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A shooting starThe sky lit up, as if with fireworks, one long vertical line of white fire, rushing down to the north. Shooting stars are the strangest things, totally unpredictable. They always come as a surprise, and with a sense of delight. No wonder we feel that we might be entitled to a wish. I was walking to the car to fetch Jean from a friend, when directly in front of me, the sky lit up with this marvellous streak of light. The beauty and the shock hit me like a sudden musical chorus. The last time I saw such a dramatic shooting star, too, I had my arms raised to embrace the sky, or to salute it. My mind filled with Beethoven's Ode to Joy, and I understood for the first time, what the word "art" means. Art is celebration. Good art is the celebration of a good mind; and great art is the celebration of a great mind. This, I believe, is why Beethoven chooses to "sing a song of joy to love and understanding..." The other world
There is a world, bordering on this one, so close that it is hard to know which is the real one. This is your world and my world, populated by imagination. This is the one world that belongs to us, where we belong, not as an occupant, but as co-creator. Where what we dream, is. This is a world made for the artist, and the world that art exists for. The artist is the ferryman to this world, not because he is the only one who dreams, but because he is that one who chooses to live the dream. Gallery and travelsAt last it seems that my Visa and passport are OK, and soon I'll be off to Venice. This morning I bumped into my friend Garth, and mentioned my plans. His reaction was a strange one. "What did you do 30 years ago?" "30 years? That's weird. 30 years ago, I was doing the same thing, except then I went to Paris for a year, to devote myself to painting." "You have to go," he said, "It is absolutely vital. It is called the return of Saturn. We need to close these massive cycles of life. If we do not, things break down." As usual, I looked this up on the Internet and found this: Up until the Saturn return, we either do or don't do what is expected of us, but at the Saturn return, we begin either doing or not doing what we have taken birth to do. Just a quick note that, despite my long association with this name, I am no longer involved with the Artists' Gallery in Simon's Town. Seeing the lightEach one of the Impressionists, at some point said, "Paint exactly what you see." Many artists resist this idea, prefering to believe that the great masters did something other than copy their vision in the greatest humility, that they had some special talent, some gift of making beautiful art. This is because mostly we lack the humility to paint what we see. We like to think of ourselves as mysteriously gifted, and therefore they project this false self-image onto the great artists. I have one rule: Paint exactly what you see. Then learn to see. To paint what you see sounds easy, too easy for our rampant egos. But it is not easy, it is the hardest thing to achieve, because we confuse what we think and what we know with what we see. We think they see the sky, when what in fact we see, is a colour, a texture, a field. We think we see a bird, when in fact what we see is a movement, a blur, a tonality, a transparency. Seeing is not just an optical phenomenon. It involves memory and imagination. We see perfectly in our dreams and in our fantasies. At other times we may see the objects, but we never see the light. Our task is to develop Shakespearean, Mozartean vision; artistvision. John Ruskin said, 'For every thousand who can see, there is one who can think; and for every thousand who can think, there is one who can see,' and elsewhere, 'The task of the artist is twofold only; to see, to feel.' |
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