Tag: abstract

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Encouragement for artists

To Bless the Space Between Us – by John O’Donohue … extract from: For the Artist at the Start of the Day shared with my by my friend, Deborah Rossouw

May your imagination know
The grace of perfect danger,

To reach beyond imitation,
And the wheel of repetition,

Deep into the call of all
The unfinished and unsolved

Until the veil of the unknown yields
And something original begins
To stir toward your senses
And grow stronger in your heart

In order to come to birth
In a clean line of form,
That claims from time
A  rhythm not yet heard, that calls space to
A different shape.

May it be its own force field
and dwell uniquely
Between the heart and the light

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Calm is hard

One of the goals in my art is to achieve the delicate balance between calm and having enough on the canvas to sustain interest. I envision ultimately, large areas of calm in my work. But why is it so hard to achieve?

You would think it’s easier to do nothing than to fill that nothingness with something of beauty. Not for me.

Calm is scary if you’re not in its habit. It’s like that silence in conversations that makes us awkward. Yet we also long for periods of silence. I would say we even need silence.

Right now I’m working with “degrees of calm.” I’m not ready for blank calmness and I may never be. But I can do less and that is a degree of calm.