Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 397
“Prophecy,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ x 38″
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Our species requires a greater capacity to see into the Real, not just the outer universe of the senses but also the inner cosmos of the psyche, the normally invisible dimensions. Near the end of his life, Jung said to an English journalist, “The only real danger that exists is man himself… His psyche should be studied because we are the origin of all coming evil.” It is a beautiful statement until the word studied comes up, at which point we are reminded that Jung at bottom was a rationalist: he refused to see that while psychology could talk brilliantly about the soul, it could never descend into its depths. For this we need imagination, madness, prophecy – art. We must understand that creative expression is not a pastime or distraction, but a psychonautic science in its own right. Allowed to operate in freedom, it can illuminate the darkness beyond our field of vision.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 355
“The Champ,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 26″ x 20″
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
True art provides us with truth in a manner analogous to science. Its prophetic dimension – its knack for showing us the side of things that our interests blind us to – make it a source of knowledge, even though it is knowledge of a kind that instrumental reason has little time for. The psychologists who revolutionized our understanding of human psychology in the earliest twentieth century drew on two principal sources to build their concepts: the dream life of their patients and the great art of the past. Without this recognition of the primacy of imagination, Freud and Jung could never have drawn their maps of the psyche. Those who work for a better world would do well to follow their example and find the guiding patterns of life in the prophetic artistic works of the past and present. Only art can act as a counter-weight to that uniquely modern mentality that, wherever it becomes the only game in town, seeks to persuade us that the proper goal of human beings is to contain, dissect, and control everything – that even the most persistent mysteries are just problems to be solved.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
Comments are welcome!
barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 