artist_statement sab i find that i see myself simultaniously as a horrific, beautiful, delicate, fierce, terrible, elegant monsterangel and my art depicts this tangle of self that i am so priviledged and so very pleased to own [97] "it is now known by neurophysiologists that art, prayer and healing all come from the same source in your body..." i often wonder am i meditating while i make art? if so, what am i meditating about? about me? about the world? am i instead praying? if so, who am i praying to? if the statement "as we are in the gods, the gods are in us" is true, am i then praying to myself? and if so, to what ends? can i really help myself with things so big that i need to pray for help with? and sometimes, i think i should jsut go and lie down... [98] shh... wait for a second... ... ok. art doesn't need me to stamp clumsy interpretations across its delicate face with intellectual hobnail boots. my interpretation is irrelevant anyway. to interpret an artwork, i must take the role of teacher and lecture you in what i perceive to be the meaning behind the work. but this would then limit your understanding of the work to my interpretation alone, not allowing you to make your own guesses or have your own thoughts, for any conclusion you came to after that time would be influenced from what i had to say. anyway, my interpretation doesn't actually relate to you, as my interpretation comes through filters of my life experiences, my thoughts and ideas. these filters are not your filters, you have not experienced the things i have and therefore these filters and anything they produce are useless to you. as the artist, to interpret the artwork for you is also to bring irrelevant meaning to it. i created it for a reason, its true. i had ideas around it and behind it and under it and through it. these ideas are all legitimate and, i flatter myself, rather good. however, the art itself is not these ideas, it's not even the work itself. the work has something to say to you, and you hear and understand a perception of it's story and somewhere in the line of sight between the work on the wall and where you are standing, between the ideas of the work and the ideas you bring to it, somewhere in the space between these two book ends, that is where the art is. [03] nice to see how far i've come... 040418 ... nom) "i just want to put a little dot, or an exclamation mark" 050811 ... Samekh I am...honored to have drank from the glorious fountain of your soul. I imagine that between the darkness and the Light there is a "knowing" and this knowing is the builder, the Smith of Light, art, prayer. i have strived, sometimes desperately to understand the nature of the Creator, and yet when we indulge in the Act of ARt the act of Creation from a completely altruistic and unsummoned impulse is that not what the creator has done? To give life to that wich is formless, to give a voice to that which slumbers, or murmers in the epulcral silence of the realm of unborn things? This really affected me and inspired me to begin perhaps to with wisdom and not just effort begin a journey that I have always been on but now I begin it, I resume it with a purpose. There are those among who sow darkness, there are those that fathom themselves to be powerful fountains of blasphemy and apostacy, they taste the edge of the Dark Ones Shadow upon thier being and reel in the egotism and rush of power, the power to Create misery and espair and fear in others. The true Fallen ones, the true Dark Lords of Blasphemy and Apostacy and Destruction walked this Earth long before man, yeah they were veritable towers and mountains of Destruction. Destroyers such as no human mind has ever contemplated or touched without going completely mad, without losing thier entire beings under the sheer "majesty" of its thralldom. I would rather create Light. I would rather allow that light to break forth from its incubation, its shell in ME already and carry me to the very summit of ALL creation into the very Presence of THAT Light itself. I feel so badly for those that have given themselves to Darkness. Those that attempt to maim and torture the psyche and mangle the body to swim dizzy in the tempests of thier own rage and for a moment, for one silver immaculate moment they transcend thier own misery, for one Dark Winter compressed into the space of a few moments they drown out thier own hearts bedlam but no amount of Alchemy, or recreation of reality, or destruction or act of inspired abomination, or monstrous compulsion can exorcise the hundreds of shadows shrieking within them. I'm glad I ran across this page. Thank You Sab 050811 ... oldephebe But then again, I just spent the last 96 hours walled in a cave of suffocating despair, so as far as someone transcending thier misery, God i may talk a good game but the anvil still sits on my chest. The air is rank with it, and every second it feels like a great winged bird is bearing down upon me, eact sortee brings it closer to my flesh. How can people just survive on purposeless monolithic hate? ... ech! ... 050813 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I don't think the desire to create darkess (i.e. destroy) and the fact of being depressed are the same thing at all. It is possible that depression can be the motivation for destructive behaviour, but this isn't always the case. On another note, is creativity always a good thing? I'd say that it's morally neutral in itself. Well, almost everything that is meant to be good can be used for bad purposes, and vice-versa: so does it really matter? I seem to be thinking of more questions than I have answers for. Here's my artistic statement for today: //()\\ ("")][+++=+}] 050813 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I meant to type "darkness" of course, not darkess, but this is obviously some sort of Freudian thing in which my subconcious mind associates darkness with the feminine therefore meaning... hmmm, let's see. It means 176714674957169470. i'M SURE OF IT. Is this all arbitrary? (winks mysteriously) 050813 ... oldephebe No. Ah you're absolutely right EI, --Umm..I should have linked the depression to a causality, such as a confederacy of the depraved and deranged who vaidate thier existaence by wrending lives. It is pointless and purposeless and inately Misphistophelean Could you unwind and translate that bit of code for the more obtuse among us (namely me) who are not versed in the esoteric knowledge bases such as computer languages and or crypto-linguistic systems? but ah good point though EI ... 050813 ... RIC You meant "validate" not vaidate right? And ("...") -pause- what's wrong with being pointless and purposeless? I mean this is the Age (as either an adjunct of or by product of a nihilistic and spiritually moribund "eco system" constructed by our post-modernism? nah that's passe...by our ever more increasing tendancy towards constructing the illusion of rationalism over a ruthlessly binary approach to human/social transactions) so yeah this is the Age of the ineluctable and indelible malaise. 050813 ... oE Gawd. That was just just.. ... 050813 ... epitome of incomprehensibility My annoying early incarnation, with a pattern of symbols misoverestimated as leetspeak rather than shape art. And this morning I was reading poems from former classmates and wondering whether they were good art or not, whether the claim of a friend of one of them about making a poetic atom bomb out of collage-scattered letters was funny or not. I don't have a statement yet. 140914 what's it to you? who go blather from