ART + LOVE
This is for anyone I have ever loved, and for anyone who is curious about the overlaps of art and love.
Ascension Piece
I don’t even know what this is going to be about yet but I am following a compulsion to show up as I am, with a half-formed idea and let the writing of it bring it into being. Much the same as when I paint. By not editing it, perhaps this piece will demonstrate the points I want to make.
I think it’s going to be about how both art and love transcend our borders of self. And about how when we reach to give someone love, we breach our containment of self to open a channel to that person, which means life can flow in both directions. There is an opportunity for exchange, where before there was only safety. What was more static and knowable is now flux and can only be experienced.
I want to say something about what passes through this new channel. Because I think it is relevant to both art and love. It is definitely my experience that painting requires me to open the gates of my self and become a sort of highway for unformed things to pass back and forth along. I think there’s a better metaphor out there but it’ll do for now. It is such a paradoxically strong position to be in; to leave the familiarity of self and to open to this current, that may pour in the unknown and become what it is destined to be in collaboration with what is outside self. It means vulnerability, exposure, risk and an alarming sense of present moment aliveness. But the reward, if you can keep the faith, is birthing art. If that isn’t life experiencing itself, I don’t know what is.
Just as surely as opening your heart to another person can feel crazily dangerous and unsettling, yet it is that feeling that coaxes you onward to hover in that raw, newly created space with another, and allow yourself to be transformed by it. Love can only enter when there is a departure from personal security. It doesn’t matter how well versed you are in relationships and how equipped you are with all the terminology and concepts that supposedly offer you a context to embark on a new relationship with eyes open and your learned reference points lined up like soldiers. It still requires a leap – because that is the portal. When two people have opened their boundary of self to wait expectantly and intrepidly for the other to do the same, the gap will be bridged by a third thing. Something that didn’t already exist. It is created because that vulnerability was offered and met and this becomes the raw material for love to be born out of because now the blend of both offerings can become itself.
I have always been endlessly fascinated with the relationship between the artwork and the viewer, probably because of this reflection of love. It mirrors so beautifully the openness needed for something to be birthed and brought home. When I am painting, I have to almost imitate the viewer in order to have that two-way flow. It’s not that I’m imagining a third party (myself, creativity and a receiver) but that at the same time as opening myself to creativity, there is another part of me that is the experiencer. Bringing art to an audience can be reminiscent of those tremors of love because there is no guarantee that the other person will join you there. Over time, I have learned that when my paintings aren’t met, it’s due to the capacity and willingness and readiness of the viewer and whether that matches the spirit in which the painting was made.
In both scenarios, art and love, something is demanded of you. Willingness is a good word for it, because to give it any other name, would create an object that could be turned over and evaluated, which defeats the point. It has to remain a mystery in order for that sense of ‘entering in’ to become live and charged. It is a ‘bringing forth’, perhaps of wonder. And that brings me to the main reason I felt compelled to write this today.
There is a quote that has been circulating in me for a couple of years and I don’t think it is just for me, because it is gaining some traction now. It’s an ancient quote from the gospel of Thomas but it is rising to the surface in popular culture and I want to be another voice that amplifies it because I think it contains some very timely wisdom for us right now.
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. But if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
It was the second part that most struck me. I feel that we live in a culture that promotes safety of self above all else; that almost orients around the idea that there are ways to achieve safety, maintain safety and keep all threats outside your door. The threats that lead the headlines are at once infinite and basic and they all perpetuate the false security that we can keep death at bay by doing more! It becomes a passing around of responsibility to neutralise threats and to shame any failed attempts to do so. But I can’t help but feel that the premise is wrong. Locking down threat keeps it inside – it makes it real. This is the exact opposite of the opening to risk that I describe above, when it comes to art and love. We are literally told all day long to close our borders in one way or another, when the biggest joke is that we are all going to die and not a single one of us knows when that will be! Is withholding working for us? The failure to ‘bring forth what is within us’ is festering and metastasizing. It is destructive purely on the principle that it is the opposite of creative and this is the axis we find ourselves on.
Put Down Your Toys
What strikes me about the quote, is that we don’t need to know what it is that is inside us that we are bringing forth. We don’t need to know. We just need to enter the arena. As with sitting down to write something that hasn’t fully formed in my mind. As with touching the canvas with pure curiosity and no pre-conceived ideas. As with recognising the potential for love with another person and saying ‘I don’t know but can we try?’
It happens because that is where life can enter. Bring forth the willingness, put something of your inner self in that shared space and as it is met by the other (lover, audience) it can play, it can breathe, it can form, it can become. That is how we are saved. Not safe.
