Art and Personal Salvation

Here is a quote from Becoming Human Through Art by Edmund Burke Feldman.

"The perfectionist impulse, manifests itself in primitive and child art as a result of the fear that raw, unadorned reality presents to the unsophisticated person. The child's art acquires a somewhat obsessive quality when he uses it to exorcise demons he cannot otherwise cope with. Contemporary artists, too, attempt to find in the reiteration of certain forms and themes a kind of personal salvation that life somehow withholds."

It seems so often that when I kick and scream against a stereotype about artists and why they create I eventually experience the very behaviors I rail against. In the movie New York Stories, Nick Nolte plays an artist who creates only when he is lonely for Rosanna Arquette's character. He needs the emotional turmoil of his relationships in order to fuel his art. I found this balderdash when I watched it as a young man in his twenties. Now, as a hopefully wiser man in his forties, I understand and have experienced the stress of relationships as a driving force behind creativity.

When I read the quote above about artists searching for personal salvation I normally would scoff a little bit. Art is art, there is no personal salvation to be found here. There is skill that can be fostered, there is vision that can be honed, there is support that can be won, but there is no personal salvation to be gained. Is there?

Is there more personal salvation to be found in creating art than in designing a car, selling a car, or building a car? Are others saved personally through carpentry, cooking, cosmetics? Is there a relationship between personal salvation and art?

Personal salvation does not come from actions you take. Personal salvation comes from accepting yourself while having a clear eye to your strengths and weaknesses. Isn't it a matter of perspective?

Yet here I am feeling a sense of personal salvation from writing stories for The Book of Bartholomew. Perhaps it is not salvation as much as setting something straight. There are times and experiences in my life I would like to revisit and do anew. I am allowed this opportunity through my writing. Perhaps this is a form of salvation -- perhaps it is a way of healing. I am not sure. But somehow I get the sense that soon I will be again experiencing a stereotype that I thought was ridiculous.

Completeness and Self-Expression

Excerpt from Becoming Human Through Art by Edmund Burke Feldman.

Why do I say the self is completed in the act of communication, that is, successful self-expression? Because I do not know in advance whether someone else will understand what I have made, or said or done. I await a response, I expect a knowing answer; I try to imagine how you will react by conducting a dialog with myself. But my expectations and anticipations are necessarily provisional until they are confirmed in a real, as opposed to a conjectured, reply. When you do in fact respond to my expression, you eliminate at least some of my uncertainty. Consequently, if you are a teacher, or a critic, or just another person, you have some control over my feelings of completeness or wholeness. You have the power to withhold your response or to respond inadequately with reference to my expectations. Or you may discover more in my expression than I thought I was saying. From this it follows that self-expression is at least two-directional; that we are responsible -- that is, answerable -- for each others self-development; and that self-expression in art is excellent or qualitatively superior only insofar as it exhibits the capacity to evoke excellent responses.

The unanswered expression of a self denies communion to that self and prevents it from becoming complete. The hyphen in the term self-expression provides the clue to its real meaning. It implies a self that acts and is understood.

I like this, except I do not necessarily think that the lack of an adequate response to an expression of self will prevent the self from becoming complete. Often it will drive artists to create better self-expression, so that the desired response becomes more likely. I have heard "no" too many times to really think that it has any impact on my becoming complete. I am complete whether people respond favorably to my art or not. Most artists learn quickly that attaching one's sense of self to their work creates a difficult road to follow.

Oil Painting: Rush to Innocence

This is a painting, Rush to Innocence, I have recently completed. I have been working on this for quite sometime -- two years or more. It is about the giddiness and excitement children feel from seeing rabbits. An excitement so exhilarating they must start running. It would be great for adults to experience that emotion more often.

The rabbits belong to a friend who rescued them after their mother had been killed by a car. She raised three of them. Two are still alive more than two years later.

The image of the children is taken from a Dick and Jane primer from the 1950's. I took their clothes off to show the vulnerability of innocence and to play with the idea of innocence around nudity that is lost to adults. Yet, these two cherubs are running with excitement toward a symbol of fertility. Are they rushing toward the future? Or are they innocent to the future and just rushing because of their excitement about natural things, those in the moment and those yet to come? This is a 40" x 30" oil painting on canvas.

Living the Artist's Life - excerpt

I enjoyed reading this honest, maybe a little "catty", assessment of the wealthy in Living the Artist's Life by gallery owner Paul Dorrell.

