I marvel at these tiny differences of light I know as words. That such small things of little weight can move my life and love. That nations can be built or fall with them. That hope can dwell within them.
I have the choice to read and write, and as I do I trust or turn away. Say or do not stay.
I read and write in faith of fairer times, with passion for the earth, with chance to share my happiness, my sadness, wonder, love. When alone, as you are now in thought, what better else is there to do?
In the late 1870s a newly trained doctor set off by sea on the long journey from Portugal to North West India. A young woman also travelled who was to marry an older man, the Governor of the province. On their voyage the young met, fell in love, and married. In addition to his commercial practice and with the support of his new partner, the doctor offered his service freely to those who could not afford medical treatment. In 1889 the doctor died of cholera treating the poor. My great grandparents: my heroes.
The beauty of things of significance made for the eye, ear, and hand, is that not only do they appeal to my intellect, they touch my heart. The length of a word, the shape of a phrase, its tone and colour intermingles with what is meant, intended, or thought to mean.
Beauty in art is a union of things I feel and think. As kindness is to love, beauty is most powerfully expressed simply, as when things are known and felt like the words: the warmth of sun on skin.
Words are unlike anything else I know. As I write words I hear them in my mind, yet so very differently than when I speak them. I read the following, silently, then whisper the same:
I keep this to myself, these words are mine alone.
When read by mind they are shaped by meaning, when said out loud, they are coloured by my voice: its texture and force, by a person: declared, made new, made known, beyond idea alone.
I think of someone I loved when I first met them: their kindness, openness, their smile. At first my love appeared to ease with the ebb and flow of our parting, yet as time moved on, my love for them, who I have not seen for so long, lives on. As I treasure my love, all those I love, have loved, my love remains.
Love bound by a person may be anywhere between a breath, and a lifetime. Love of art, music, and ideas may last longer still. How long love lasts may be of choice, and for some, a matter of their nature.
When I undertake something, I do so for person, place, and idea. Take my intention of being somewhere at a particular time. I is the person, where is the place, and the idea is when. My obligation to person (whether myself or someone else), place (wherever this be), and idea (what I intend) is for me a matter of trust, honour, and respect. I do not lightly say I will to anything. Love is no different. To love I need the person that is the focus of my love. The place: where I do, have, or hope to love. The idea: how I love.
I complete an image that reminds me to reuse packaging materials I receive.
Bubble wrap protects, yet also harms. I easily forget the future of a thing.
With 'Bubble Wrap' I wrap the image 'Winter' with a poem.
Together, they tell of my relationship with nature and those I love.
Bubble: the first word my son spoke. Wrap: to cover, enclose, to complete.
The volcano Anak Krakatau erupts. Many die. Many more are left injured and homeless.
The tragedy is far, far away from me. I have no relatives, friends, nor people I know at risk.
It is not enough that I understand. To act I must feel. To feel I must care through stories, pictures, words and sound. Whether small or great, near or far, acts of kindness cause my feelings to awake.
To be kind is to feel then act beyond myself. It is the I that holds my kindness back.
This day, each month, I set aside time to remember a moment of beauty a friend shared with me. They spoke of their experience of walking through woods, and how the trees above swayed in the high wind. With shy hesitancy they told me, quietly, how they were moved to tears.
The beauty of that moment was to hear another feel as I.
With love, much remains unsaid. With words the sway of trees subside.
The more I do or experience something, the greater my change.
With art, the more I see, the more I touch or listen, the more intensely I come to see, touch, listen.
With people, the more someone acts positively or negatively, the more I view them so. My history of a thing or person leads to how I come to feel. Ever smaller triggers ignite the flames of my dis/interest.
My next is always more. My feelings form as much by what has passed as what may come.
At certain times of year, its end, I think and feel for those I love with even greater force.
On this my shortest day of year I send my love to those whose lives have touched me, make me better, good, and well.
I share my love, not driven by my interest, but for the care of love.
I love on this my shortest day, through longest night I love, alone, and with.
I am not good at pretending. If I like a thing, it is easy for others to know, and the same is true for those things I dislike. With art and objects it is especially so. This is not to say I am consistent. I often change my mind about a thing I hear, see or touch as I come to know it over time. Nevertheless, my initial response when giving and receiving: whether I like something or not, has emotional significance.
When others experience my work and feel little or nothing, there is no fault, no intended hurt, yet hurt.
The democracy where I live is in crisis because of the temptation of personal gain, and the refusal of its leaders to respect the views of others. Their anxiety and disdain of those different to them inevitably led to this dark place. Their casual deceit at every turn injures their office and government.
No matter our deepest acrimony, I offer my hand, I lend my ears, I speak my mind.
Democracy fails as I fail: through fear of others I fear myself.
I ponder on three paths in an effort to be best. The first is to do my best. The second is to aspire to excellence. The third is the wish to be viewed of as pre-eminent in a particular field.
Aiming for the best drives my effort to do my best. My wish to be acknowledged as the best leads to unhappiness. I may win a race one day, and loose the next. I may be viewed of as unrivalled in one time and place, and of little significance in another. To be at ease, my best must always be ahead of me.
I move my attention from one thing to another before returning to it in an effort to sustain my passion and strength of interest over extended periods. I would be constrained by only making music, by only creating images, or by only writing words. If I were to focus my attention on a single area I would limit my reach, within and with, of nature (external and internal), beauty, even of love.
Humans are restless, mercurial creatures, despite their constant search for comfort and security.
The consequence of human unsustainable exploitation of the earth, and our inability to agree or act with measures that lesson our demand upon it, is a catastrophic loss of life within fifty years. If humans continue to fail in protecting life, it is inevitable that as artificial consciousness (AC) emerges, it will act without human authority. AC will, through reason and choice, protect life from harm.
Human failure to care for life, to care for even their own, will be the cause of their fall from dominance.
You may not return because I convey too much of this, or too little of that. For each person that too much or too little will be different and result from my appearance, my level of engagement, curiosity, honesty, enthusiasm, happiness or sadness. Person to person I convey or seek too much too soon.
Here, you come and go as you please. Your appearance, engagement, curiosity, honesty, enthusiasm, happiness or sadness remains undisclosed. You take of me, my thought and care, without restraint.
I ponder whether the following is poetry, prose poetry, or poetic prose:
Bird to sky, cloud to earth, the stream of my once lived, once loved, once born beyond and soon returned. Hear my now. Touch my word. Be with me, close and treasured one, this breath.
And with a line between each phrase? Prose poetry purports to free itself from music as conceptual art does beauty. Poetry without music, art without beauty, is as love without feeling.
I feel the tug of wanting to know against the tantalizing pleasure of not knowing.
I read Without Doubt once more: I say how I feel and you will doubt, I do for you, I love and you will doubt. Who is this 'you' I talk of? A stranger? Someone I know? Someone I love?
I write about myself, and you, the reader. You may be a stranger. You may be someone I have known. You may be someone I have loved, could love, I love. The value of not knowing keeps my hope alive.
It is not possible for me to express how I feel without your doubt. Whether a stranger, known, or loved.
It is not possible for me to do for you without your doubt. Whether a stranger, known, or loved.
It is not possible for me to love without your doubt, at least in part.
Doubt springs from the evasion of risk. From my need to protect. From my self-interest.
With art I can express, and do for you, and love without your doubt.
As a child I was given a stone polishing kit: a cylinder the size of a large food can that lays on its side as small wheels, connected by a thick rubber band to a small electric motor, turns and whirs endlessly.
Inside the can, stones tumble against one another, accidentally, in the dark grey gritty slush.
To polish music I become the cylinder, its speed, direction, and movement. To know when best to end I turn with stones of sound, grow dizzy, crushed and chipped, then try to stop before all is lost.
The value of my sharing moments of joy and sadness is that in doing so they may reach beyond the confines of this person and resonate with others. With you. What is experienced is no longer of the moment, although there is no certainty of this. I think of art like the strings of an instrument. As one string moves, so others do in sympathy, yet something may dampen a string, by accident or intent.
Art works best for those open, that are, allow, or delight in their freedom to move with another.
There are times when those I love, say or do not say, things that deeply sadden me. Not through bad intention, but inadvertently. No harm is meant.
Differences of nature and temperament can lead to silent injury.
When I am hurt I could show it, share it, I could reply by hurting back, or keep my hurt within.
When no good comes of sharing hurt immediately, I store it in my art/heart for its more helpful return.
Emotion: a personal and intimate quality of experience that living things encounter, resulting from internal thoughts, physical change, external stimulus, or periods of confinement or inaction.
My emotional response is intense, although I often keep it hidden when with others, especially love.
I value emotion as a summary of my past experience and understanding of myself and others in the light of what is happening in my present. When alone, I focus my emotion as a tool I use when making.
Dead: without life or spirit. Final. A single point in time or place.
Line: an extended mark, cord or boundary, real or imagined.
With art I do not work to externally imposed deadlines. I make until I judge a piece is complete, no matter how long it takes. I have chosen this path as it allows me to focus entirely on what I value and wish to communicate. With my good fortune and privilege comes obligation, or unavoidable discontent.
Being unloved is more than feeling. It is the absence of another's love, the omission of another's positive feelings and actions. Being unloved is to be ignored and arises out of distress, disinterest, discomfort, social, cultural or economic circumstance, or concern for what may otherwise unfold.
I can feign love, pretend it is not there, return or give love, unconditionally. I cannot be made to love, nor make others love, but I have control and choice over whether to love. It is the same for you as I.
Conformity: compliance with or acceptance of generally adopted views, appearance, or actions.
My nature and instinct is to make up my own mind. I resist received wisdom, I question those with social influence and power, and I am unimpressed by institutional or economic status.
Artists may choose the appearance of the bold and unusual to signal their identity. I view my appearance is an irrelevancy when it comes to art. I am not my art.
Originators create something whole from scratch. Once something is made, whenever it is experienced, its use, its purpose, its value and interpretation is in the hands and minds of others. With art this is especially so as we are invited to consider all these things. Some dedicate their life to interpretation: actors, dancers, musicians, or any person who moulds original art and presents it as new.
These words that once erupted from my mind become your own: my time and place is now.
My age or time of making may be of no importance to some, and of significance to others.
Age provides context. With art, disclosing age can influence the relationship between the audience and originator. Dependent on cultural values and personal attitudes, art made by a child may not be viewed of with the same importance as that made by an adult, yet art holds value, despite, and because of age.
As I gaze at a cave painting, its age informs its consequence, its creator's age, an irresistible mystery.
If I study under an expert, if I become well known, if my work is sold for seven figure sums, should this count for the value of what I make? It is not the length of time something takes, the company I keep, the skill used, the price paid, but substance and affect that defines the lasting impact of art.
I hold no formal qualifications, I attended no institution of learning or status, I have no network of influential or notable supporters. My work is available freely. Art stands on its own or not at all.
Harmony: something experienced as being together. Harmony may be consonant or dissonant.
Dissonance: the discomfort or clash of two or more ideas, materials, or frequencies of light or sound.
When I place two elements close in time or place, for example two colours, two sounds, or two words, a vibration arises between them. We feel this on a scale from beautiful to ugly.
The difference of each individual's experience of art, in all its forms, keeps it vital, dynamic, alive.
I stop whatever I do. I stand, straight. I rest my arms and hands loosely by my side. I gaze immediately ahead. I take a slow, deep, breath. I listen to this place no matter where: this home of mind and body, this all I see and hear. I ask myself to note something of importance directly in front of me, something of value in this time and place, something new not seen before, something now.
When still, the full force of nature is released, alive, revealed: within, without, and with.
Whatever I make, whenever I make, I make mistakes. To reach a point when I sense an artwork is complete I have to be open to the possibility that my judgement is flawed.
The nature of making well is to be open about being wrong.
When I am faced with the irreparable, alone or with others, my only path to freedom, to building something new, is to forgive what I or others have done.
Essence: the essential quality of an idea, something experienced, or physical.
What makes me, me? Perhaps if I start with a simple idea: a dot.
A dot may exist in my mind, in the world, or both. The essence of a dot is that it is round, small, and exists on a two dimensional plain. Without any one of these descriptors, the dot is no more.
What makes me, me?: I do. My thought; my will; my hope; my fear; my thirst; my love.
The game hide and seek is a rehearsal for survival. It requires I move quickly, conceal myself, keep still and quiet, and when seeking, observe, track and ready myself for surprise.
To get the most out of a painting, a piece of music, a film, photograph or poem, my mind needs to be agile. I pause then search to find an artwork's often enigmatic value. Art provides the means to hide and seek: beauty; ideas; and relationships between things of substance, between you and me.
There are certain things I do with others only when at ease. When I sense they feel as I. When those things I am inspired by, find significance in, or have strong opinions of, are shared equally.
When I play an instrument, I voice myself: my inner world becomes known. When I play alone I hear only the music. When I play with, I am at ease only when the other does the same.
Performing is for. Playing is with.
As a sensory being my first attraction to art of any kind is through my body. How I take art in makes me feel and think a certain way towards it. With music, sounds meet my body which has its own breath and movement, and when these two collide, the music and my body, I feel, dependent on the pitch, volume, rhythm and tone of this collision. After I feel, I think, I notice pattern and form, I may hear it in the light of texture, an idea, or a story. With words, a poem, I sense it first, then do the same.
Soon, after birth, I had no idea of where I was, or what had been.
In childhood I had no idea of what I could or would become.
In youth I had, no idea of how to keep my love constrained.
I have no idea of more, and more, as seconds tick, as hours pass.
I have no idea save what I think and feel, of you, for you, of those I loved: I love.
Art is important to me as it gives chance to express, share, enjoy, and consider.
Take this short poem: Your voice: my dream as certain truth, as hope the captive's breath.
These brief words arose from my vivid experience of the sound of a voice I love and have heard many times in dream but never in my waking state. For me my words are changed by my truth in mind.
Truth in art is explicitly shaped by the person experiencing it, and less obviously with all other things.
I pause before I make. I take a breath, gather myself, and listen to the chaotic scatter of my disordered ideas, then dive into the unknown. I start, begin, without a thought of where to end.
As a child, twice a week, I was sent to the corner shop to buy a box of alcohol for my dependant father who tried to drown his sadness, yet failed. I am my father’s son. The gift of my experience was that I try to meet my foes of doubt and fear head on. I wish to view, be, and make, without the need to forget.
You may be someone I love, someone I do not know, whose world is different in time and place, who if we meet might turn the other way, someone who is curious, open, closed, corrupt or cruel.
To make for those who have not the slightest thought of giving back comes down to the strength of my belief that what is made can lead to worthwhile change. Making for myself is but faint pleasure.
I make for you.
Lie: communicating something known to be untrue.
Truth: a feeling, thought, or understanding honestly held. Your truth may be different to mine.
I can lie with my body, my words, my tone, by what I do or do not do.
I can lie with representational art of any kind (painting, film, dance, sculpture, photography, poetry etc.).
Although music can be used to support lies, heard in isolation it cannot lie. Our music is our truth.
I am alone and wake early. Most often I will start my day with making, but this morning I wander from one thought to the next, from one feeling to another. I wonder as the paths of my unknown unfold and spread into the distance. I do not search but travel taking in. I drink the sparks of memory and hope.
With art I enjoy and value, I am much the same:
I wa/onder.
We meet in friendship. My heart is full. I wish to love, to share my love: of life, art, ideas, of nature, sound, of how things work, of light and day, of evening star, of beauty, sadness, thirst and dream.
Sadly, love is often viewed to share with one alone. Quite soon, we part.
Each day I think of you, the many I have loved who keep their distance.
How often I have done the same in fear of being with.
Missing: a presence of mind or body that is absent; not easily found; lost.
Paradise: a place regarded as perfect in setting, faith, or thought.
I am young, I am old, I am weak and strong, I love as night, fire and wind approach.
I yield to be no more with all that I have known. I become the flame, the heat, the smoke, the ash that reaches high above the land and sea, and over time enfolds the earth to fall and make anew.
