one more time with feeling…

Art has always been a means of escape for me, from myself, from my surroundings, from a page, whether from a boring Sunday afternoon or from classes as a child, from meetings or conferences as an adult.

In my blog, touches of sense… this search for freedom is constant.

While what is most important for me is to recapture the sensations that I have always had since my childhood when making art, I have come to accept that working on my craft is necessary.

I find myself a little perplexed when I think about this issue.

Perhaps thought isn’t the answer, I shall follow my instincts.

I am suddenly reminded of a quotation of Leo Van Lier:

“To perceive we must act; to act we must perceive. Activity in one’s environment brings forth the affordances in those environments.”

Dreams drawn

Engraved on a corner of scrap, the drawing takes form.

Escaping from dutiful participation, I am engrossed in crude line, simple colour, unplanned sketch.

This art is still alive to me.

Resistant to academic form, I make do with child-informed imagery. It has a keen edge.

I brandish it now.

It remains stubbornly ignorant of rigour, it appears quite oblivious to science.

From, a sunlit window-sill, a dull page opens up distant horizons to us....alone.

I am there again, revisiting a forgotten encampment. There is warmth, there is fire, there are a thousand stories to be heard. She was always there for me.

How can one explain that however far one goes from oneself one always returns to one's imperturbable essence, one's dreams...

Wherever my path shall lead, I am, as ever, prepared for uncertain journey. I will need little luggage.

Left with the memory of some beaten up biro, a last pencil stub, and a sunlit window-sill; I will be free.

Dreams-drawn will know no bounds.

touches of sense…2014

Any scrap of paper will do.

(The scrap above, on which the image of an old man is drawn, is an example.)

This class has got nothing to do with me.

I shall be elsewhere.

touches of sense…2015

Shriek

So those were my conference notes. I had almost forgotten. They appeared in disorder, on my desk.

I focused my attention on drawing escape.

It appeared in the bottom right hand corner.

Shriek.

I know it when I feel it... There is a starting point. It isn't a photographic image.

More than an image there is an urge. First strokes of a brush pen. I am taken up, defined in a curve.

First angles, first volumes of the body. Whose body? Whose body will it be? Verticality. Crosshatching.

Lettering, familiar scribbled lettering.

EXHAUSTED.

Change implement. Where's that red BIC pen? I need that red BIC pen.

I need it's cut into the paper. I need it's disresepect.

I had some time, some peace, some desire.

Going back to school.

I had been working on my drawing technique, academically, like I used to do at school. I hated it.

There are moments when my soul erupts in revolt at constraints which I have accepted being imposed on myself. There are moments when I feel the need to return to basics.

I feel reassured learning more about the voices of artists behind their work.

Picasso would altenate between "studies" - careful "drawing" and apparent flourishes of revolt.

A man who at times fell into despair when thinking of the appearance of photography.

What should an artist do when faced with "photorealism"?

"I might as well kill myself"... he thought.

Picasso decided to paint what he felt not what he saw.

touches of sense… 2018