But for the ones (the wealthy) who are awake, to connect with your art makes them feel more alive, even rebellious, especially after all the years of dull, repetitious, mind-numbing work many of them have had to do in acquiring their wealth. Unfortunately that kind of money-chasing often compromises growth, and can create an imbalance that is reflected by harsh acquisitiveness, appalling selfishness, and virtually no awareness.

When you meet certain of these people, you may see how their dignity suffered as a result of that chase, how all too often their goals were misplaced, weren't sufficiently rewarding, or were assigned undue priority. This may make them depressed, half-alive, or primitive in outlook, consumed by the misery of their greed. All too often this is the case. Their fixation with money likely screwed up their marriage, their kids, their own lives, leaving them drained of humanity, outside the feast of life, with them now trying, through art, to reach for greater meaning.

Whatever their individual natures, the rich do have a place in our system, and while it might not ultimately be as important as many of them think it is, it is still significant. Their businesses help create jobs, many of them passionately support the arts, and, when of the visionary sort, they do things for the underprivileged that you and I can only dream of. Regardless of who they are, and how benevolent they may or may not be, you must not judge them, you should never envy them, and you certainly should never allow yourself to be intimidated by them.

Be cool when dealing with the rich, be confident, but be humble. Like anyone, they are only looking for acceptance.

Watercolor: Wild Ginger, Stages 1 & 2

This is the first stage of a watercolor painting of wild ginger. What I mostly am doing at this stage is plotting out the internal structure of the leaf. Placing the veins and identifying edges. The veins are created as negative shapes as I fill in the between shapes of green. I varied color a bit to set-up the next stage of going stronger with color and making my tones and colors more accurate. There is an interesting play between a green with a strong mustardy yellow underneath and a green with a strong bluishness on the surface. I hopefully will be able to capture that contrast.

This is the next stage of the wild ginger plant that I am painting. In this stage I have defined the leaf veins better and, in the process, mottled the leaf and started to add contrast. The contrast is starting to create some depth to the plant. The stem is laid in simply at this point as it is very fuzzy and I will have to deal with that in the next stage. You can also see that the flower is more well defined. The flower is hairy also, so I have only defined things in a cursory manner and will leave it like this until it is time to do the fuzz/hair detail.

Watercolor: Wild Ginger Composition

I am currently creating a composition of a wild ginger plant to use for a watercolor painting. Wild ginger have two leaves that rise up on strong, fairly straight stems and a small flower that protrudes from the base and lays on the ground. They bloom in the spring, late April to early May, in Minnesota. They like shade and can be found in large quantities along the bluffs of the Mississippi River.

I created two drawing, one of each leaf, on tracing paper. Then, overlapping the two pieces of tracing paper, I moved the leaves around to determine what composition I wanted. Since there are just two leaves, I decided to have the leaves next to each other on the horizontal plane. I was going back and forth on whether I wanted the leaves to overlap or not. With an overlapping of these two shapes I could create a sense of depth rather easily. Since the plant is so simple, creating depth without the leaves overlapping would be harder.

I decided to have the leaves not overlap. Why? I just like the look of the leaves separated better. When the leaves overlapped it was abit confusing as to where one leaf began and the other ended.

I will share this painting as it progresses.

Art Question: What Motivates You to Keep Painting?

A friend of mine recently said she currently doesn't feel the motivation to paint and asked why I do keep painting, what motivates me?

The following excerpt from Becoming Human Through Art: Aesthetic experience in the school by Edmund Burke Feldman explains some of what motivates me:

We should try to think of art, in the present context, as an instrument or tool for dealing with human situations that call for expression. In the course of growing up there are thousands of events and experiences, whose meaning we want to share. It is not a matter of exceptional generosity or lack of self-control that makes children want to divulge their experiences; being human, they have to share, they cannot help sharing, the meanings of their lives. It is the human need to communicate with other people that is the foundation of art...

Sharing and exchanging the contents of their lives is what helps children grow into mature social beings who can function normally in communities, make friends, work productively, and develop confidence in their powers of human understanding and expression...

From a human standpoint, it is not correct to say that the individual sets out to create music, art or literature; rather, he is moved or impelled to say something and art is the result...

At present, artists combine media of expression; they are reluctant to recognize boundaries between paintings and sculpture, between two- and three-dimensional expression, between music and theater and opera and cinema and architecture and sculpture and industrial design. Whether he knows it or not, today's artist seems to be seeking the tribal artist's freedom of access to all media and types of expression. Obviously, the need to make a statement, to share experience, to evoke a response, takes precedence over the 'rules' about categories of artistic expression.

I find that most things written about why children make art applies as well to adults, or at least me.