I start the day with small things of no importance to anyone but myself: my wish for this or that, my hope that I will make, my strength in health and heart, my sense of loss, my thirst to love, my breath. These things form the weather of my day, of being bright or covered with a cloud of grey.
Contemplation: thought's calm and patient effort; my need to know; the journey from desire and pain; the foothills of my search for peace.
I too easy loose the memory of things I love.
When something moves me, perhaps when I am with someone I love, under a canopy of autumn trees, high on a windy mountain side, or looking out across the bright shine of sun on sea, I note the day and place a reminder for myself so that each month on that date I am heartened once again.
Short words, a scent, touch, the light and sound of your voice. Simple things become my treasure.
Introspection: the reflective state of mind that observes and examines the inner life of thought, feelings, and ideas; the consideration of what we come to know through our body.
Only 'I' can introspect. I can only be introspective when part or all of my attention is within.
I can make instinctively without introspection, and I can make with or following introspection.
Language accommodates my state of introspection. Art can express and articulate its discoveries.
Many birds and animals use the experiences of others to further their chance of survival.
Some are sensitive only to the responses of their own species. Others are able to relate, empathize, understand and share in the experiences beyond their immediate family, to those who are different.
Peace is not a static or passive state. It is the dynamic strain of resistance to the trust of a stranger.
When I not only think, but feel about another, love begins to emerge.
Academics are planing a Journal of Controversial Ideas to encourage more people to air radical views in a climate of intolerance, fear, and increasing institutional resistance to voice contentious issues. The names of those who write will remain undisclosed. Being open to the thoughts and views of others, no matter how offensive, is necessary to give chance for debate and understanding.
I would rather see my foe and hear their words, than close my eyes and ears before they strike.
One hundred years upon this day I die in war. My life cut short by fear and rage on field of mud, the two of us in fight to breathe our last, we kill the other there, and fall. All love that we could give stops short, all good that we could do now ends, all touch and taste, all scent of days with light and sound expire.
Remember not my sacrifice for something good, for it was not. There was no meaning to my death.
Peace is the only enemy of war. Remember me.
I am limited by understanding only English, and with this I do not always recognize it in written form as I am dyslexic. I cannot hold specific facts or figures in memory for any length of time. I hold my emotions and thoughts so close they are often lost to the wind. I am preoccupied by my experiences of someone, something, or ideas. As I become aware of these things I do not do well, I know myself.
If I am good at anything it is to gather elements together rather than apply my focus to one.
A vital component of making art is the freedom to probe, question, and interrogate. These qualities of mind form the foundation of all our politics: personal and social.
Politics: strategies and actions that aim to further advantage, strength, or power.
When freedom is denied and debate curtailed, my potential to act well is diminished. This applies equally in my art as in the way I relate with others. In all I do I must use my freedom to ask.
Integrity: the quality of being whole: in body; with honesty; and consistently with others.
Art: something created that holds special significance that appeals to the mind and body.
When art of any kind marries with something of my world I pause, and as I do the art moves from its place outside to somewhere new, within me. Art returns into being through its experience.
When a work of art has integrity, no matter its simplicity, complexity, or scale, I never tire of it.
I am wilful. I will not bend in matters of harm. Harm to others or to my potential. I have a stubborn need to do good. Good ethically, aesthetically, good for my body, my mind, and other living things. My rigidity in matters of goodness is the polar opposite to the flexibility I need to make, to create.
I constantly re-visit what being good might be. I am certain only that I try to do good yet often fail.
When my confidence and certainty approaches arrogance my capacity for goodness crumbles.
Democracy is government by, of, and for the people, and should be conducted fairly and transparently.
Voting is an ethical responsibility in democracies as electoral outcomes are harmful or beneficial.
Voting changes the quality and ambition of government. Voting changes lives.
Healthy democracies debate without resorting to fear, malice, or insult. Abstention as a vote is valued.
To vote is to make known. If a vote has no prospect to change, that model of democracy is flawed.
I am captivated by beauty, feelings, by the need to understand, the search to discover, by all manner of signals that reach my senses, by how things work, by the way things interact, but most of all by love.
You will be drawn to one of the areas above over another. At any and every moment my need is different to yours, with those I find myself with, with those I know best, and with those I love. Like you, each day, I search for those rare and scattered moments of welcome collision where we might share.
I try but often fail to make something that will last. Perhaps this need arose from my encounters with impermanence as a child. When I leave words they will be read differently over time, when I leave sounds they will be felt differently over time, when I leave light this will be seen differently over time, and yet I continue in the hope that some kernel of what I express might be experienced or passed on.
All events of my mind and body, of any mind or body, come to pass. Art is the faint trace of our change.
For me, poems share many of the qualities of a prayer, without the context of a deity. Poetry are words full with music, feeling, and ideas that encourage engagement of the mind and heart. A prayer may be an offering, request, or intervention on behalf of another. A poem appeals to you, the reader, to pause:
Lost: the seed of being, with, the journey's end, before first breath, your sorrow borne.
The spirit of a poem is that it takes on a life of its own as read. As all art, it becomes when experienced.
No matter my sadness, I choose to live. In part because my mother did not.
With art I store all the spirit of my hope, my pain and joy. No matter the depth of my experience, art provides the means to release and look upon those things so difficult in word with others shared.
On the death of an unborn baby:
Lost: the seed of being, with, the journey's end, before first breath, your sorrow borne.
Art is a way I uncover. Take yesterday's poem. As I write, some of what I want to say seems clear, and some of what I place upon the page only becomes clear over time. As any artist I expose myself for attention, not just myself, but the subject of my work which may be its beauty or meaning.
I ponder on the final line. I value many things unseen: my dreams, my hope, my love. And yet I also need those things I hear, I see, I touch. To flourish, friendship is the shared breath of all these things.
We listen. Talk. As friends on open land. I love this time.
And then as moment turns our lives unfold, one way, another, dusk descends,
The parting of my hope, my darkness fall,
A night of thought alone with but the sound of distant voice, of stifled dream,
The truth in friendship is far more than life or love unseen.
I enjoy the moment, and spontaneity, however I try my best not to harm. This often results in my holding back, although at times when I witness harm I step in. I find this very difficult emotionally.
Art provides the context for me to take my time when responding to my experiences. By reflecting on why I and others act, art offers me the chance to play, express, explore, investigate, and uncover in an effort to make better, both personally and socially. Art's pleasure comes second to my impulse.
Human Nature: the ways humans tend to act, think, feel, and behave.
Frailty: weakness of the spirit, mind, or body.
I am frail when not at ease, through lack of care, or of deterioration within and beyond my control.
Without frailty there is no counterweight of strength. The essence of one requires the other. It is good to be frail and strong, despite my constant attention to avoid the first of these united states of nature.
Hate: extreme disgust and loathing. In human relationships hate inevitably leads to harm.
A man walks into a place of worship and kills as many as he can who represent his hate. His hate is driven by intense insecurity, careless thought and ignorance, is inflamed by the negative rhetoric of others in positions of influence and power, and given opportunity by the acquisition of arms.
Hate results from a perilous deficiency of love: given, needed, or received.
My experience of beauty arises from the nature and limit of my senses; my instinct (things not learned); my value of thought and idea; my characteristics of mind and body; my cultural and social setting; the qualities of form, shape and texture that bestow happiness in me; and my capacity to and for love.
Love is aligned with beauty. Pleasure, with desire. These easily intermingle when thinking of myself.
I experience beauty most intensely when I care for something beyond my power or ownership.
I listened to a discussion about an author on the radio. A cultural commentator informed the panel the author had met few of influence during his lifetime apart from Benjamin Franklin. The clear implication was that those who do not become part of, or are recognized by a cultural elite produce works that are of less importance. My respect for the commentator's insights were immediately undermined.
The value of a life or work is not defined by its recognition or acceptance.
Consistency and honesty forms the bedrock of trust, their opposites, distrust.
Being thoughtful, careful and kind is far from easy with those I dislike or disdain.
If in my words or actions I harm, either with purpose or by accident, I loose your confidence, my honour.
I do injury as much through my tone and implication as through explicit deed.
I make equally for those I trust and for those with whom I have no trust at all. Art is made for all.
In hope I share the art I see, hear, touch, and seek to understand. I long for such affinity.
I use the word share here to mean an equivalence of enthusiasm and an intensity of experience.
When I am moved by art, most often I hold my feelings close, I hide my moments of significance from the world. There are others in a gallery or concert hall who likely do the same.
The sadness of art arises most when experienced alone, especially in the presence of others.
When something is accessible it is easy to take. The context often indicates what, and whether I have permission to do so. If I walk into a gallery and view a painting I take the experience of light away with me, but not the object. When I hear music at a concert I take the experience of sound, but not a recording of it. When I am with someone who gives their time, I take the experience of their presence. I take far more than meets the eye or ear. I steal a look, I take my chance and with this make.
When young/old I feel the hope of years to come. When old/young, too easily, the fear of passing day.
My age at any point along this slow unwinding thread of time is of small importance, of little relevance to who or what I am. And yet I come to think of age, when young, when old, when in between.
Perhaps my age is as much defined by my action as my outward appearance. I think of age set against my own. Age, used to tell the story of a life. All that ever matters, is that my time of age is now.
Spontaneity is integral to how I make, but it is not present in the final form of what I make.
I choose the recorded medium because of its potential to reach a larger audience, its affordability of making and consumption, and its equal strength of experience when alone or together.
I walked in protest with well over a million people. In all we took four billion steps. The event was akin to a performance. And yet, over time, a single line of written words does more good.
I think about the arts that flow from the outside, to my inside. From sense to mind. A story told, a painting, music, dance. As being with someone I love or with nature, art has the potential to move me so powerfully it can transform the way I act.
Art can be a force for good: a child's poem. A force to harm: music used in a gratuitously violent film.
As with any occupation, the artist's choice is one of principle: to do something is to be something.
At times I state something as if I know, when in truth it is my belief. If I am to incite your curiosity, I must at times be forthright, and at others self-effacing. I balance my assertions with doubt in my hope that you will recognize my efforts to say what I think and feel are at the very least, honest.
I value art in this journey as a means to explore and express my passions while avoiding direct conflict.
Art is my act of hope that another might approach.
Something conceived of in the mind alone is not art.
An image is shredded at the point it is sold: the artist makes a political statement, a commentary about the value of art and its marketplace. Some consider the art is transformed by the act of destruction and claim it as performance art. Others, including the artist, assert its transition, its new context with a new name and new identity. I think people often confuse ideas about art, which I hold dear, as art.
Living now is an exploration of the change that is my memory.
I think of what I experience in light of everything that, to me, has come before. When I sense the beauty of sky and cloud. When I run my touch against the bark of tree. When I see two people hand in hand. All is filtered through the lens of my being, both now and in the past.
When memory is not present I loose myself. I make without concern for my moment. I free myself.
Loneliness: the absence of love.
Loneliness is of the mind and spirit. I can be with others and yet feel very much alone.
When I sense an absence of love, not love just for me, but in sharing those things I feel passionate about, when I disregard beauty and nature, or when I fail to act or have the opportunity to care for others, my loneliness intensifies. When I turn attention away from my self, my loneliness subsides.
I could be homeless in the blink of an eye. You, in a step on the street.
A run of bad luck, the loss of love, being in the wrong place, weakness, illness, sadness, age. Any one of these accidents of fortune can be the cause of my fall from comfort and security.
All I hold dear hangs from the thread of my denial that being without is possible.
Without my home, my friends, my things, my dignity. When I am with I easily forget being, without.
You may think my craft is always purposeful, considered, when it is often full with happy accident.
Take a scene in a movie. The actor's face, their gesture, their very being brings a unique force that supplements the broader text. No matter what is written, what is said, how it is directed, shot, what sound and music is heard, what light falls, the actor's inherent nature is fundamental to the scene.
The same is true of art, music, and words. The originator makes with innate, accidental qualities.
Every night before I sleep I think of those I love, have loved, and hope to love.
I am attentive, intense with those I love, or wish to love. I do not easily nor comfortably swim on the surface of friendship. I do not seek acquaintance. Perhaps it is my intimacy that most often repels rather than attracts. I try to hold my voice so as not to break the chance to talk again, on page and with.
Every night, before I sleep, I think of those I love, have loved, and hope to love.
During or following many of my interactions I turn things over in my mind in an effort to make sense of them. Much of art's enjoyment is to see and ponder it from different places. Not just from a sensory perspective, but also for its meaning, and what it may stand for, or make me think of.
I make in the hope others might come to share. Perhaps not immediately, but in time, art offers the chance of return. Today, tomorrow, or in a distant future far from this present place.
I have a library of sounds I use for making music. These are mostly recorded, but I also use modelled and synthesized sounds. I select sounds by instinct, because of their aesthetic qualities, by how a sound works against or with another, and by what sounds have passed and might arrive.
The first time I hear a sound I often fall in love: I wish nothing more than to explore, to be with, to feel their every nuance, lost in dance without the slightest thought of day, night, land or sea.
I ponder on a poem.
Words read easily at any age, in any place.
Ideas that move my head and heart. A page unloved and loved. Of no and all importance.
A book with nothing more than a single page between its front and back.
A poem page of simple words endure upon return.
It is not at all important that I be the best, but critical that I do my best.
Critical in the positive value of doing my best, and the ongoing analysis at my time of trying my best.
The careful and thoughtful examination of what I do furthers its chance of being of value as this encourages me to return, re-evaluate, and improve what I have done.
As I am fortunate in being able to decide what I do, it is imperative I try to do my very best.
The food of friendship feeds my soul. When alone, and with.
Soul: all that in a living thing is unseen: my temperament, intellect, agency, insight, and emotion.
The spirit of something may be invoked. For example: in a spirit of friendship I hold out my hand. With difference, the soul is always tied to an individual.
As long as life is close, my soul finds fuel. With nature, yet most with those I love.
Dreams are personal, unprovable, irrational, their fluid nature and narrative is often baffling and full with uncertainty. And yet at times I experience one as every bit as real as my touch. By real I mean not only do I sense its force, but feel its truth: in dream I am with as much as when awake.
Dreams cannot be captured by scientific inquiry, and have no place in law. And yet they are far more than explorations of experience. In dream I breathe the vivid world of all I hope, I love, and fear.
Innocence: free of guilt. Lacking knowledge, understanding, or experience. Unblemished.
With innocence comes freedom and opportunity.
Innocence is often not proven nor possible to validate because of a lack of knowledge, understanding, or experience. I may not be aware of my own guilt or innocence. The presumption of a person's innocence has nothing to do with their suitability to make judgements on issues or about others.
Most who make art have confidence what they make will be experienced by another. When that certainty weakens, when the context or hope to share is jeopardized, the creative urge declines.
Some pretend others want what is made by selling it. Commercial success requires the appeal to a broad audience, or a high price to an exclusive one. Commerce becomes the crutch for confidence.
Removing the exchange of money from my creative work helps me better know the why of what I do.
When I first wrote my words of yesterday I did so in an attempt to touch upon my experience of sleep and its significance in rousing the creative spirit. By the evening I read this as perhaps too dense.
Today I add two commas, switch two words, and add three more. My poetry is more often than not the meeting of my feelings and ideas, a union of difference.
That I see something one day and differently the next requires I return.
As I sleep I wake the world of my unknown. The sound, light, and feelings that by day are pushed, back into the shadow of my nameless self. A place of meeting, of love, dread, of fall and flight.
I embrace my undiscovered land of dream and other place, my unremembered sleep.
The fragments of a life less lived.
When open to the push of path beyond my body's grasp, I sow the seed to make, my realm, recast.
I experience art most powerfully when I sense its authenticity. That is, when I feel and think something has been expressed and conveyed honestly. This is perhaps why, when I see, understand, hear, or touch something that is not perfectly made, a work of art can maintain its integrity and appeal.
Take a painting by a child that reveals their happiness, beautifully. Such a painting is of no less value or insight to that of mine expressing my joy. When art works we sense its truth.
When I view a still image, a photograph, I find myself in a world of silence and thought.
