Beauty as a conduit of the unspeakable

Some things in life can't be told in sentences. Some things demand a poem, song, film, painting, dance, or narrative. Things like love, death, loneliness, loyalty, betrayal, hope beyond despair and even beauty itself.

I wonder sometimes if that feeling we get from truly great movies, music and art... from sunsets and mountains and oceans... isn't something eternal in our souls... a mystery set in us from before time, the mystery of God. I feel like I crave those moments in my life... those are the moments I feel most alive, most awake. Conversely, fake beauty, false loves, fashion, success, etc. fuel in me a weariness that I avoid and yet get pulled into. I sense in myself two paths... one seeking life, full, dynamic, others-focused life... and the other seeking self, stuff, and rights.

I think that is how people fall in line... religion or no religion, church or no church... when we get to our very truest motives and hearts, we are either seeking after something really real and true and bigger, or we are seeking ourselves. And not to say that people don't shift back and forth from side to side, but that the majority of our general direction in life can be traced to walking toward the person of Jesus or away from Him.

I think somehow beauty is tied up in all that.

art and fear

i'm reading another "art" book entitled 'Art and Fear' ... really great so far and anyhow, this quote made me laugh out loud:

"Artists don't get to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of NOT working." -Stephen DeStaebler

unfortunately for me and most artists i know, this is an entirely accurate assessment. there is something about the fear and pain of making a work that keeps me from it until i am so creatively backed-up that i need to spill out. i suppose there is a discipline which can somewhat override this tendency, but i often entirely fail to employ it.
however, i am coming to a realization that all the reading and drawing i do is a valid employment of my mind and energies in the efforts to keep thinking about art and keep my imagination very much alive and childlike. i think sometimes i get very caught up in wanting that every piece i make would be a success and communicate the feeling, thought, experience, etc. which motivated it. i labor and labor and panic and freeze in this mode and eventually i produce something. sometimes it is exactly what i meant to say and other times it just "something."

perhaps it is a stroke of greater maturity to realize that growth is a process and that maturation itself comes in seeming waves of intensity... and that growth in the arts means sorting through all the really bad ideas to find the really superb ones.

it is such an odd awareness to be thinking that what i am learning now will seem so common to me in a few months and that my whole life will feel like the slow peeling away of scales from my eyes and mind and heart.... a bittersweet metamorphosis for sure.

another great quote

"If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? Good God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us."

-Franz Kafka

i read that from the prologue to a new Chaim Potok book i found in my house... i guess it's "new" only in the sense that i haven't read it yet and am excited about it. that's pretty much all. cheers and happy thursday!

eating my words

well i found a cool quote while reading ben shahn's THE SHAPE OF CONTENT (requisite reading for artists).

"It became uncomfortably apparent to me that whatever one thinks as well as whatever one paints must be constantly reexamined, torn apart, if that seems to be indicated, and reassembled in the light of new attitudes or new discovery."

the key word for me in that quote is "uncomfortably". amen. that is probably the best way to describe where i feel i am lately... since graduating and leaving the safe womb of undergrad studios, my work has undergone numerous deaths and rebirths and i'm still not really sure what is going on with me. after feeling like i had a "style" with which to work, i am suddenly back to sketching still-lifes of organic shapes (orchids and trees). the hard part is to not lose hope and to not be so aware of even "where i am" in my art, but to stay connected to the love of it and its intuitive nature as a communication between me and God. from my art and even my marriage i am coming to understand how terribly stubborn and intensely afraid i am as a person. learning is a painful process, as one of russell's professors once told him. coming from someone who's been pretty good at everything she's tried so far in life, i'm starting to believe it's true and that i might be, for the first time, really learning something.

first entry

so i don't have anything really great or inspiring to say, but this will probably serve as a good place for random thoughts, favorite quotes and news about shows and such. check back for updates... but not too often, as i probably won't be as ambitious as i think i will be at writing things here.

some people just like paper better.