Learning to See, Scratching at the Truth

“and the stones show me the way….”

I’m involved in a few conversations on the needfulness of art. This fragment of a quotation from Carl Jung seems an appropriate place to begin.

In a time when the hot-house strains of art criticism that have so long been the “High-brow” approach to questions of art join most other expert-led monopolies on thought in a growing irrelevancy, it’s important to begin again at the foundation of questions of art and its place. Andrew Taggart’s essay linked to above, and the thread it is a part of, is a good introduction to these questions and to how the current status quo has failed.

My own intuition has always led me to mutter under my breath that art exists in relationship to Truth. No matter how hopelessly unfashionable this has been, I’ve never let it go.

Drawing Distinctions

Another cross-post from Horizons of Significance,

The following is an address to be given at the first session of a class at a school that as far as I know does not yet exist.  Nor do I know who the students might be, or their circumstances.  What I do know is that I’d like to be there, at the front of that room, confronting their eager or timid faces, with the prospect of a long series of sessions to follow, and more after that.

“Faith, Hope and Impossibility” Philip Guston 1966

A cross-post from Fine Lines,

To will a new form is unacceptable, because will builds distortions.  Desire, too, is incomplete and arbitrary. These strategies, however intimate they become, must especially be removed to clear the way for something else – a situation somewhat unclear, but which in retrospect becomes a precise act….

…The closer I get… the more intensely subjective I become – but the more objective too.  Your eye gets sharper; you become continuously more and more critical.

There is no measure I can hold on to except this… making.

Philip Guston, Faith, Hope and Impossibility XXXI Artnews Annual 1966

On Painting

Another cross-post from Horizons of Significance,

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The following is from an e-mail I wrote a friend, a painter.  I post it here because while it was intended as a response to a particular person, a friend and colleague, it also continues ruminations I’ve had here in the post Drawing Distinctions and the thread of posts since then, including most recently, On Creativity.

As I told this friend, “I am beginning to think about drawing, painting and sculpture again.  It is still very far from any reality I can see myself in.  The space and materials required are truly beyond me at this point.….   For now it’s art as an idea that engages me.  As something to feed into writing as opposed to doing it myself.”

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