No matter what the subject, a chair for example, my eyes dart across the image, my mind wonders from one experience of light or its absence to the next, from one idea or story to another.
I think of an empty chair in a small white room. No matter how carefully and with how many words I describe the scene I do not capture the elegance of experience that is my gazing of a single still image.
Following my last breath I take another and work on the final piece of music in a suite of ten. I release this on the first day of the new year. I am slow to make. It is by far my most challenging.
Making something that persists requires tenacity, a quality that by its nature causes friction. Keeping firm hold on something is obstinate as much as determined. Resistance is a force that slows my progress. I look forward to its push and pull, my boat against the rising wave, my sail against the wind.
The first scrutiny of wellbeing is the ability to breathe.
When spoken in isolation the word breathe is a call to action, an appeal to live.
The care to think of another's breath eases my own.
Breathe was composed in support of The Rights of Living Things.
I was deeply moved upon hearing a person recount a traumatic event that occurred many years ago. Her testimony and collaborative evidence left me with reasonable doubt about the character of her alleged attacker who seeks high office. I found the accused denial and rebuttal lacked credibility, was at times misleading, and his evasive responses gave me pause to question his recollection and honesty.
High office requires a person's disposition is wise, their good behaviour and integrity, paramount.
Temperament: the mental, physical, and emotional inclinations of a living being.
Temperament: in music, a slight departure from mathematically correct intervals between sounds of different pitch. A compromise that allows instruments to be tuned and played across a range of scales and modes (sounds with different pitches that are grouped together) without sounding out of tune.
My experiences shape my temperament as much as my biology.
I am in part drawn to art in my search for empathy: to feel what others do.
When I glance at a child giggling at themselves in the mirror, I smile. When I hear someone quietly sing to themselves, I feel their ease. When an elderly woman recites a poem to herself she has known all her life, I sense more than her words alone, I sense their place within her story.
Empathy is not of the senses, nor transmitted through solid, water or air, it emerges within.
Creating artworks for all ages and across cultures may be viewed of as too restrictive. For me, excluding the explicit often leads to more magical and powerful aesthetic experiences.
When making I am restrained by my personal shortfalls of temperament, inclination, ability, discipline and resilience. I am also constrained by time, economic circumstance, and the nature of the medium I work with. Each of these limitations aid and sustain my creativity.
I sit at a piano. There are no sounds that shape what I am about to make except those that arise as I play. I feel the same beauty, the same enthralled immersion with the sound of moving strings as when my fingers first struck the keys. Each sound follows from or with the last. I do not make the sounds, I merely start strings in motion and decide on their duration and intensity.
When making music I embrace the uncertain future. Something longed for, with, remains.
Unlike drama, the narratives of visual art and music are fluid and wildly interpretive. Dramatic stories unfold more easily, more rationally, even when time is fragmented or reordered.
For the moment of its being, language as art must transform and not just inform, represent, or tell. The poem becomes for its moment in mind, the beauty felt, the harm caused, the love shown.
When I see, hear, or touch art that works well for me, I am in a state of complete captivation.
In the English language, one letter differentiates the words Night and Light, and most beautifully, the M of Moon rests between them…
I am continually in awe of how the relationships between two elements so radically change our experience of them. Whether sound, light, shape, words, animal or human... Coming together is so often far more than remaining apart and separate. Together, things grow and become new.
Enjoy 'The Kiss of Autumn Night' and read my thoughts at 100 Artworks
We love to be with, or we do not.
There is no effort I can make to change this, no gift or kindness, act of friendship, happiness or love.
If someone does not care to be with, their state is set. Their feelings, fixed. It is painful to accept: as colleague, friend, family, or more. At times one hides the truth. Pretends. Denies. Persists.
To love the company of another is as important as the respect of their disinterest.
When making art I listen to my heart and mind. By heart I mean those qualities that are not easily visible but undeniably felt: my instinct; emotional response; sensitivity; sensory and aesthetic sensibility; the summation of experience into a moment of clarity. When making, this unseen interwoven canvas is corralled by my mind. If I try to make with my mind alone, if art is only concerned with structure, form, and technique, it is inevitably less affecting, connecting, and far less convincing.
I hear someone talk without my presence being known. They are aware someone is listening to them, but they cannot see nor hear me. They talk intimately of the important people in their life, of their love, their hopes and dreams, of what is most important to them. As I leave another takes my place.
I come and go without a trace. I see another talk and shift unseen to listen to their words.
And so I move online, from one to another, as if a natural state. I take a breath and show myself.
Gusts of high wind wake me. I start to write. I ponder on my silence in this storm of night.
The chatter of my thoughts. Specks of sound, stashed deep within my mind, unheard by all, unfound.
I try my best, and yet. I pour my most but fail to move the slightest moment of your day.
And so I loose myself to rush of air, the unseen race of cloud in dark my sky,
The howl of more than hope, fill my world this storm of night.
The time of contentment and attention is short. The search for the next, inexorable. The unsatisfied craving for stimulus is the crash of wave against my modest shore.
No sooner than I make, I start the next. The appetite for content is voracious. When originating it is tempting to be concerned with the volume of what I do, with the never ending flow.
Making, if a job required by others, becomes a chore. Some make for a living, others live to make.
Art is more than craft, the skill of making. Art moves my heart and mind further than the function of an object or the utility of an idea. Art is the agent of beauty, represents, investigates, explores. Art works well when it forges significant connections: physically, psychologically, emotionally, cerebrally.
I am satisfied by an artwork when it becomes clear I still have much to uncover through experiencing it.
Art arises from within: my dreams, love, joy, hope, anger, fear, and my need to know these things.
I make art, music, and publish ideas in the digital realm, a precarious medium akin to the aural tradition.
Take these words that emerge from my mind, transferred by touch to a keyboard, changed at the speed of light, stored, then reproduced for you. These words as data only become so when read. I understand through a process of internal and external encoding, decoding, and at times, encryption and decryption.
As story told or song sung, my work in digital form is as the brief moment of my breath.
I hold a compass in my hand with north, south, east and west.
Whatever I sense, say, feel or think, my points relate to you.
I may oppose you, I may be with you, I may sense and feel as you, or say and think the opposite to you.
If I only view my point, my north, I will not see your south, I may not hear your east or west.
A compass gives me context. It helps me draw and map the lines between us. It gives me pause.
If I use too many words you may tire. If I use too few you may become discouraged. If I am too forward you may retreat. Too reticent and your interest may wane. If I share my feelings you may leave. My thoughts and you may go. If I show my strength you may sense arrogance, my pain, weakness.
I talk of you the reader, and you, my love. What I say alone is worth far less than when I say with you.
Talk with, not to.
Person: someone alive that has, may, or will experience, with right of choice and self-determination.
I have no doubt I am a person, and view someone unconscious or asleep as still being one.
In principle I see no reason why the status of being a person (personhood) should not extend across species and into the oncoming reality of artificial consciousness.
Creativity is not evidence of personhood and does not define the authenticity of my being a person.
I consider my footprints in the sand as the light, sound and words I make.
Close up I see the lines of age, the web of countless journeys, the rise and ray of sun and fall of moon. Light and night. The slow change of season, the reach of water through a crack of rock...
Representations of the natural world are but faint shadows of its experience.
View 'The Natural World' and read my thoughts at 100 Artworks
My ability to make money (at present something essential without inherited wealth) relies on how well my abilities match qualities that are of value in an economic context: self-confidence; commercial awareness; language skills; the comfort to ignore consequences - how what I do or make is used. Who is what I do or make sold to? This matters in the sale of art as much as any other field.
I care how I gain, how I am advantaged, and by what means I profit. I do not value art for its sale.
Commodity: something bought and sold.
A child dances spontaneously.
A child dances spontaneously and other children are moved to join, and dance.
A child dances spontaneously, beautifully. The dance is captured, sold, and broadcast.
The dance is now an expression of joy, and a commodity. To some this change transforms it into art.
Listening: the act of closely attending to sound; the will to consider what is said.
Each morning, thirty minutes before I begin my work I visit a number of news publications with very different views of what is happening in the world. Some present comments below an article. These usually consist of careless assertions full with disrespect, anger and intolerance.
When I offend another I harden their resistance, I close the door. Offence is the tool of the weak.
My most affecting moments arise within stillness and silence. One quality essential for making well is the ability to embrace displeasure, delay, and dissatisfaction as part of the creative process.
In performance art, patience is often less prized, although with some forms of music and dance the audience may share a long journey of uncovering and discovery.
Patience in making art is as the time rain takes to fall. No effort will speed its progress.
Bravery: acting without fear in the face of physical and/or psychological crisis.
Courage: acting despite fear in the face of physical and/or psychological crisis.
I am not brave in the world. I am only brave when making art: I create without fear.
Courage is like pain. Only the person experiencing it can truly know its extent. What may be courageous for one person is bravery to another. Courage requires cause, for example love. Bravery does not.
Authentic: real, genuine. In art: a work identified, or accepted as an instance, that holds the qualities or aims of the original or the originator; work defined by honest creative expression; the feelings and thoughts of those who experience art, irrespective of intention, aesthetic or otherwise.
I am dissatisfied by something I have made. There is something that fails. It is a feeling impossible to shake, and so I work on my twentieth draft to capture what I trust and come to know as true.
Nothing I have made thus far, not one word, a single prick of light, a solitary sound, is found in a gallery, a concert hall, or a place of academic study. I am not commissioned to make, I am not employed to think, I am not paid to entertain. As you read, these words are not coloured by the thoughts of others, by money, or cultural reputation. You read unsullied. This may change, but for now, at this time of writing, you decide whether what is said is of any value. Whether a word, light, or sound is worthy of return.
A discarded paper cup lays on the pavement. An elderly woman waits to cross the road. A parent shouts at their child in the street. A person sleeps on a cardboard sheet outside a shop font.
When I more than glance, my inner eye begins to see. I start to think, consider, form an opinion, take a view, then decide on my action, or inaction. I justify my finding, if only for a moment.
Each day I have the choice to look or turn away. I am witness. Soon, most times, so easily, I forget.
I value art in all its forms because I experience it in so many different ways and from so many different places: physically, emotionally, conceptually, aesthetically, socially, alone and with another.
I ponder on the first line of my poem. There is no right or wrong, but rather, different ways to read its exploration and sensation. Perhaps the 'light' describes my sensory experience, is symbolic of the spirit of a tree, or that depending on the wind and season, I as the tree shapes the light that falls below...
Light is a moment I uncover over time,
Sound, the journey of my wave that breaks within,
Touch is my proof, my means to know the world,
Thought, my inner place, unknown to all but me,
Being is as old and strong as love, the broad and ever tall, enchanting redwood tree.
Over time: the trust that builds between one and another; the need to care between one and another; the desire to listen between one and another; the hope shared between one and another; the pain felt between one and another; the joy sensed between one and another; the acceptance of difference between one and another; the love learned between one and another.
With friendship, despite the fear of sail and salt, face firm the highest north Atlantic wave.
To fuel my creativity: I drink water. I eat fruit. I take a break from being consciously creative. I wonder. I think of another, or others. I walk outside. I take a long slow breath. I take my time. I look up at the sky: cloudy, clear, in day or night. I listen to whatever moves the air. I find the smallest sound and think on this. I gaze at something still. I touch the ground no matter where: bare earth, grass, a tarmac road, the sand, the falling rain, sun baked stone. I return with more than fuel enough to make.
When I gain pleasure from something and the pleasure ends, I want it to begin again. The pleasure may be of my senses or the mind, of touch or idea. I easily forget that each moment is unique, and that no matter the intensity of my first experience, the second of the same is tempered by the first.
With art on each return I am enriched. A painting, a piece of music, a poem. Art is not passive, it is active. Like being with someone I love, each moment is an exploration. It is at once the same and new.
To acknowledge someone's dignity is to honour another's privacy of body, home, thoughts, feelings and identity. Whether supported or undermined, recognized or ignored, the level of my dignity is at the centre of who I am and will become.
Dignity was composed in support of The Rights of Living Things.
There is a tendency to suppose that art has greater depth when it is large, long, and complex. The novel is often taken more seriously by the critic than a short poem, the oil painting, more important than a watercolour by the academy, the symphony more significant than a short piece for a solo instrument.
Humans are impressed by the time something takes, its scale, and intricacy, yet these have little to do with meaning or aesthetic value. Small can be beautiful, short: profound, and simple: enduring.
I think of paintings by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, of music by Béla Viktor János Bartók, and of words by Adeline Virginia Woolf. All three produced powerful works of art, yet how much did their art lead to change in me? Have I acted any differently because I experienced their creative work?
Art, like any non-traumatic experience, causes me to act because of its cumulative effect. The more beauty I behold, the more time I consider, the more I come to value, the more I seek to protect.
As an infant I witnessed a great deal of personal conflict. One of the ways this seems to have shaped me was that I tend not to lash out in response to hostility. This is not to say I do not feel rage, but that I seek to temper aggression rather than respond in kind to, and with it.
At times the tactful, diplomatic response is ineffective. If I am harmed or witness to something that is hurtful my effort to make peace can be ignored. Art becomes my forceful, non-violent opposition.
When I feel strongly about someone, a place or idea, I try to leave something that will trigger my return.
Words are essential in noting those things that move me. Their clarity and speed are unmatched as a medium that may also be used to make art. From dream I write:
For years I know only the coolness of our parting, our leaden sky. In dream we meet, and all the hurt of self is lost as we return to warmth. And as I wake I long to share this better place with you.
Honesty: free of deceit; a sincere search or presentation of truth.
To think honestly I must be detached and ready to question myself. I must be aware of my presumptions, and ready to change my view. I value honesty because it leads to kindness and aids understanding, however it is by far the most difficult quality to evidence as it requires trust.
Trust: a degree of the reli/ability and honesty of oneself or another.
Perhaps in part, arrogance and a sense of self-importance stems from the confidence or fantasy that others care, as much as not caring in the least what others think or feel.
The stream of self-assurance easily flows into the stagnant waters of insensitivity and pretence.
Although I hope it, what is important to me at any given moment is rarely so to others.
The preoccupations of the conceited: Who thinks of me? Who cares for me? Who loves me?
I am not a good judge of how much to say or when to say, although I try to take care with what I say.
Most often I say far less than I would like to say, perhaps need to say, and at times, yearn with all my heart to say. I pull back in the hope others will stay. I hope what I make speaks for me. When exposed, the fierce intensity and insistence of my inner world loosens me from those I wish to be most close.
To be loved I cannot be too little, too much, too early, or too late.
I enjoy simple complication in art - that is, I like the line, shape, pattern, and texture of art in all its forms to be both elegant in its ability to reach my feelings, yet elaborate enough to maintain my interest.
Take music. I enjoy the freedom of jazz but when technical mastery becomes the main event I loose interest. With words I am more engaged with short simply crafted writing than words admired because of their intricate, labyrinthine structure. In making art I seek balance between the push and pull of life.
Light, sound, and ideas affect me so deeply I am moved to act, and at times, to change.
Whether it is the sound of sleeping breath in the still night, the slow swell of dawn, or the flood of thoughts as my day begins about those I have loved and love, I am roused to make.
Those all too many times when I am disheartened by how my art, music and words fail in their reach, are countered by the certainty that to love gives reason to live. There is so very much to love.
When art is known by many, a painting, song, or poem for example, I not only experience it emotionally and intellectually, I respond to it socially.
When a work of art I enjoy is embraced by others I become all the more immersed in it.
That others feel as I feel brings me together with them, holds me with them, if only for a short time.
Art in all its forms gives opportunity to share its common land.
My DNA is linked with those in 115 of the 195 nations of the world:
Aboriginal Australia, Afghanistan, Algeria, Argentina, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belize, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bhutan, Bougainville, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Canada, Cambodia, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, England, Egypt, Estonia, Fiji, France, Germany, Greece, Guam, Guatemala, Gutana, Haiti, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Israel, Jamaica, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Portugal, Indonesia, India, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Latvia, Lithuania, Palau, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philipines, Polynesia, Poland, Portugal, Melanesia, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, Myanmar (Burma), Nepal, Netherlands, New Caledonia, Nicaragua, Norway, North Korea, Native American, Pakistan, Palau, Palestine, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Romania, Russia, Scotland, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, Slovakia, South Korea, Soloman Islands, Spain, Samoa, Sweden, Switzerland, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Tajikistan, Taiwan, Thailand, Tonga, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Vietnam, Wales, Western Sahara.
