John Bradley, in writing “Singing Salt Water Country” of the Songlines of Carpentaria with Yanyuwa families writes about their Kujika ( Goo djee ga ) – their ceremonial songs. Songs of power embedded in the earth.
Without language how could the country hear?
He was told, “That to call the name of country at night could make that country tremble. To know country so intimately, that calling its name – can cause it to tremble, is a powerful way of knowing.”
“That singing it, with its multiple verses, must be for country, as at times for the singers, an ecstatic experience. And does the country tremble with Joy? They are putting down their Goo djee ga (Kujika) to hold it in country.”
When we paint the landscape, we acknowledge it. And perhaps also, cause it to tremble ? with Joy. John Bradley became increasingly aware, of listening to country, and to it silences.
The essence of the human lies in our potential to survive in harmony with every life element.
D’Arcy Hayman at a UNESCO conference some years ago said:
“We cannot measure man’s intelligence by his ability to read established languages, but through art, the family of man can be brought into touch with itself …The deepening humanisation of man has always been dependant on his capacity to turn personal experience into symbol and symbol into life experience.”
I believe the lessons we learn from art process and its practise, may be applied to all our living, so that we grow, we learn to balance, learn to relax and to move with life rhythms.
We learn to translate waves of energy through the numerous directions and expression in art.
I believe that in all areas of artistic endeavour there is a psychic energy; a force that transmits and links us to the invisible.
In most forms of art it is necessary to perceive the invisible (or rather) what SEEMS invisible.
In order to do this we must first push away the visible as one would push away water in swimming, so that we travel into the next space, creating a link between the two.
There are laws which apply to life and to nature. There are logics.
Infinite and endless possibilities and probabilities.
When we walk in the landscape. When we stand by the sea. If we chance upon a dead bird and are not moved then our consciousness is corrupt.
When we drive through the land, to the left and right, our sight is divided by the highway. When we WALK over it we experience the whole circumference. (I am in the landscape the landscape is in me) When we paint the landscape we become part of it – breathing its essence. A reminder.
If I see a beautiful tree my reaction is a need to run and embrace it. A mountain seems to beckon and I want to go to it. In my mind I pass my hand over a wheat field. Run my hand over the whole scene. I see a cloud hovering in blue space above, held by the finest energy and feel part of it, yet there is a distance between me – the mountain – the sky – clouds and trees.
There are things that stop me in my tracks. I might see a tree that is so poised and perfect I must walk on. The tree seems to be asking me to tell it how beautiful it is and by doing this maybe I give it existence?
My perception may be very different from yours. This is what makes each of us so unique.
One morning I stopped my car to walk along a track from the highway. The air cold. The atmosphere hazy. Dew, still on the grass. Cobwebs clinging to dead branches. On the damp red sand were fresh ant holes. Worm mounds. A variety of grasses. Native trees and a few small sticks from a dead tree standing upright in the sand like fine pieces of sculpture. There were trees grown so old they had fallen apart. Some half buried. I couldn’t stop long enough to paint the scene.
I recorded it on my internal mirror. That was my sketch which was to emerge some years later as a painting. But different.
In my paintings I’m not so concerned with the horizon. I am more concerned with taking you the viewer (behind the scenes) as it were – behind the flat 2 dimensional surface. Behind and beyond that first sensation of paint-colour is where the mystery lies.
Artists are, in general, aware of a moral issue.
The morality in art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
We catch fleeting glimpses of life. Of movement. Change. Now stillness and peace. Now fear. Reality stripped of softness and gentleness. We witness the elements (often destructive) yet there remains an essential beauty and mystery.
The world as we see it is only a thin veil for a deeper reality of abstract form.
Life is change and from change comes movement, more change, and somewhere here lies art.
The artist is still striving toward a reconciliation of two extremes. On one hand, a primitive expression and on the other, of refinement.
The artist walks out into space and brings back new worlds. Art makes order out of chaos and sometimes chaos out of order.
The answer lies in the process of looking/seeing/ feeling in our deepest emotional and spiritual self. But then the artist must step aside so that you may experience the visual/ tactile sensation of paint, the texture of the canvas and allow a work to speak for itself – the medium must be the guide.
I say to my students: the head must not know what the hand is thinking
Anais Nin said: “… it is a world for others. An inheritance for others. In the end when you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others…”
Tristan Tzara said:”… all pictorial or plastic art is useless. