"Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury - sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal - drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us."People have asked me before, and I have asked myself this too: what inspires me, or what motivates me to begin a piece? I find it difficult to give a straightforward answer. Mostly because I feel that my craft is still very much at its infancy, and that I am at the midst of experimentation and play (a state I doubt will ever end). Can I get away with saying "everything"? Probably not, because that doesn't do it for me either. There has to be some kind of hierarchy to the things that motivate me the most. And what propels me to pick up that pen or brush must surely possess some discriminatory power over other things that interest me - otherwise I'd be a mad woman trying to capture absolutely everything that sparks my interest.
My imagination has no limits, but I think what really gets the most "air time" in my work is an exploration of self. As vague as this may sound, and however many times we hear artists say this - art to me is The Personal. Unlike the Jeff Koons type approach, which is impersonal, I find myself hovering at the other end of this spectrum. I was drawn to Rushdie's concept of the Fury for this very reason.
To me, art is subjective. I can't help but weave myself into everything I create. Most of my paintings are done without much thought, but intuition - and what else could intuition be but some reflection of the self?
No comments:
Post a Comment