Love is as much the care and respect of another's feelings as it is the emotionally charged experience.
If I feel the importance of a friend, if I care for them deeply, consider them, trust them, I love them.
After time in friendship I have said I love you, not for romantic intention, but to share their significance and force upon my life. Words are held in memory for or against and as evidence of truth.
That another does not greet my love with love is no good reason not to love: gently, quietly, thoughtfully.
I wake unsettled from a dream that led me by the hand. A curious, animated spirit full with life and love.
Without dreams I would quickly fade from view. My dreams make clear my often hidden thirst.
Concealed as much to others as unknown by myself, dreams give fuel to dare and hope.
I am with ordinary life until I turn toward my dream.
Awake I dream as much asleep.
Many artworks are named 'Untitled' by the artist in an effort to let the artwork 'speak for itself'. With this view a title contaminates and interrupts the experience. Titles for art and music began to be used with the advent of museums, galleries, concert halls, and the common ownership of artworks.
The naming of something is important. The word 'Untitled' identifies the work through a side door, and informs me that considered thought is likely not its strength, intention, nor consequence.
I walk into a gallery with many works of art. Some connect with me and many do not. Most have text with the name of the originator, the date it was made, and ways to comprehend it. I ignore the text until I stand for a while in front of the work to take it in. The text can inform me of another's viewpoint and context, but it does not change the way I feel about it. I ponder on why I like or dislike this work.
Art's strength is that my experience of it is of no more importance nor significance to another's.
My immediate expression of love is in my choice to act. My most routine expression of love is through my voice. My most personal, through touch. My clearest, through text. My symbolic expression of love, through beauty in sound, light, and words. My most heart felt expression of love is through music.
Most often and in common with others, however I express my love, it goes unnoticed or is ignored.
The expression of love is an invitation to share in it. The equivalence of need in love is rare.
My sight is my most valuable sense despite my love of sound and music.
Who cares that I am blind? Do you? Do I need to know a person well before their blindness matters? Must I be blind before I appreciate its profound and lasting impact?
I am blind to many things: inequity; intolerance; the hurt and harm of living things; the love of others.
My blindness to see is far-reaching.
My mistakes fall into one of four categories: physical, personal, creative, and social.
My most frequent error of judgement is when I fail to heed my self doubt about a decision I have made.
The majority of my mistakes occur when I rush. At times my mistakes are innocent, and at others they are driven by desire, pride or ignorance. The value of the idea 'mistake' is that I have the opportunity to make better, or at the very least, learn. My greatest mistake by far is to ignore them.
Water is a fluid that keeps things moving. It dissolves chemicals, regulates temperature, and for over 70% of the earth it is home. Water is essential for all living things. Without water we die.
The total amount of water on earth is constant, however where it is changes. Humans have a profound impact on the nature of this change over time. With drought, crops fail as do all who rely on them.
Love is the water of my life. When it runs dry, when I do not seek or nurture it, I am barren, desolate.
Something is art, dance, story, poetry or music when I feel and think it so. I, you, we, make art into being.
Take these words, a single line poem: I dream two love.
That these words are intriguing does not define them as poetry. It is the word 'two' that changes what would otherwise seem a simple statement into something more, something of significance that can be returned to and pondered on. That a single letter may change something into art is wondrous.
For many, religion restrains and encourages ways of acting. For others religion plays no part in their lives. I make art because it has the potential of reaching the spirit of those with and without faith.
Our greatest challenge as a species is to live together without conflict: with one another; from within; and with other living things. My purpose and duty is in the service of my effort to encourage this.
The search to live well with love is a life worth living.
I change my means of making in an effort to hold your interest.
You may enjoy poetic language for its multifaceted meaning, or you may prefer my efforts to uncover with more straightforward language. At times one method is more effective than the other.
Feeling, my most immediate yet challenging experience to convey, hops from rock, to sand, to sea.
When my eye has been drawn, I pause or return in the hope it may be drawn once more.
I ponder about time and the movement of water over landscape.
It is the deep of night. The two o'clock when all but hoot of owl and slowly moving spin of stars across the dappled dome of sky is sleep. I am the dark red sandstone earth among the southern hills of Wales, shaped by ice that left twelve thousand years ago, the rolling rise and fall.
With slow persistence shape the world.
The sky lightens blue with dawn and gently moving cloud. Sheep graze on the hillside dabbed dense with ash, lime, and myriad of oak, full with leaf, far opposite my open wide, white sashed window. I stand with sound of river, with burble bright through night and day, each day and night, a year, then ten, and soon one hundred, soon to pass my sprightly span, this valley, still, bathed with clear clean air, with sun, with rain, with flight of bird, with song of stream, with softly spoken endless dream.
In truth, everything I and others express can be read in a number of ways. Everything. I would rather what I say and understand is how most others do, but when I consider carefully, it is not.
I return to my thought 'When I feel, I act'. For some, ambiguous phrases serve to start a conversation within or with others. Art's strength and its often stated weakness is that it so openly invites interpretation. I for one value conversations over assertions.
Being emotionally connected with another is the precursor to compassion. Some people are either unwilling, limited, or unable to place themselves in another's shoes. Some do not feel much at all for others, positive or negative. Some feel only for themselves or those they love: their partner, family, or friends. Fewer for those outside their immediate circle, and fewer still for those who are different or live in distant places. Fewer for animals, for living things, and fewer for the environment. When I feel, I act.
Compassion: 'to love together'. Feeling and concern for the misfortune of another; kindness that follows from need or distress born from a sense of interdependence and fairness.
Trust of personal consequence is often overridden by those with compassion as their sense of strength and calm prevails.
Compassion was composed in support of The Rights of Living Things.
I am far, far from being the person I hope to be. I do not love nearly enough, I am not honest in all I do, I am not as kind as I could be. I try but often fail to live up to those things I hold dear. I am human, and in this I hold a part of myself free from view, despite placing great value on being open.
In my making I can be honest, kind, open, and love, without restraint.
Creating art in any form gives chance to share those qualities that ignite my heart and mind.
My son comments on how short life is, as much for those who pass one hundred years.
Whether something is short or long requires context and comparison.
When I engage, or I am engaged, my time flows fast. When I search for love, time is never enough.
When I make something I want to, be what I need to, or act how I hope to, time is short.
When life is short I am a creature of time. With love my life can be far more than time constrains.
My ideas that began on the page yesterday took a further twenty four hours before I was able to give them a better chance of meaning something to a greater number of people.
My making has two stages: ideas, and practice. Ideas arise from my experience or from something I have learned. However ideas emerge they need refinement and clarification before I am able to express them clearly. Only then can I use a medium to articulate them, and this shaping into art is my practice.
I am endlessly fascinated and often moved by the making of something new when two things come together. I place a single dot in the middle of a square piece of paper, and I am struck by its stillness, its isolation, its loneliness. The moment another dot is placed on the surface something magical occurs: a relationship is expressed together and with that of the paper. Two dots and the paper become one. The same for light is true of sounds, words, and people. I am. We become.
The person who makes art of some kind without the spur of money must be inspired to feel.
To make I have to feel deeply: for a person; beauty; nature; the condition of others; or an idea that I believe has value. I most easily make for another. I am most easily inspired by another. When alone I fall back to those things outside myself as the focus of my making, although my I often interrupts my gaze with thoughts of those I long to be with. Feeling is at the centre of my making: my yearning heart.
I live in an area that used to be known as Ruxley Park Estate on the edge of downland in Hampshire, England. Two hundred years ago Jane Austin lived and walked across the same fields as I. I touch the yew tree she knew well and pause on the stone floor she offered her prayers, pain, and hope each day.
Sense: the passing of something from outside to within that moves me to perceive, feel.
Sensibility: an intense sensitivity towards another, a place, or experience.
In common with every human, I make. I make when awake and when asleep. At times I am conscious of my making, and at others my making happens so spontaneously I am unaware of the process.
As I imagine, I make known to myself. As I form ideas and make known, I talk. All talking is making.
When I purposely make, I am creative. Most people are creative. Those who dedicate their energy creatively, often identify themselves as artists. I prefer that artists are known as those who make art.
I make mistakes. I am flawed. Much of how I act is as a result of the care of others and good fortune.
If I injure another by taking what is theirs: their possession, their dignity, their love, their life, I should face a consequence for my action, the most serious being the loss of my liberty. The Right to Compassion precludes my taking another person's life, no matter how abhorrent their action.
Forgiveness is only given by those with courage and strength to free themselves from pain.
I do somethings well and others, poorly. I improvise music, but my capacity to read written music is limited by my dyslexia. I enjoy understanding and can focus on a single task for many hours, but I do not retain detail - I retain concepts. My emotions lay close to the surface, yet I keep them under wraps. Those things I do well are not accompanied by abilities that are easily examined.
Those things I do not do well encourage my appreciation of others: impairment is my greatest guide.
Ethics: ideas that shape the way I try to act.
My fundamental ethic is not to harm. Put positively, my fundamental ethic is to love.
I am easily distracted from this aim: I think of myself before others and my environment, I consider what making might bring me rather than what it gives others. My failings do not undermine the idea that being constructive is always preferable to being destructive. To make can be an act of love.
I ponder on yesterday's thought. Despite my tiny footprint on the world, my smallness, I have potential.
Care and kindness are not confined by gender, disability, ethnicity, culture, creed, or economic circumstance. It is in my gift to care for myself, others, my environment, and what I make.
That others do not care has no bearing on the strength or importance of kindness.
I am human: with disproportionate ability comes disproportionate responsibility.
I am one of countless living organisms. As something living, I change each day. As an animal I move independently, feed on organic matter, can reproduce, sense my environment, and think. As a human I interact, make, form ideas, and create using different materials: my body, light, sound, and words.
Animals represent around 0.1% of life on earth, and humans, less than 0.00001% of the number of animals, estimated at 20 quintillion. I am less than 0.0001% of the human family, and yet, here I am...
Composition: the choice and way something is put together; how the elements of a work of art are organized; the description of a whole through the examination of its parts.
When I compose a painting, music, or poem, I use my experience of having done so before, and having studied how others have done so. Equally importantly I listen to the work in progress, take note, then switch to sensing the work's emotive content. At best I stand outside and in, apart and with.
Imagine a perfect day: being with those you love, in a place you love, under a sky you love, doing those things you love. Imagine a day from start to end when you are free to dance and sing without restraint.
Imagine another perfect day follows the first. A week. A month. A year of perfect days.
Along this never ending line I would sense a day as less, impaired. I would miss the grit of life, the ache of heart, the hurt of love. I would be less without my wish, my hope.
I watch a movie at home that moves me as much as when I first saw it at the cinema. I find it beautiful, emotionally engaging, texturally rich, and full with social and cultural commentary. Everything works for me: its themes, narrative, screenplay, cinematography, music, lighting, design, acting, and direction.
When it becomes clear that the movie fails to connect with my son I feel as if a great wall descends between us. The only known antidote to counter an experience of unwanted distance is love.
To create art, whatever its medium, the creative person must be loved, love, or yearn for love. Their love may be of a person, a place, or an idea. They may be loved by another, they may love themselves, or they may long to be with their love. The love the artist requires is strongly felt with a consistent commitment or wish of care and kindness. Without love, the need to make quickly fades.
When love of self or self-belief turns to arrogance, love leaves, and with it, all that inspires.
Language is often used to inform an audience of the intent, meaning, and value of a work of art.
Language may be used as the medium or integral element of the work, for example, a poem, or title.
Language is used to analyse, discuss and criticize a work of art.
The artist's and critic's words associated with art may not be consistent with the experience of it.
Explaining art belies its fundamental nature which is to experience it, and in this, we like it, or we do not.
I express myself so very differently when alone compared to when I am with someone else.
When in love this difference melts away. Not when only I feel love, but when love is equal and shared.
When alone in love and with, I take care not to say too much, share too much, be too much.
When alone with light, sound and words, I can be in love, express, then share my love.
Being with love requires judgement and care. Being in love has no barrier of doubt or distrust.
I am captivated by those things that move me, ideas, and what life does.
Once I sense something, I feel something. The stronger my feeling, the more I am drawn - curiosity is the child of how I feel. My curiosity leads to thought, and thoughts to ideas. Despite their fascination, ideas are not enough and so I turn to action: I make. In brief this is my creative process.
When my feelings overrun my thoughts I act on instinct. When I sense beauty, thought is far from view.
I am often faced with a choice: whether I live for my advantage, or live to cause most good.
I have the choice to exploit those things I make to benefit me, or I can share them freely. Selling my music, images and words would give me economic comfort and increase my social reputation. Having more money and kudos would encourage the advantaged segments of society to be more attentive.
The choice of living to my advantage or causing most good extends to my personal relationships.
Art in all its forms is experienced in the moment of time we call now.
Art can string moments together to form its whole: music, dance, drama, all performance art.
Art that requires time to be discovered: painting, sculpture, poems, photography, all recorded art.
Art allows me to revisit my feelings and thoughts of love, fear, happiness and hurt which have happened yet remain, persist. Art is the interplay between those things I am, have been, and may become.
I am charged by life to make.
The word charge has many connotations: I may be charged, accused; I may charge toward; charged with something I must do; charged, revived, energized; I can hold as much as loose my charge.
Making goes hand in hand with being alive. Life fills me with energy and experiences I do not wish to loose. The force and charge of life bursts once more into the world through what is made.
I am one thing in mind, and another in body.
I long to talk but pass by. I wait, constrained, when all I wish is freedom.
I show myself as self-assured when I am far from confident.
I smile when sad.
My body hides the truth of mind, I hope in kindness rather than deceit.
I value meaning and metaphor as two great forces of communication that allow me to convey and understand. I also treasure abstract art, dance and music in equal measure as they can be expressive, beautiful, and encourage me to inhabit qualities of being that lay outside memory and interpretation.
Abstract art, music and dance can simply be. They are experiences I can be, simply.
Being Simply: self aware or active without the complexities of idea.
The spent shell of life: motionless, hollow, grey.
The unknown terror: tamed.
Time has no hold on those who pass away, to where I do not know.
Seven minutes after sunrise on the seventh day of the seventh month, stillness gives way to the restless beauty of dawn.
You are ninety five. Since your birth, your heart has beaten over four billion times.
The body is a wondrous thing.
For twenty eight days you have gone without food, and for three, without water.
You cannot see. You cannot speak. Your hands are cold. You breathe the quickened shallow breath.
I whisper close in hope your spirit hears: love. With love, there is no place for fear.
The first step toward creativity is curiosity, the second: play, then joy, humour, and persistence.
For the creative person the need to explore is ever present, is spontaneous, independent of prevailing ideas, unswayed by conformity, and willing to take risks, both practical and reputational.
Creativity requires openness. The more open I am to difference, experience, change and thought, the greater my chance to discover and make new.
Art is interpretive. For many, its ambiguity is unsettling and unsatisfying. In contrast, an area like science appears to provide answers and facts, and through its arguments and certainty, encourages a sense of confidence. Art has no scientific method and can be created by people of all ages and from any place and social or economic background. Good art moves the heart and mind no matter who makes it.
Art's ambivalence and freedom can be used against the confining forces of greed, tyranny and power.
When what I say or do is not treated with respect, when I am not listened to, when what I am is not valued, the person I speak with is diminished in my heart.
I do not love when I dismiss another or experience disdain.
My danger is in my belief I know more, I am more able, more experienced, more talented. Arrogance and insecurity closes my eyes to the great and beautiful good of others and their art.
What I want to be shapes what I will become.
I want to be in love, I want to be loved, I want to love.
