understand the world in a very intimate way. This is why I think
artists like Van Gogh, Dali, and Goya went nuts. They saw the world in a very
special and intense way that they went insane and created out of the only way
they knew how to communicate--namely paint. They were artistic geniuses but
crazy people. I am not going crazy, just to reassure my parents, but I resonate
with how art can attach you to the world in an extremely intimate and yet
sometimes dangerously poisonous way. I see Christ as my lifeline that grounds
me in my every thought and action. However, the rawness of the students who
attend art school is intense. I find sometimes I am not in control, just
tumbling endlessly through the routines unable to break free. Art school itself
is awesome but the student shows and art that the students produce is VERY raw
and “angsty”. Religion itself seems fundamentally unwelcome especially in an
artistic form. That is what I find hard, Christ is so important to my art, and
if that is unwelcome it leaves me with relatively nothing to grip onto. This
has forced me to think of how I can represent Christ in my work more
creatively. It is a humbling thing to work in an extremely artistic space. We
live, eat, and breathe art. I absolutely love it….and yet sometimes I feel
there is much more to creation and living than just painting. So it justifies
the effort and experience in leaving the comforts of my studio to live in the
world. I find it hard to communicate to you all sometimes because it feels as
though I need to prove myself in front of you and have something to show for
myself. In fact, the things I have to show are strangely not in visual format.
I am yet gaining a basis for my work, broadening my field and experience, and
figuring out what inspires me. This is what I got:
- · I am fundamentally driven by the unique gift of living in the presence of other human beings. We are so special, and so blessed. Geez. I just finished watching Gravity (great movie) and it really nails home the blessing it is to live with others so that the weight or gravity of loneliness does not crush us completely.
- · I am inspired by movement. We are, in fact, made to run. Anatomically, we are beings not built to sit, stand in one place, or even walk. We are made to run….. Our bodies are anatomically built to run! How cool is that! So it seems like a just work to highlight our ability to move ourselves and others, physically, mentally, spiritually, etc. in artistic form. What does this look like?
- · At the present moment I am disgusted and uniquely attracted to the concept of liminality. I was discussing my concerns, discomforts, and fears of being apart from everything I know with my parents and they lead me to the word “liminality”. The word literally means threshold. Author and Franciscan friar, Richard Rohr writes, “A liminal space, the place of transition, waiting, and not knowing is…a unique spiritual position where human beings hate to be but where the biblical God is always leading them. It is when you have left the tried and true, but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are finally out of the way. It is when you are between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer. If you are not trained in how to hold anxiety, how to live with ambiguity, how to entrust and wait, you will run…anything to flee this terrible cloud of unknowing. (This is all thanks to my parents for leading me onto this topic because it perfectly describes what I am going though with my final year at Wheaton, Senior Show, financially and the questions that lie in the future. What does this look like?
- · I am interested but not too knowledgeable of the concepts of balance, place, connection and orientation. These are things you can’t learn or understand from a textbook but rather experience only. What is our place in the world? Why, do we do the things we do? By the things I do, how am I influencing others? What does this look like in artistic form? It’s the job of the artist to notice things that normally go unnoticed.
- · Of course this all comes from the Creator himself, who is the light of the world and heart of my work. I would be nothing without Him.
Here are some pictures for you all, for fun:
Cool Swing Lucian and I found:
At the Sunday Market
Hobbit Day Out
