Notes from the studio / The luminous experience
According to Aboriginal myth, the whole Universe was sung into existence during the Dreamtime, the period of creation when the world was a featureless void where ancestral spirits in human and other life forms emerged from the earth and the sky creating all living things and the landscape we see today. Aboriginals navigated their way across the land using paths called songlines or dreaming tracks. In Aboriginal mythology, a songline is a myth based around localised ‘creator-beings’ during the Dreaming, the indigenous Australian embodiment of the creation of the Earth. Each songline explains the route followed by the creator-being during the course of the myth. As the various peoples of the continent traversed songlines, they left numerous glyphs and etchings along the way, serving as landmarks to help future travellers navigate. (Wikipedia)
To me, it is an interesting viewpoint to see Art as some sort of navigational device or a route towards a realm of existence we all, more or less sense and desire, but most of the time in our modern day to day life, are rarely capable of entering.
Saul Bellow said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech:
“Only art penetrates the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive.(…) Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterises prayer, too, in the eye of the storm… Art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.”
I like to think and believe that the purpose of all art is, and essentially has always been, to transcend us towards a further state of consciousness, most of the humanity as a whole (myself included) yet has to uncover. This state of mind has been sung by sages, mystics and artists alike but no words can describe it. It is a luminous experience, ultimately of the soul, if such a thing exist.
In my work, I hope to provide a sanctuary of beauty and stillness and offer a visual starting point from which the spectator, just by silently watching, might be able to “penetrate behind the seeming realities of this world”.
All Art is inherently a kind of meditation or prayer because it freezes or stops time if even for a minute. A painting, a dance, a poem or a musical symphony are not things, they are experiences or pathways or, translated from Aboriginal myth, “Songlines”, designed to help us on our way through life and elevate our consciousness if only we let them.
Words or sentences underlined contain links to more information. If you’re interested in my journeys through the wonderful landscape of lyrical abstract painting, click to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