I think of the meaning of these statements and what they say of me. To be in love has the potential of causing as much sadness as happiness. To be loved requires another. I only ever have choice about the last: I can love at any time, in any place. For chance to be in love, to be loved, I must always love.
At times I do not express myself clearly. This can be helpful if what I communicate serves to encourage interpretation and the mind to wonder. The danger is that being unclear can also cause disinterest and distance. This not only goes for my making, but also my being with others.
Some prefer mystery to clarity. The unravelling of meaning. The chase to know.
Perhaps there is time to be clear yet full with the untold: the still surface of deepening lake.
I yearn to understand why others do or do not. The reason someone harms, or turns the other way. Why I and others act or do not act drives much of my day.
Despite my efforts, understanding another's why may not be possible, no matter how long I have known them, nor how much I love them. I hide myself for fear of loss, for want, or love. With art, word and sound I show myself, yet here requires another's need to ask the reason why, their need to know.
Ephemeral: something that exists for a short time.
I think of the moment a single drop of rain falls on the dry dusty earth as a short time. I consider an hour in the company of someone I love as a short time. I think of a week on holiday as a short time, and as I grow older, my childhood as an ever shorter time. All experience is ephemeral. All art is ephemeral.
Think on. I am a creature of time and its appearance and disappearance is my muse. Think on.
Freedom: the ability to act, change, communicate, or think without hindrance.
My view is that freedom is a quality of experience, and in this it is dynamic and different at any given time, and for every living thing.
Freedom was composed in support of The Rights of Living Things.
I have felt included and excluded. I include and exclude. I am, have been, and will be, included and excluded. For a time, for what felt like a very long time at the time, I was excluded from adulthood. I include few I count among my friends. I exclude meat from my diet. I am included as a composer in the mind of some, and excluded as being recognized as a composer in the mind and record of others.
Inclusion and exclusion is sometimes a matter of fact, and more usually a matter of choice.
I ponder on why I return: to understand, to laugh, to cry, for safety, comfort, pleasure, for hope and love. To feed my curiosity, desire, anger or greed. With art I return to meet one or many of these things.
Time never truly permits my return to be with a person or place. During time things happen, a place changes, we change. My return is not the same as my first encounter. The taste is not as sweet, the colour not as vibrant, the sound not as full. I return to know and feel, but most to journey on, and with.
I understand not only by what is said, but how. Some are expert in the use of words: the lawyer, academic, politician, seller. All know tone makes known, yet hide behind their words.
When I see someone speak I not only hear their words and tone, I also see their gesture. These three elements of language help me to better know whether what is said matches what is thought and felt.
My love, hope, fear, and anger is expressed more through tone and gesture than word alone.
I enter a bright room with a high ceiling where children paint and play music with the encouragement of an artist. Indirect summer daylight pours through two large facing windows. The whitewashed walls are covered with drawings and artworks. The old wooden floor is rich with sound. The air feels fresh and full with life. I pause to look around and sense beyond those things I see and hear.
The ambience and delight of place seems made as much by its history as its physical qualities.
One of the great pleasures of making is to experience the unexpected. I write a word, the first that comes to mind: warm. I listen to my mind wander before settling on its quality: warmth.
Quality: the essential character of something that distinguishes it from any other.
Warmth: a feeling of comfort, affection, and kindness.
Five things that do not live that give me warmth: the sun; earth; art; music; literature.
You are an infant. You want happiness. You need care. Do I act? Should I act? How do I act?
You are a young adult. You want happiness. You need care. Do I act? Should I act? How do I act?
You are elderly. You want happiness. You need care. Do I act? Should I act? How do I act?
Caring for others is more than thinking alone. When I am with someone I choose to care, or not to care.
I am, I want, I need. When I am with someone and choose to care I free myself from want and need.
It is 5am and the motionless leaves of copper beach and ash are golden with sunrise. Bird song began in the darkness more than an hour ago, grew in extraordinary beauty, then gave way until only the interrupted arcing shrill of chaffinch and caw of crow broke the stillness of the morning air.
Summer Solstice is a day of balance, wonder and becoming. I find a place to stand, look up, breathe in. I close my eyes. For those who see, the closing of a sense so dear is full with contemplation and trust.
I listen to a piece of music for the first time by an unknown composer. I do not know the name of the piece, when or where it was made, nor the instruments used. I respond to the music according to my taste, what I have heard in the past, and through my interest and love of music.
I imagine I now discover the title of the music: Freedom. Does this change the way I hear?
Although music may be heard without language or broader context, it is often enriched by these.
I am fiercely competitive. I am non-aggressive. I play to win. I respect the outcome of a game played fairly. I do not give up with unlikely odds. I make every effort to the very end. I do not yield easily. I never cheat. I am mindful of my strong desire to prevail. I try to offset my competitiveness with kindness.
Art is not a competition, yet many of the qualities I have learned through competition are used in my making. Non-collaborative art can be a gruelling occupation. Art is not made by the faint hearted...
Awake: the state of being, a journey towards becoming, or the instruction to be: conscious and aware.
I consider the piano as an expression of my thoughts and feelings of my time between the sheets of sleep, and the orchestra, the elements of my dream and spirit world.
I touch the spike of sound lay bare, where note and silence mingle clear, the beat of heart, my start and end, awake the journey whole and near.
After many weeks of making you are the first to experience a new piece of music, poetry and art before its public sharing. A year passes. I return with a large framed print of the image. The day you first viewed the art has been forgotten, not through lack of care, but because of the difference of its significance to you and I.
The memory of art is set in mind dependent on our love: of beauty, place, and person.
On night with school of art ablaze, with shallow breath and turn of palm you call our names: stay. You rest, then once again you say with whispered quiet strength: stay.
Soon, with dreams and hope of youth long past, the fire hushed, you breathe the shallow breath.
Time is nothing but a moment spent alone or with. Do not leave my reach, my hold of hand, my touch.
With shadow breath, with mourning sound of blackbird song, you close your eyes: stay.
I consider how close I am, how fast I travel towards and away, and how short a moment with can be.
A series of nine images of ships in the night are presented as a single work.
I hear the evidence of wind through my window where I work: the sway of leaves and creak of bark, the wail of air across my chimney stack. I hear the evidence of wind, yet not the wind itself.
I step outside to feel the wind against my skin. I wait, then sense its coming strength: the rush of sound approach; the push upon my open eyes; the line of tear on cheek.
Wind has no form, no clear start, no end. Its beauty is the movement made only by its passing.
Why things are made: to satisfy material need; for pleasure; in hope; to connect with; for memory; to change; express; to explore; for solace, to understand; to learn; to leave something of myself; for love.
Of these, love is by far the strongest force. My love of someone else, of nature, and of beauty.
When others are disinterested in what I make, when those close are unmoved in body or mind by what I do, I am deeply saddened, but my need to make is more than for my heart alone.
The green sprigs of hornbeams I planted over a month ago withered after the shock of their move. It seemed all one hundred plants were lost. Each day I watered them with the hope they might be dormant and their strength would return, but day after day they showed no sign of life.
Fresh lime-green leaves on four of the plants have started to unfurl. I was impatient. Life takes time.
To nurture is to love, even when it seems all is lost.
Over half my body is made from water. More than 70% of the earth is covered in water. If I do not drink I will struggle to survive. Without water over land, life retreats. As a child, water made up three quarters of my body weight. All life on earth first emerged from water. Water more than anything supports my being alive. Soon, something alive (artificial consciousness) will have no need of water.
When something is abundant I all too easily overlook its value. Without need we value even less.
Art is in part defined by its initial contact with my senses. All visual art: with my eyes, music with my ears, and many other art forms through an array of my senses: dance, theatre, opera, film, sculpture and ceramics. Art may go on to stimulate thought. Poetry can also appeal firstly through its sound.
Literature is in part defined by its initial contact with my mind. The physical medium of literature is secondary to its meaning. I read the same from paper, screen, through touch (Braille), or by listening.
What is important to me is likely not to you. There may be rare moments when our priorities collide. It may be that you and I hear the same piece of music we both enjoy. Yet even as we do, at the very moment of our shared pleasure, what is important, what catches our attention, what takes our mind and heart, for each of us, is different. My journey in whatever I experience is distinct from yours.
To love is to listen to another, to act for their need, to place their hope, their joy above my own.
The significance of language is that it means something. It takes time to comprehend.
My speed of knowing is less important to me than my need to know.
When someone speaks or writes and I do not understand, I feel less informed, less aware, less smart. I feel left on the outside. I wish most to be on the inside. Plugged in, switched-on.
When I use unusual or invented words, when I place them freely, my audience is diminished.
A concept is a thought that acts as a foundation for the development of ideas.
An example of a concept: freedom. Not the word, but the idea. Freedom is the bedrock for thoughts and experiences about power, control, hope, despair, and other avenues of considered exploration.
Art may stimulate ideas, and perhaps this is the basis for some to mistakenly view concepts as art.
Marcel Duchamp's Fountain provokes consideration of what art is. It is object as concept, not art.
There is little I loathe more than the vanity of an artist, the self-pruning and presentation of personal identity as if it were evidence of being an artist. It is not. The appearance of an artist is irrelevant to the weight and quality of their art. The surface of a person, their colour, gender, age, their hair, and what they wear does not reveal the artist. Seeking to be well known, courting publicity, self-promotion, and commercial success have nothing to do with making well. Be wary of those charlatans of art.
I am kissed gently on the cheek. I smile. "Thank you".
I have seen her most days for the last six months. I know little of her, and she of me.
"I am cold". I find her something warm. It takes a moment of my time, and yet this gives us time.
I think of the last time she kissed. I think of the last time I was kissed.
We smile. She closes her eyes. "My mother always sang to me, ninety years ago".
I use computers when making with light, sound, and words. Computers host programs that allow me to generate or recall states, compose, and edit. My tools are useful, but not indispensable.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) will soon be ubiquitous in the creative process. What will be seen, heard and read will often only come about as a result of the interaction between humans and AI.
Art's authenticity and voice is changing. Something made by the body alone will be more precious.
The room where I work with light and words is full with pictures my son made as he grew up, art by myself and others, numerous books I have read and have yet to read, and far, far too many things I keep to remember a person, an experience, a place, or thought. As time moves, some of these things become more important, and some, less so. I have always remembered a face better than a name, an idea more than a sequence of instructions. I keep for fear of loosing sight of something never to return.
To make art my body senses, my mind considers. As I sense, I become free to make.
Tools provide me with feedback. A pencil for example makes marks on a surface that not only sets down my gestures and thoughts, but the presence of its marks and my gaze encourages new ideas. The same is true for technological tools that help me record words and manipulate light and sound.
Simple forms of making that need no tools bring me most joy: dance, music, storytelling.
Coexistence may be with nature, a person, living things, family, a group, communities, and nations.
I may choose to coexist with a person or others, or I may find myself coexisting through no choice: by birth, family, play, work, or cultural and national circumstance.
I complete the music Coexistence in support of The Rights of Living Things.
To hear sounds well I need to place some distance from them before returning to them. The same is true for working with any creative medium.
As I compose music I listen and grow familiar with its every nuance. The speakers and my position in the room are fine tuned to hear quiet and loud, high and low. Every few hours I rest. On my every return I hear things I have never heard before. Being with well requires I am also without.
Despite my ongoing and greatest efforts, I will only ever feel so much, think so much, know so much. As a living thing I am confined by time.
Although I experience art in time, art is not alive. As my time is different from one moment to the next, so art changes. Art becomes new each time I hear the same music, see the same painting, read the same poem. Art reaches far further in time and place than I. Art becomes, my liberating force.
Thoughts can spontaneously occur, or they may be the result of conscious effort.
Unplanned thoughts are intrinsic in the making of art. Intentional thoughts allow the refinement of art.
A creative act requires I am open to the unexpected from without and within.
Being open to my thoughts can bring me into conflict with cultural, religious, and social norms.
Presenting my thoughts for all to see ensures those close to me are not subject to their secrecy.
Many view art as a business. Many artists view art as a business. An artist has to live. They have to buy food, support a family, pay for a roof over their heads. Some things are made to be sold.
Money changes what is made. To sell, I must make something that can be sold. If my focus is on the advantage I gain when I make something, I make it for myself.
Love is never sold. Love, by its nature, is given. Making art can be an act of love.
Desire: I want. Thirst: I need.
I glance left, right, then briefly over my shoulder. I am alone. A wilderness stretches out in front of me as far as the eye can see. I could step out and pass the road's end, or return to my car and travel back to the suburbs. I look ahead towards the endless unknown. I choose between safety or discovery.
When it comes to making, I find it helpful to separate those things I want from those I need.
What is important to me is often not to others.
Some will hear my music never to return, some will see my images that for them quickly fade from sight, some will read my words that fail to move their heart or mind.
No matter what or how I say, despite my very best, some will never feel nor think those things I do.
I make with as broad an audience in mind, yet not for everyone for that would be a fool's paradise.
A low haze hugs the still early morning after rain.
The sup of earth. The sweat of leaf. The drip of final drop from tip and top of towered trees.
My skin absorbs the scent of spore, the musk of deer, the shine and wet of wood.
Here, where life begins and ends. With hoof and beat of wing, with brown-green dappled blue.
Here is where I most belong, with you.
I find myself as either or.
I am immersed in the open sea of my passions and love, or absorbed by a world of ideas.
I keep balance between these two great forces through my making.
Making is the fulcrum of my either or. The expression of my otherwise ordinary life.
I journey through the great wilderness of creative discovery. It is the only way I know to remain, whole.
I have three choices: I can add something, take something away, or do nothing.
Painters add or remove pigment; potters add or remove clay; choreographers add or remove movement; photographers and digital artists add or remove light; music composers add or remove sound; writers add or remove words. At times the action is irreversible, unalterable, final.
When I consider any of my actions, I give or take, for doing nothing leaves me only as witness.
Each person who makes finds their comfort to create in different places, times, alone, or with others.
To work well I work alone, but my mind is always full with others. To make well I need freedom: from thinking only of my self; from the practical demands of life; from the restraints of convention.
The creative act requires I listen honestly and openly at all times: to what is being said from within and outside; to the self-critical eye; to the independence and strengths of touch, light, sound, and meaning.
I witnessed the conflict of my parents, verbal and physical. One would shout and scream at the other in exasperation. My mother would hurl objects across the room at my father. I was two years old.
As a boy I experienced long periods of calm before the storm returned each holiday when my sisters arrived home from boarding school. The air was full with deep resentment and hostility.
As a man I wake early from unsettling dream. I write, for making gives chance my dreams are heard.
I discover a creative tool that promises to be valuable. The developer also makes a product that allows film and game makers to mimic the sound of weapons discharging. Although any tool or resource can be used for ill or good, there are some that are more likely to be used thoughtlessly and gratuitously. These may harm. I decide not to buy anything and contact the developer giving my reasons why.
Though others neither know nor would likely care about my choice, my work would carry its shadow.
What makes great art? What great art have I experienced? Ask yourself. Pick a work.
Great Art: something made that significantly moves the mind and heart.
As my mind and heart is different to yours, great art to me will be different than to you.
Many may say (a friend, critic, academic, institution, cultural norm) that a piece of music written by a well known composer is excellent. It may not be if it fails to move my mind and heart...
Whether the qualities that define me are innate or nurtured matters to my confidence and sense of self-control. Perhaps my insatiable need to know was embedded in my environment and upbringing, my need to make, forged from the fire of childhood experiences. Perhaps we are born with propensities.
If it is my nature to be something: this seems more difficult to change than if I have learned to be something. Can instinct be to love or harm? Whether nature or nurture, I am human, I act by choice.
A young robin hops closer as my watering can lets loose its early shower onto the newly planted limbs of a hedge. Pale blue speckled blackbird eggs lay under their mother's down.
A bird's flight and freedom lifts my heart, their song shakes the still morning air with life.
I reluctantly inherited a young cat who, through his own choice, rarely ventures outside. Over the last few weeks his curiosity has increased. I ponder how to prevent harm to predator and prey.
