The Lighthouse Keeper's cat

Crisis is all too familiar to me; there is this exhibition, this deadline, there are sleepless nights, oh-shit-oh-shit-I-just-can-not-do-this-f***-F*** etc… Getting older, you ask yourself, why does this happen every time? It’s just stupid. A waste of time. Could I, PLEASE,  just get on with it! In the end all-is-well-that-ends-well. Some stuff goes on the wall; other stuff find its place in the bin.

So it is not surprising, that this quote caught my attention, even hidden in a footnote, during my research on story telling and creative writing.

“This explains why hardly any productive work gets through without morbid crises of a neurotic nature.” 

I am reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell*; I often find myself more interested in the comprehensive footnotes and quotes, than in the actual text. You’ll find this footnote in Part 1, Chapter 1, under the title ’2. Refusal of the Call’, where Campbell quotes Otto Rank** (1884 – 1939) from Art and the Artist, published in New York 1943.

To distinguish the ‘neurotic’ from the ‘productive’ artist Rank writes: ”…both are distinguished fundamentally from the average type, who accepts himself as he is, by their tendency to exercise their violation in reshaping themselves.” He states the neurotic type does “…not get beyond the destructive preliminary work and is therefore unable to detach the whole creative process from his own person and [unable to] transfer it to an ideological abstraction. The productive artist also begins… with that re-creation of himself … [but] is in a position to shift the creative will-power from his own person to an ideological representations of that person and thus render it objective.”Rank emphasises that even the productive artistic process is “in a measure limited … to within the individual himself… in its constructive, but also in its destructive aspects.” He ends with the quoto above, “This explains why hardly any productive work gets through without morbid crises of a neurotic nature.”

In short: The ‘artist’ is captured in the need to re-invent himself, or his surroundings. In a productive phase, he is able to shift this creative power from himself to his artwork. So the artistic process, if it does not begin in crisis, will go through crisis, or even end in a crisis (failure).

This might explain a lot ^_^…

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* and desperately trying to ignore hero-worshipping references to Freudian psychoanalytic simplifications that make me very, very angry…

** again you have to see them in their historic context. That we have outgrown some (most?) of their ideas, does not mean they do not have something to say.

“My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.”

Odilon Redon about his work

Somebody came to our exhibition today and saw my painting “Above the Forest”. He asked me about Odilon Redon; I had not heard the name before (shame on me), so the vistor showed me some images on the net:

Odilon Redon, Spirit of the Forest, 1880.

Redon, Eye-Balloon 1878

Redon, The Smiling Spider  1881

I have to go to the library and get some books soon!

A couple of reasons to watch this lecture by swoon from 2007:

1)  ”I’d bee pasting work on the street for a long time and been thinking about  how does this gesture translate into a gesture of not just “me”, “me”, “me”, “I want my name”, “I want my image on the city”. But to sort of make it more of a statement about the permeability of these public spaces and to open up and democratise these public spaces. And how you make this gesture a real gesture.” /quote end

I flinch about tags (including rough images of men’s private parts) on fences and bus stops as most people, but I am running round cities to make images of street art I like and I see as “Art”. One can’t draw a line on “It’s all about me” to distinguish between annoying scribbles and art. For me “Art” is all about the “Artist”. However if one puts his/her/its art into the public space, should there be more than ”me”, “me”, “me”? Something to think about… ^_^.

Having said this I have some issues with her using the word “democratise” and with the example of pasting children’s drawings on billboards. That’s too easy or simple…

2) Jeeeeeeeeesssssss ! I am a printmaker myself. To cut images like this into lino or wood (with or without a Dremel), to make prints to put them into the public space for everybody to enjoy and in the end to decay… you at least have to respect this ^_^…

3) From the street into the gallery. I think that Swoon’s art translates smoothly from the street into the gallery without loosing any imagination or context. It seems to me her art just develops and grows wildly inside a protected environment.

So go and watch it even if it is a bit older ^_^…

Images courtesy of Swoon. © 2007 The Museum of Modern Art, New York

The 600 Years from the macula on Vimeo.

via theViech

Found today: Art by Stefan Thompson, Ottawa, Canada

Stefan Thompson is living and working in Ottawa, Canada. You can find more of his work on his website and on deviantart. In the Earth Paint section of his site you will find a good overview over non-toxic mediums and pigments.

He is having an upcoming exhibition ‘NEW NEW SHOW SHOW’ on FEBRUARY 8- March 6 2011 in Ottawa Art Gallery.

Found via Goggle images searching for drypoint and etching ^_^…

This is a new project of mine ^_^… capturing urban messages…

Urban Messages #2, on a stroll through the night

Urban Messages #1 on my way home from the studio

A friend of mine got this fantastic book ‘Brodsky & Utkin, the Complete Works’ by Lois Nesbitt, Princeton Architectural Press, New York ISBN 1-56898-399-9.

Dome, Etching 1989

Brodsky was part of the “Paper Architects” a group that protested against the corrupted standardized production in the Soviet Union. (…»Wikipedia).

The drawings and etchings are depicting ‘narrative’, dreamlike architecture that defies the rules of physics but is strangely familiar.

You can find many more etchings at The Paper Architecture Of Brodsky & Utkin or images of sculptures from an exhibtion ‘BRODSKY & UTKIN’ 1990 at the Feldman Gallery.

Love it, thanks to Dan for sharing ^_^…