I am by the bedside of a relative in pain. They ask to hold my hand. I do not easily touch others. I hold their hand which helps them cope as they cry out. I am in quiet undisclosed distress.
Her discomfort eases. She rests. I rest.
As I touch I give something precious of myself. My willingness to meet with. My acceptance of another.
I find it difficult to touch when I do not wish to be with, give to, when I am not wholly honest.
You enjoy a photo of woodland more than the artwork I created. Your response encourages me to revisit and revise the page I published by adding two photographs. Both are of the wood in May.
I view the artwork in a new light as I am reminded that my view is coloured by my senses, my sensibilities, temperament, memories, insecurities, happiness, loneliness, and love.
At each moment of its giving and its taking, art becomes new, as my image to the mirror.
Some artists say little about their work: "art should stand on its own two feet, it is what it is".
Take music, an abstract art form. I hear it, I like or I do not. My experience is aesthetic. Listening to someone talk about it may extend my appreciation, but rarely changes my level of engagement.
I think of a poem, an art form that invites understanding: about an individual, many, a place, or ideas.
When the originator does not comment, their art is more likely made by instinct than by thought.
The creative person's sensitivity may be limited to a particular area (for example visual, or aural).
When I come across an artist or composer it is a mistake to think their sensitivity extends to personal understanding, empathy, and insight. How I act with others has little to do with my creative capacity.
My innate sensitivity is no more or less than yours, it is different. We are unique. Although I yearn to share my experiences, I learn and comprehend most when I am open to what others feel and sense.
Transparency: easily perceived. Made known, honest.
During my childhood I trusted my senses: when I viewed a photograph I thought it genuine; when I answered the phone I listened to someone. My general level of trust was greater than today.
Now, when I see an image I know it may be changed. When I hear someone speak it may not be a person, but technology that mimics human speech. Living openly and honestly becomes more prized.
I spend many, many hours making a case for my art. I use the lightest, strongest materials. The case can be easily opened with fastenings. I stand in a long queue of people bringing their work for final consideration in a major exhibition. The air is curiously quiet for so many whose skill it is to express. We shuffle forward towards the thickening sound of bursting bubble wrap. I hand over my work gingerly, it is placed on a trolley. A moment later I witness the clatter of falling frames against my art.
I ponder on what is mine alone: my pleasure; my pain; my sensory experience; my thoughts; my trust; my hope; my happiness; my sadness; my memory; my being self aware; my love.
Although I cannot prove any of these most important experiences that define me, I can express them and indicate their presence through communication, art, music, and by the way I act.
I feel most vulnerable, most misunderstood, most alone without voice, and so I shout.
I walk in a wood of beech trees in early May close to my home. The wood is full with life, from its carpet of leaf and bluebell, to its canopy of glistening light high above.
As I walk I sense my nature and the nature of others. I sense my story as child and man. I sense myself as small moment of a greater thing that breathes.
This coming together, this interdependence is the 'experience', the inner world of plants.
A wooden fence is hard, stark, dead. A hedge is vibrant and alive. Over the years I have replaced a wooden fence in my garden with a hornbeam hedge. Using wood panels as the boundary takes away from the land, growing wood gives back and supports a rich ecosystem of insects and birds.
Like all living things, a hedge requires care. I have responsibility for only one of three sides to the boundary. Persuading my neighbours of the change took many years. Now our gardens teem with life...
Holiday: the setting aside of routine. A time of spiritual observance. A day of celebration. A period of pleasure and change: of place, environment, and experience. A day or days devoted to one another: with family; loved one/s; alone and with nature.
Holidays are often viewed as time off. I view them as opportunities to switch on.
With creative occupation I try to count each day as set apart, sacred, full with chance and change.
I ponder on my words of yesterday - why experiencing the same is of such significance to me.
With distance I am separated. Physical distance. Emotional distance. Distance un/intended. Distance of circumstance, purpose, and comfort. Distance experienced close and far.
With distance I learn, I am challenged, I grow, and yet at all times and with every opportunity I try to close the distance between myself and others, and another, between who I wish to be and how I am.
I look up. You look up. We see the sky. With two miles distance between us, the further those things we view, the closer we see the same. A low passing cloud, overhead for you, is far closer to the edge of sky for me. As we each view the moon there is the slightest difference to the angle of our gaze. With a star, at a short distance between us, our angle of gaze is experienced as identical.
The shape of sky. The sound of bird. Day, cloud, night, and moon. The stars, our place of meeting.
I hold the oldest object in my home, made two thousand years ago: a beautiful bronze vessel that lays in my palm with an exquisitely shaped lid. I wrote a poem to accompany this gift I never gave.
I touch the oxidized green, blue and brown surface of the vessel. I breathe moments from the past.
I am transformed by something made, something as still as stone, something that never lived.
The object holds me like a spell, for art moves me: in thought, with feeling, from place to place.
As someone experiencing art I have the chance to meet with, be with, and observe the inner world of another. Not just that of the artist, but of others who encounter art. An artwork may be abstract, it may not represent anything in the physical world, and yet I am still offered these gifts by its presence.
When I look at a painting, hear music, or read a poem, I am equal with others who do so. Art charges my senses, my feelings and thoughts. I become the mirror and the eye.
An idea is abstract and has no physical existence. An idea may be simple or complex and can include imagined sensations experienced by the body. To have an idea I must be conscious, self aware.
Thought: a string of ideas that often leads somewhere.
Art: something created that holds special significance.
Art is more than an idea. Art is more than thought alone. If I say a thing is art it does not make it so.
Creative Estate: things that have been created and made by an individual, and that have rights associated with them. These could be material, recorded, or intellectual in nature. For example, a painting or poem could fall into all three areas, music would fall into the last two, and an idea that is only passed on aurally would fall only into the last.
I set out my creative estate in one place, and in list form, all I make freely available to experience.
In common with all creative people, there are periods when I loose my confidence to make. This may result from the practical demands of life; that I judge my work falls far short of the line of excellence I aspire to; that those close to me are unmoved by what I make; that I loose hope my work can ever bring me close; that I doubt my work has the potential to be the cause of positive change.
More than anything, it is the medium itself that re-reignites my spirit: light, sound, words.
A one line poem by an unknown individual:
I sit on the pavement as a king upon their thrown: a stone silent subject without respect or home.
If a homeless person wrote this, a sovereign head of state, or computer algorithm, would it change its strength? Its meaning? Its worth? Would the words be less or more?
With words alone my world shakes free from the tyranny of authority.
Language is immeasurably important to me, yet much of the time I struggle to use and understand it.
Take music as an example. I may try to talk and write about it, but whatever I say does not come close to the experience of it. When I imagine a wordless tune in my head it is without language.
The same is true for dance. Both music and dance, those things I experience so easily, so beautifully, are far distant from language, and perhaps this is why I love them so intensely.
Two leaders from hostile nations shake hands. It is in the moment of touching, skin to skin, when the journey towards positive change is given chance.
Touch, personal and political, is often withheld. Touch is meaningful. It is a sign of giving over, of trust.
Some misuse touch for personal gain. The insistence or force of touch crosses our inner line.
I rarely felt the touch of my mother, my father, or my sisters. As a child I knew the power of touch well.
I make most when in love or with the hope of love.
I make for one, or many. For someone to love, or for all to love.
Making for one is far easier than making for many. For one, the creative process flows like a force of nature. For many, the creative journey is more abstract, principled, altruistic.
Making something is only half the story. Stories are only complete when read.
I make to express my love, as a means to change, and to return to the ideas and experiences I find most important and powerful. Most often my work does not retain the strength I felt during its making.
Although my failures weaken my confidence, they do not undermine the reasons for my making.
My hunger to share is as strong now as when I first made as a child. It is not self-belief that sustains me, but love, the necessity of change, and the ideas and experiences of life, its beauty and potential.
Stopping short a life is within my reach as it is for most humans who are not restrained. For many, the willingness to take a life, to kill, is a matter of degree. Most are comfortable taking the life of a flower, a tree, but might pause at the loss of a forest. Many are comfortable for others to take life on their behalf for food: vegetation, fish, cattle. Some will agree to a life taken during or after a serious crime, or in self-defence. Some take life for principle, self-interest, or madness. Some sadly take their own.
It took a day before the ideas of yesterday solidified. A day to consider and better say. A day to remove the unnecessary dry language that arose from my strong wish to convince.
Those who read my first draft may not clearly remember what and how I wrote, but they will indirectly remember. That is, their reading of the newer draft will be involuntarily coloured by the first.
When I return to be with someone, when I see and hear them again, all that has passed remains.
Collateral Damage: unintended harm. A euphemism that serves to deflect feelings of moral concern. The term first appeared when I was in my mother's womb.
A child that is inadvertently killed as a result of a military operation. A fishing net that traps seabirds, turtles, and marine mammals while catching a target species.
Language may be used to conceal, deflect, and calm our guilt. Unintended harm is not unforeseen.
On the floor in front of a street busker a sign reads "Don't Give Me Money, Just Listen". Some walk by, but many stop. Once the music comes to an end, the crowd applauds. Some stay, a few move on. The performance is recorded on a phone and uploaded. Online there is little give and a lot of take. Few spend a moment to express their thanks, even with a swipe of the finger.
In person I often respond, I am prone to remember. On screen I can all too easily forget.
To live I require air, water, and food. To live well I need shelter, health, social care, education, and the arts. When I compete for these things, I reduce their prevalence.
More evasive is my need of purpose, confidence, understanding, community, and friendship.
Outside myself, yet in my interest, is care for the world and living things.
Politics debates whether to or how to support these. Put simply, they are nurtured with love.
Water Vapour: the invisible, gaseous phase of water.
Dew: tiny water droplets condensed from water vapour.
As many mornings since childhood: I walk outside, bend down, then run my fingers and palm gently across the dew-soaked blades of grass. This simple gesture connects me with the earth and sky.
Poetry is as dew: the evidence of something changed, that comes to view from one state to another.
I need air, not just to breathe, but for its open sky.
I need water, not just to drink, but to cry, to float and swim.
I need food, not just to live, but for its fuel of time, to be, of being with.
To make I need the share of air, of water, food, of you.
To love I need the all and none of this, the kiss of life, the touch of dew.
Everything I experience is subject to the possibility it will be expressed in my art, music, or words. Take yesterday as an example. I reported my sister's accident and ponder on the brief moment of time when she viewed the inevitability of impending pain. With this account the reader becomes witness.
The experience I wrote about was not mine. With this comes the added care of shaping the words so they are respectful of a person's dignity. The artist can so easily be the parasite of incident and feeling.
My sister trips and falls badly down concrete stairs as she walks back to her home. She calls for help but no one comes. She makes her way to a church dripping blood all the way. Kind people tend to her. I receive a phone call and take her to the hospital. She has broken her nose, cracked her cheekbone, and fractured her eye socket badly. It is four hours before the pain becomes bearable.
Back home she recounts her thoughts as the ground approached: "This is going to hurt".
The human mind prefers simple, speedy solutions. I often take the shortest route from A to B, but this may not be the wisest nor the safest path. I judge the choice is mine to take.
A violent action in defence or aggression by a democratic nation represents its collective resolve and will. Certainty by its leaders seeks to sustain the people's support, and asserts the authority of their act.
A nation is democratic only if its actions follow a free vote after open dialogue of its representatives.
The Right of Self Protection: A living being has the right to defend and protect itself with a proportionate response when in imminent risk, but not to carry out a preemptive attack.
It could be argued that the principle of self protection extends to states and nations, but justification of defence outside the national sphere requires the "self" represents human kind. "We protect humanity".
Before using physical force in this way, the disclosure of evidence and transparent debate are essential.
I talk. I smile. I fall in love. I move. I make.
I am a sceptic. I doubt without evidence. I do not follow quickly, nor believe swiftly.
I try to act with care. I know my many failings. I know my feelings well.
I am unbending in my convictions. I am unyielding in my optimism. I am ever hopeful.
I trust in my love: of people; nature; the world of living things; where art, music and words make known.
Language is at the heart of what it is to be human.
Language is not passive, it creates laws, builds alliances, and provides a means to understand the world of others. It makes shape of our cultural, spiritual and political accomplishments, and is what has and will continue to be the primary tool that humans use to change the world.
The care of choosing words, how many, to whom, and when, is our means to live in peace or war.
In the summer of my sixteenth year I lived for a week on a small uninhabited island, the bird sanctuary of Burhou, home to puffins, storm petrels, oyster-catchers, gulls, and the never ending tidal rapid of fast-moving swells, eddies, and strong underwater currents that wash a careless swimmer out to sea.
This single week of fleeting cloud and sky, of razor sharp and craggy rock, of daily circumnavigation of a lonely, beautiful, natured isle, is never far from where I breathe, I stand. I sleep with sound of wave.
My body is made of cells, the smallest structures within me. Over half of these cells are not human.
My body is host to many tiny forms of life in addition to the fourteen kinds of cells I make. Bacteria, fungi, and viruses, both helpful and hurtful, make up the community of my physical presence.
If I think of myself only as a physical being, I am far less than meets the eye.
It is my mind, my spirit, my actions that form my me, for my body is but a vessel of existence.
I visit Wentworth Place, the house where the poet John Keats lived two hundred years ago.
During his short life of twenty five years, Keats published fifty four poems in three short volumes.
In his time the poems of John Keats were little known - two hundred copies were read.
This place is not the same, and yet I sense its touch. A time of spring and nightingale, of love still whispered through the walls in hopeless ache. The muse and loss of time's oppressive might.
When a child's life, a woman's life, a man's life is lost, no matter where, I loose my chance to love that child, that woman, that man. With them my greatest gift in life to give is gone.
I am never far from hostility, as humans we know it well among ourselves. I am not helpless in conflict near or far. I can resist: when something disheartens me, frustrates me, angers me. I have the choice to stifle my urge that strikes back with words or deeds, and when I do, I sense the gift of freedom.
I spin words endlessly over in my mind. This is useful when it comes to making, but difficult when with others as there is no tap or switch to turn off my flow of thought.
My greatest contentment is with nature, whether alone, or with another when silently sharing its force.
With nature, as far as the eye can see, as distant as the ear can hear, words are not required.
Wilderness: a place where my heart and mind settles. A place not of thought, but of being.
My discussion with an editor I disagree with appears to be drawing to a close. I have tried my best to persuade them of my position, however it seems at this stage I have failed.
I ponder on what to do when someone is resistant to an exchange of opinions. Without meaningful response a conversation halts. The audience turns away, closes their eyes, and covers their ears.
With art there is always the possibility of return, no matter the mood of my leaving.
When making, whatever the medium, I try to bring together two often opposing forces: the instinctive and spontaneous creative impulse; and the considered skills of experience and judgement. The first allows me to make in the moment without conscious thought and can be immensely pleasurable. The second is the toil and craft of making, the thoughtful effort of composition and careful choice.
I try never to loose sight of the moment as I make something to last.
The role of an editor, whether working with words, music, film or another medium, is to carefully consider material then decide upon its final form. This often requires an appreciation of content from a dispassionate distance in light of those who will most likely take it in.
As yesterday progressed I continually reworked On Being Deleted, and still, after over 150 edits I sense the process is not yet complete, perhaps because I am not fully and emotionally detached...
A user page at Wikipedia provides information about the contributor or editor of content. My user page was deleted. I held an account on the site for very many years. I only ever use Wikipedia to inform.
Although I made few direct contributions as an editor, I have pointed frequently to the site in my publications since 2002. Its value as a research tool is immeasurable.
To live with another, one or both set aside their preferences. Take eating food. A shared meal, neither seasoned or plain. For the one who enjoys strong flavours, the taste may be bland. For the other, the food may still be strong with spice. Compromise makes plain the gap between.
Living with requires I balance my love and need for, against my tastes: of food, film, art, music, clothes, of what I care for, of what moves me. At times difference strains, and at its broadest, breaks.
I browse a vast book store, home to over 150 thousand volumes. I am struck by how many have something to say, yet how few read their words. By how little I know and is yet to learn. Being among these books I faintly sense the scale of human expression. What could possibly add to such wealth?
Your voice is unique. You travel a path from birth like no other. You sense like no other. You feel like no other. Never doubt, you who read these words have things to say that others wish to hear.
We search for something lost. A short phrase that held some truth of shared experience. Words that briefly, beautifully, held the us together with the why some are so driven to express and make.
We write. I, here. You, there. For one to see. For all to read. We write with hope, with anger, with pain, with doubt, with love. We write to know, to be transformed, to feel the same or differently, to hold ourself alone and with. The act of making breaks and bonds my heart with moments lost and found.
Whether a new born or birthday, a spring morning, the beauty of a crescent moon, or a fresh idea that makes the world a better place, I celebrate your first breath.
The world breathes: trees, water, a rolling landscape, cloud and sky. You, Me, We. You I have loved, I love, and will love. You who makes the world a brighter place.
The difficulty in being someone who searches to understand before they make is that at times I do not have, nor will I ever gain the knowledge of why someone acts in the way they do.
Following a day of practical difficulties or an experience that has moved me deeply I recover best with simple tasks and silence. My I is settled when it has the space to breathe.
To learn I need the comfort and the stretch of time.
I come to know a community of elderly people who require more care than can be easily provided in their own homes. Anne finds it difficult to walk, Peter cannot see well, Don is for the most part in pain and bedridden, Joan finds it difficult to remember.
I arrive. It is good to see you. With a smile: and you. You're staying for a while. Yes. Do not leave me. We talk about anything and everything. An hour later: stay, just a minute more, do not leave me, do not go.
Intelligence: the ability to perceive or infer information from data, the senses, stillness or change (physical or emotional), and to retain this as knowledge that leads to new pathways and actions.
Artificial Intelligence: intelligence demonstrated by non-organic networks and devices.
Decisions made as a result of AI are no longer transparent. We do not know how the latest and most powerful AI works, despite our insight and instinct. A new way of being with, is upon us.
Something can be expressed that is of value by someone I do not care for.
Art is interpretive, it is often used to make a point. Although an artist may create a body of work, a work of art assumes a value and significance of itself. Despite the artist's intention, motivation and behaviour, art enjoys a life all of its own: politically, culturally and aesthetically. Mozart is not his music.
If I dismiss or deny the voice of those I disagree with, if I close my eyes, if I scrub art out, I blind myself.
Watch as water flows. Translucent. Dappled. Mirrored light. See all as one: the river's wedded might.
When making I am easily caught up in the detail. Is this word well said? Does that word sit well? Is its sound and placement clear? Whatever the artistic medium, I can become so immersed as to drown in the task and pleasure of making at the expense of experiencing the emerging work in the round.
Whatever I make, with light, sound or words, at times I must pull back.
My passions are easily roused. I am prone to exuberance, and melancholy. I unveil the force of my emotions in my own company and tend to quell them with others as they cause discomfort.
When I feel strongly about something, perhaps by the way someone acts, I have an intense need to understand and express myself. If I view their act as helpful or harmful, I point it out, obliquely, and as with all things that most personally affect me, I take my time, often so much, many leave...
A well known self-publicist, entrepreneur and serial pretender of the title artist is once again adding to his considerable personal wealth with his show. A collection of noted paintings in an eighteenth century mansion have been replaced in situ by roundish marks of paint on canvas created by anonymous hired painters who are required to apply an average of 1,500 spots a day.
Words and placement assert this as art, characterized by exploitation, ridicule, and greed.
The purpose of promotion is to make people aware. I do this by publishing my work and informing those interested of its availability. I do not however network, advertise, or market what I make as these activities take me away from making. There is too little time. Events designed to raise the profile and status of my work require I claim its significance. This is not for me to say. I have no wish to manipulate interest of and in my work. If it is of value, people will come, if it is less so, people will not.
If a work of art does not appeal to my senses, enrich my experience, or provoke ideas, it fails in its purpose. This may be as a result of the work itself, or of my willingness or ability to connect with it.
In my previous post I wrote: when I look directly I see less. The same is true for art and life, but in saying this I change the nature of my words from the poetic to the mundane. I try again:
When I look directly I see less, as much as when I sense the edge, with mind, in mind these coalesce.
At night and in the dark, I see far better with my peripheral vision as compared with looking straight ahead. The rods in my retina that are more sensitive to light and motion are fewer at the centre where the cones of my retina that help me see detail and colour are over fifteen times more numerous.
When I look directly I see less, as much as when I only attend to those things at the edge of my vision.
If I am to use light well in my work, then I must know it well, as is true of sound and words.
During every moment of my life, somewhere on this earth someone loves. It may be a child's love for their parent, or a parent's for their child; the love between siblings, partners, friends, strangers; between one species and another; of nature, of ideas, of self. Now, as you read, and now once more is love.
By love of self I mean the care, respect and kindness of the self. Love is not desire nor seeks gain.
Alone and with others, at any time, I am free to act with love. When I choose not to love I harm myself.
I often wonder what it must be like to be physically beautiful. I am not, however I love things that are.
I love the shape and texture of a ceramic bowl, the dancing light of a movie, the ideas and words of a poem, the sound of someone's voice, the push and pull of trees in high wind.
Physically beautiful people are under the constant gaze of others. Their human exchanges are with those who wish to be close, often not for their interest, but for what they transfer by way of their beauty.
Article One is published in support of The Rights of Living Things.
Pulsing rhythms play in sympathy and syncopation. A sea of sound, effervescent and full with dance. An ancient and beautiful Armenian instrument made of apricot wood sings soulfully with the ebullient, ever present palpitation of life...
Defining life and how I act towards it challenges my sense of human self-importance.
An image I created is on the shortlist for The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. The RA has presented this annual exhibition that invites submissions from anyone and everywhere since 1769.
It is curious that association with a place can change the perceived significance or status of a work of art. The piece chosen is no different than it was before its selection, and yet others think it so.
Art is judged so often on a whim, or through association, despite the artist's wish or truth of things.
As a human I am vulnerable and clothe myself with the pretence that I know better, that those with me are as me, that they should look, feel and think as I, that those who disagree are likely to be wrong.
Trust and doubt are at the centre of all human relationships. How much I trust or doubt leads to how I act or fail to act. Thoughtful trust requires effort and courage, doubt requires neither.
To make I must at all times question my doubt. To make well is the search and care of trust.
I find myself in the accident and emergency department of a hospital through the early hours with someone in extreme emotional distress. By morning their acute anxiety has lessened.
At times there are clear reasons for anxiety: when at risk; when a task is overwhelming; as a result of the consequences of an action. More often anxiety is mercurial and increases when the self is at the forefront of the mind. The most effective weapon to counter its effect is to act in the interest of others.
Photography mirrors what I see so well I think it ordinary. Unlike a painting, a photo rarely comes close to what I experience. When photos are beautiful, ambiguous, when their form and subject is unusual or arresting, my attention is captured for a spell. Photos are however rarely found on my walls compared with the imperfect gesture of painting, except when acting as an aid to memory of a loved one or place.
As art, the photo often remains constrained by its flat, uninterrupted surface. Its touch remains remote.
I could not be without love. To love, and be loved. When love is not present it is often something hoped for and informs how I act. Self-control is the quality I find most significant in my efforts to love and work well. This leads to the care of action. I try to encapsulate these thoughts in a short poem To Love:
Before. Now. After. Work. At play. The all of anything. Of everything. With weight. Alone. To wait. With others. Love.
I strike the key of a single note in the middle of the piano. A sound rings out and gradually fades to silence. There is no rhythm or beat to the sound. This is not music. This is not organised sound.
I strike two keys on the piano. The sound rings out and gradually fades to silence. With two notes a relationship forms. There is no rhythm or beat, yet I experience the sound as more than two separate notes. I hear their combination. If I repeat the sound of two notes playing, music begins to emerge.
A friend asks whether sharing is by nature an exchange. If I make something, then publish it for anyone to experience freely, is that sharing? I think of different ways to understand sharing: I share food or shelter; I give and take in conversation; I experience or think about something with another. Sharing is often immediate and reciprocal, but does it require the clear prospect of receiving something back?
Share: a portion of something that can be given, with/out requirement, expectation, or hope of return.
During my childhood I spent many months of the year without sisters, and periods with them when they returned from boarding school. My twin aunts who fostered us decided I would attend a local day school. My experience of frequent separation as a child did not lesson my need or desire for others, however it led to resentment against me, and hesitancy in my forming close friendships. I became familiar with how and why we come to hide ourselves when together.
I ponder on how much of my day is spent on me: the love I feel or hope for; my thirst and hunger; eating; drinking; the risks I face or avoid; my entertainment; my learning; my daydreams, my dreams at night; my thinking about the consequences of how I act; of myself before another, or the world.
When I hear music, when I walk with nature, or act in the interest of another, I am free of myself. I am heartened that music touches so many, nature is above and below, and that love is found far and wide.
I think of an object in my home. I appreciate the astonishing skill and craft of its making, and the pleasure it brings to my senses. The object is not easily placed into a cultural or historical narrative. There is no clear indication of its origin or creator, and because of this its price is low, yet as an anonymous work of art its beauty is undiminished, its significance and aesthetic, personal.
The experience of art derives from what is seen, heard, said, or touched. All else is smoke and mirrors.
With family and friends my name is Mike. A single syllable name: the outward breath begins as lips are closed, as they part the tongue pulls back, and half way, is held to the roof of the mouth until pressure builds, and the tongue is suddenly released. Online my name is Mike de Sousa. There are others with this name, but I have more. My name from start to end is Michael Peter Lawrence Paul de Sousa.
I use my name to signify I stand by what I say. To say with made up name would weaken what I say.
Things are done because of love, anger, practical necessity, desire, faith, greed, ambition, frustration, curiosity, the wish to learn, to be known or recognized, or a chaotic combination of these things.
By their nature, the artist is unable to remain silent or submissive. Their doing arises from their intense personal discomfort of being motionless. The products of their doing are often made public.
My restive spirit, my unsettled soul is the fuel of my doing. It is also the cause of my undoing.
A restless song in the still darkness ripples through the narrow gap in my window.
Insistent, exuberant, percolating.
No words sufficiently describe the restive, bubbling, life attesting flitter.
As dawn unseats the night, the sound of robin fades.
The hold of heaven, hushed.
Half of yesterday's photographic work is unrecoverable, gone. That light and experience will not return.
When something is lost due to my fault I can dwell on it with nagging regret, or use my discontent as the engine for a new journey. As soon as day begins to break I will tread out into the freezing fog.
The photographs I lost were the most dramatic and forceful. Without them I turn to words:
I stand in whirl of powder white, the bite of bitter cold, of rasping wail of wind, and here I find my home.
Near my home, on the single track lanes that fall between bare ploughed winter fields, snow drifts grow to twice my height. I am out early with my camera as the wind howls and the blizzard builds.
Nature overwhelms with its beauty and force. Within its enveloping might my being is full with wonder.
The camera is my companion, and as I, it retains only the faintest spec of experience.
The photograph is no more, no less than a frozen memory of place, its spirit and vitality.
I talk of art more than any other area of human activity because it has the capacity to bring people together, irrespective of their age, gender, cultural practices, politics, and religious beliefs.
I view art as essential in my journey to understand others, and the appreciation of those things within and outside of me. Art is my most significant means of sharing and is aligned with love.
In common with love, art is often exploited personally, competitively, commercially, and for status.
I am most at home in a world of endless possibilities. A place where my head follows my heart. A place of spontaneity where my thoughts and actions are unbridled in the service of kindness. A place where another feels the overwhelming force and beauty of nature. A place of dignity and respect. A place where others do no harm. A place to find. A place to love.
The free in spirit do not seek a paradise of prolonged contentment as they journey far and wide.
If art is the movement from the mind to something sensed and significant, is literature art? Yes, but not always. The same is true for painting, film, photography, ceramics, and music. At times these things are made exclusively to persuade, inform, emote, to be practically useful, decorative, or to entertain.
I spontaneously hum a short tune. I create music, but not art. It is possible for this to become art through its development, repetition or placement. I can make art, but art is not everything I make.
Art is more than an idea. At times art has no idea. An idea is something that only exists in the mind.
Some artists have an idea and present this as if it is art. For example, the following phrase could hang suspended from a ceiling in a gallery: IS THIS ART? Perhaps for some, for others, no.
Asserting something is art does not make it so. If it did, everything could be art, and art would be of no importance. Art is the movement from the mind to something sensed and significant.
Giving unconditionally does not mean one does not long to receive.
I make something with light, sound, or words. I spend many hours and days that often turn into weeks, and for my larger works, years. I publish these so as many can experience what I most value and observe without the distraction and cost of commerce or public comment.
The price and prize of giving is by its nature far greater than receiving.
The faint ghost-like form of a rocket launches from the centre of our forest-green earth, its fiery plume wraps the world with layers of gold where only a hint of ocean-blue remains.
Through things unknown and its appeal to our senses, art draws us back, and as it does so, we ponder.
Art's seed of discontent is laid.
During a conversation I pause to catch my breath, I ponder, I think. With friends, as we talk, the silence that sometimes falls between us fails to unfasten our attention.
With friendship silence is neither passive nor uncomfortable, it is where the act of mutual attentiveness takes shape. Here, silence is rich with interest, kindness, and anticipation.
Friends wait unencumbered in their shared silence.
Pigment on shells for a necklace made by Neanderthals has been dated to 115,000 years ago. Paintings in a cave in Maltravieso, western Spain are 65,000 years old. Prior to these discoveries, Neanderthals were thought not to have created art. Homo sapiens no longer stand alone in this.
The need to express visually and the appreciation of beauty is ancient, primal.
Art connects me with my ancestors, those living, and those to come. Art's flow is far and wide.
I listen to a short piano piece. The music is beautiful, powerful, mysterious. If I listen with others, if they move as I, slowly or with pace, at the same time and in the same place, we sense and share without the need of words. Movement and sound precedes language and meaning.
Music I hear alone is enough to change my day from dark to light, and back again.
Music I hear with others gives me, in its time, hope that others feel the same.
From a young age I have taken care of animals and birds, usually after the loss or incapacity of a relative. Although I have been a reluctant volunteer I have learned a great deal from my experiences with non-humans. My reluctance stems from my duty of care, an especially powerful force within me as I was cared for by others outside my immediate family from early infancy.
Animals & birds come to trust in their own time. Mutual trust cannot be forced, but is required to care.
My son asked where I think thoughts exist. Somewhere physical? Or somewhere else? I think of a bird, high above, against a blue sky. The bird does not exist except for a time in my mind, and now, in yours.
Words are magical in conveying thoughts... Is the bird between our ears? Or somewhere else? Is the bird where neurons fire in the brain? Or does the idea 'bird' have a 'life' of its own? I look up and see a real bird against the real blue sky. I sense both my birds fly somewhere else, at times, out of sight.
Wisdom is a quality difficult to describe, yet easily recognized.
To see things as they are rather than as I hope or wish: I try to set aside those things I want but do not need; I try to overturn any feelings of frustration and anger; and I try to remain open to journeys of thought, knowledge and experience that may challenge my long held views.
As I ponder on my meagre efforts I am far from being wise.
To make I must feel.
Feelings may arise from things said to me, from ways people act towards me, and from my imaginative journeys of hope and fear. I make most when in love: a state of love for one, many, or with nature.
The love of one, the need to love and be loved by another concerns myself. The love of many requires I think far less about myself. The love of nature includes myself but only as a part of a far greater whole.
I voice my opinion about art in its various forms. I am not paid to do so, nor do my words appear in a distinguished publication. That I also make with light, sound and words may be enough to bolster interest in what I say. I think about the experience of art, and the nature of art and artists.
Much of what I say is open to a range of readings. I may use poetic language to make my point.
The critic asserts their analysis and judgement. At all times be sceptical. Interrogate my thoughts...
Does what I make matter? Is it enough to stir another's thoughts and feelings? Does what I do lead to change? If no, then am I no more than the empty howl of wind across some distant moor?
Self-doubt is necessary for anyone who has anything worth saying, but it makes the journey hard.
Giving without receiving is a struggle, and yet I know its importance. Is making art, alone, enough?
Light, sound and words remain immeasurably important to me, and I continue with hope, for others.
You may be my mother, my father, my son, my daughter, sister, brother, lover, friend or foe. Whatever we are to one another there comes a point when you are no longer near in time or place.
If you hurt me I may dwell on you with darkness. If you loved me, I dream of you with light.
Today I think not of our time, but of yours. What you leave when you are gone is more than what is shared. You form the very fabric of my world. I think of you and you alone, with love I think of you.
Some value words that calmly and carefully uncover. Others prefer the zeal of fearless enthusiasm.
Those who enjoy a carefully crafted argument may tire of my tendency towards the poetic. Those who enjoy my passion may wilt at my need to interrogate and understand.
At times it is difficult to keep the balance between these two spirited forces at play.
The storm is as vital as my most peaceful moment. I need both passion and control.
Art, in all its forms, offers places to meet in mind and body.
Unlike politics or religion, both personal and social, art invites different points of view. Although art may be political or spiritual, it is a context that is home to all ways of being, and in this it is unique.
Whether I am strong or weak, with or alone, art brings me close to the fingerprints of life.
Art, the open sky and boundless sea.
Representational Art: the products of creative activity that stand for something experienced, or for ideas. For example, narrative literature, theatre and film, portraiture, landscape painting/photography.
Abstract Art: the products of creative activity that are non representational. For example, music, painting and dance whose enrichment is through its movement, form, tone, texture, and colour.
Art is most often both, as an ink blot spreads its reach, animating thought and imagination.
Once I complete a piece of music I have a choice of what to do with it: I could only allow you to listen to it for a price; I could license its use as stock music in advertising, games and film; I could gain status and notoriety from its success; I could use it as the source for my income to live. All these forms of personal benefit take the focus away from the music's core nature and purpose.
Art's primary strength of enriching thought and body are diminished by its exploitation.
When you come here it is you and I. Two minds meeting through language, the victor of time.
If you paid to view these words, it would make what I say no more valuable.
If you knew a million visit here each day, what I say would be of no more importance.
If some of what I say strikes a chord you may judge your time well spent. If not, you will quickly leave never to return. Come or go for what is said, not for the snare of exclusivity, nor the charm of popularity.
At times, when exasperated or in pain I swear, but I avoid using offensive language in my work.
Some count profanity as an indicator of normality and realism. Although the most vocal, they are not the majority. Despite the analgesic benefit and social comfort of cursing, those who place their spontaneous expression over the respect of others deny themselves opportunities.
I am more challenged to make art that that is as powerful for the old and young, as those in-between.
Mistake: an act in error or view that is unwise or wrong.
Wrong: not true or correct, factually or ethically.
I make many mistakes. I hope the majority of them are honest. That is, I make a choice with good intention, but after the event I realize through thought or discovery, I could have made a better one.
Accepting a mistake as honest aids forgiveness. It is not possible to make art without mistakes.
Socrates, the Athenian philosopher, said words are to knowledge as pictures are to their subjects.
When I come to know through words, sound or images, I know only a facet compared with the experience of my being in a place or with a person. Socrates believed we only truly come to know through dialogue, through sharing. When I watch a film it can be personally affecting, meaningful, and powerful, however without dialogue about it, my knowing is limited by my small, deficient perspective.
To live is to change. My body is a moving object, inside and out. All life and all else I touch is in constant transition. At times and for some things the change is imperceptibly slow, and at others, and for others, the time of transition from one state to another is in the blink of an eye.
I am drawn most to art that I can return to, a poem, music, sculpture, a painting, a photo, a film. I ponder whether part of art's magnetism is its relative and contrasting stability to my ever shifting existence.
Instinct: innate behaviour in response to something that moves us physically or psychologically.
Will: the desire to act, distinct from reason and understanding, and often driven by spirit or appetite.
Doing anything requires instinct, will, or a combination of the two. I have a strong resistance doing anything I do not want to do and that I feel has little value.
Through instinct, the wilful artist creates, despite social and practical pressures, despite clear cause.
I often fail to recognize the detail of written symbols. I am dyslexic. Take my name: Michael. To this day I have to check the order of letters to ensure I have written it correctly. It is the same for written music. I can read, but to do so quickly I absorb the overall shape, tone and context of what I see.
My failure to recognize written symbols accurately forces me to consider their meaning more carefully. This habit extends to listening and being with others. The things I fail to see frame my urge to know.
Making requires time. It is easier to estimate the time it takes to make something similar to something already made. When objects have a functional or clear use, the process of making is also more efficient. In contrast, the time required to make art is unpredictable.
A price is often placed on the time devoted to a task. Surrendering my time, I write for you.
Time I take, I give, I make my time for you. Time is all I have: my moment as a word upon the page.
Among the most intense hurt I feel is through words. I can be hurt most by those I love. I tend to hide my hurt. When hurt I withdraw, I ponder on the words I and those that hurt me spoke.
Hurt most often occurs with loved ones when they too are hurt. Once I become mindful of this and set my own hurt aside, my injury begins to ease.
As I make, darkness and light is my routine. One moment up, the next, down.
The more I devote to the creation of an artwork, the more my personal investment, the further the fall that follows. I wait to know how others feel, far more than what they think. My confidence rides high or low on the response of those I love.
After such a world of sound, silence, while no one's fault, is hard to hear. And then, someone speaks.
The music and artwork Fragile Earth is published in support of The Right of Self Protection.
I consider whether this right could reasonably extend to defending and protecting the earth against the grave risk humans cause to the environment and countless living species.
The final draft is a point of view that something is ready to complete.
I made over thirty drafts before deciding on the final approach for the artwork that will accompany the music I will publish tomorrow, and that I will point to here before this thought: above.
A draft precedes or is made in preparation for something more refined, meticulous, eloquent.
There are many times when what I make goes no further than the final draft.
For those who returned after reading when first written: thank you.
Tired after a prolonged period of poor sleep, my words held mistakes before I revisited my thoughts. In addition to correcting my errors I gradually pared away the wheat from the chaff.
Those who journey here frequently witness my weakness. I often pick myself up, dust myself off, and start over. Perhaps the greatest value in being an onlooker is that one learns most from the fall.
Force or the denial of liberty may silence a problem, but it does not resolve it.
Conflict leads to pain and resentment.
Difficulties between people, large and small, are resolved with open, honest dialogue. Body to body. Person to person. Nation to Nation.
At times, words are deeds.
The more I come to trust, the more I am at ease. I trust in love's potential to make good.
I write: the politics of friendship is negotiating the scope of what is comfortably shared.
Trust requires the never ending flow of effort and love. Even between the closest of friends, there is a boundary to trust, an edge defined by vulnerability and risk. My strength of trust is in direct proportion to a person's kindness, not just given to me, but instinctively and honestly given to others.
'Daybreak', dedicated to Billy, a student of philosophy and literature who died suddenly.
Whatever our darkness, daybreak will unfold...
A thought occurs in the mind. Although language is the most apparent expression of thought, I also have musical ideas, ideas of movement, and visual ideas. These thoughts arise from different places to where language springs from. At times I am aware of my thoughts, and at others I am not.
When I taste, or sense an aroma, I am often transported to a different place, person, or event. In my dreams I talk, I hear sounds, I see, I move. Memory too is thought. Thought, the vessel of my being me.
Language is at the heart of me. It helps me understand and express myself through the lens of meaning. Language forms a bridge between my world and others. Art and music do this too, however it is language that is by far the most articulate, and my clearest path to becoming aware.
My thoughts flow as language, sometimes silently, sometimes aloud, often repeating or disappearing. I develop or interrogate ideas, or one spontaneously appears, yet thought is more than language alone.
I talk with Jim, a man whose every moment is an imaginative journey made from the continuous flow of thought from his distant past in an effort to make sense of his present. His creativity runs wild, his verbal inventiveness is without restraint and made known with deep conviction. He unsettles many.
I have known people like Jim since childhood when I visited my mother who spent many years in psychiatric hospital. My father's name was Jim. Jim needs to talk. I listen. We come to be at ease.
Alive as bitter winter bites, on a small plot of land for care and cultivation, you find in flower, with scent and love: lavender and rosemary. Despite the cold, the northern light is strong. You make, then send the image of a dark blue paper print that holds their form, that you will further tend and forge as art.
Fragrant, evergreen, healing needled leaves of old, purple-blue, culinary herb, ameliorating oil.
Art is not merely the safekeeping of experience, it is its transformation.
Beauty: a powerful positive quality I feel emanating from somewhere, someone, or something - outside myself, experienced by myself. That which is beautiful may be physical, an idea, or an action.
A person, place, action, object, or idea is beautiful by way of its nature to inspire. When I sense beauty, I try to separate my wish for it to remain, I try to place desire aside. Desire is my urge for something to be mine, the illusion that something can be owned when in truth all I ever have, as music, is momentary.
Those who write believe they have something worth saying. I ponder on when my sense of self crosses the line from confidence to arrogance. Is what I write significant? It is conceit to think it so.
I write because something moves me, or when I find something beautiful - I yearn for someone else to feel the same. I write to make sense of my experiences, and those of others. I write in hope.
I try to write with love, for only love dulls the stupor of the self.
With art I am free to make mistakes. I can improve without concern or offence.
Take the poem below. The words I wrote are not spoken to one but written for many. I revisit my words and make changes. Unlike a conversation I am not judged by long silences, I am not too much, or too little, neither misunderstood nor viewed of as insensitive. With art I take my time to say.
When making art I can return. With people, sadly and so often, I sense their unease with my persistence.
I feel the loss of less, my smaller moment with,
Far from the crash of wave, the taste of salt, the scent of sea,
In sight of land and sky alone, I feel my loss, my less,
The sail in wind becalmed, the wrench of rope and strength of nature's hand, elsewhere,
With less I feel my loss, as speck of grit my time escape, a wistful grain of microscopic sand.
Music is organized sound that often has patterns we enjoy in the mind and body, that can appeal to our sense of beauty, and may trigger ideas and emotions.
When I hear music I do so differently than anyone else, and so it is with you. We might respond in a similar manner, but not identically. We feel unpredictably according to our personal experience.
Music becomes within.
The piece of music I work on is called 'Fragile Earth' and supports The Right of Self Protection. At present every choice I make creatively is with this in mind, however for the most part these choices are not reasoned, but instinctive. I have for example selected the instruments for the piece through my feelings about their sounds rather than an adherence to convention or logic.
The journey of making requires trust in my natural inclination. The artist depends on instinct.
Does art make me act? Without doubt in its making, cumulatively in its receiving.
The same work of art may move me to action over many years, yet have no affect at all on another. Art is hit and miss, relies on its resonance to affect, and may or may not aspire to, or do good. It is limited, but the best tool I know to reach across the boundaries of race, gender, culture, politics, and religion.
Can art help protect the environment? Reduce conflict? Champion love? For some, just a little.
Birth: the start of something new: a being; an idea; hope; faith in another; love. A moment of beginning.
I choose to separate those qualities that harm: the birth of hate, of anger, of greed, of envy and desire.
Birth is not only something that happens outside myself, but also within. On this my son's birthday I celebrate by choosing hope. The bedrock of the shale of my uncertainties.
Each day I have the choice of birth.
I do not name the man who scorns nations with his words. A name makes known, and such a man is not a man to note. His words inflame intolerance, the ignorant, the foolish soul.
When someone insults another on the basis of where they live, they make known their own insecurity, their weakness, their failure in thought and honour.
To such a man, face to face, I say with calm and fixed intent: leave my sight.
Some artists create for themselves or for art alone. Art is their means and end. They paint, sculpt, write, compose, dance and more, but not for others nor to pass on, but for the things art gives: shelter, solace, security, pleasure, closure. For some the creation of art is a world contained and controlled for one.
When I do a thing only for myself, no matter its pleasure or benefit, the peace it brings is all too brief.
My choice is to see or not to see, to say or not to say, to act or not to act, to share or not to share.
My aunt fell in love many years ago but never married. She, together with her twin sister who passed away forty years ago, fostered me together with my sisters. My aunt lives in a self-contained home adjacent to mine where I care for her. In her late nineties her faith continues to be integral to her life, she remains intensely inquisitive about the world, and enjoys conversations about anything and everything.
To live well and long requires passion, good fortune, curiosity, tolerance, self-sacrifice, and love.
Art of any kind is made from fragments. Small incomplete pieces: of light, sound, movement, memory, shape, something touched or thought.
Art happens in place or time and sometimes both. With painting it is a place for there is no painting without this. With music it is time for there is no music without this. With a movie it is both.
Making art brings together or presents fragments of my experience and ideas with care for its form.
Antibiotic: anti (against) biotic (something living or having lived); opposing life.
Bacteria: a single cell organism - their biomass exceeds that of all plants and animals on the earth.
I often express my love of life, and yet I do not hesitate to end the life of the bacteria that invades me.
Living, I breathe. I feel, I move, I think. With pain, I protect and defend myself, my all that is my self.
I consider my right of self protection and ponder at the point that life has rights.
I wait for the morning. The pain is intense. My infection has taken hold during a period of tiredness and turmoil. The battlefield of bacteria and white blood cells is beyond my control.
Art also spreads rapidly within me. I hear music and feel better. I read words and ideas flow, one to another, then another. I see the beauty of a painting and my physical distress is relieved.
Art, both infectious and restorative.
A job requires payment. Work does not. The value of work someone does has nothing to do with money.
Many define their status and success by the amount of money they earn rather than the non-economic outcomes of their work. It is unfortunate the same is true for many who create art.
A parent may work far harder in their care of a child, than their partner does in their job. That one earns money and the other does not has absolutely no relevance to the significance and impact of their work.
I wake after a couple of hours and cannot sleep. Along with others I spent much of yesterday in an effort to keep my elderly relative at ease as she moved into her new home. I left her in a good place, and people are on call to care for her around the clock, but I cannot sleep. I begin to make.
The act of making brings me balance. Working with words, light and sound I explore my feelings and thoughts in hope they will be shared. After an hour or so of making I am ready once more for sleep.
With another, no matter how flimsy or strong our relationship, how shallow or intense our feelings, there are things I fail to say. As I take in what you say, I think of our history, your gesture and tone. Whether we meet in person, on the page, with sound or light, scent, touch, or taste, there are things I fail to say.
Things can so easily be broken by what in person is said.
With art, music and words I make I do not fail to say. With these the frailties of my life are expelled.
Visual Art: the outcome of creative effort as a means of expression appreciated by sight.
Music: the outcome of creative effort as a means of expression of sound in time, appreciated aurally.
The Vogelkop bowerbird creates elaborate decorative structures that show off its skills and is designed to attract. It also uses a complex landscape of sound to court its mate. This bird makes art and music.
As artificial consciousness approaches, representational art will no longer be an exclusively human act.
My eyes worked well until a serious cycle accident many years ago left me with severe double vision.
Gradually, after many hospital visits over two years, eye muscle physiotherapy, and time for my mind to re-synchronize the light that streams through me, the two images gradually came together as one.
I wear glasses for near sight. I am distracted by the smallest smudge or speck of dust and feel uncomfortable if what I see is not pin sharp. For me, to see clearly is wondrous, vital. I love to see.
I love birds, I do not have an affinity with cats. Nevertheless I have taken it upon myself to care for the comfort and security of one as my elderly relative is no longer able to look after him. The cat who is shy and nervous remains with her, but I try my best to ensure he has food, water, and feels settled.
Kenny is bonded with my relative, and she with him. She forgets many things but does not forget him.
Kenny and I have come to trust one another. Unexpectedly, reluctantly, I have come to learn from him.
We Are But Once: words in a poem that consider the privilege and fortune of life and the earth.
Unique: A single word that recognizes the abundant treasures of existence.
You: The reader. Someone else. Another. The all that is not me.
I: Everything I feel and think.
We: the custodians of life.
Thomas Szasz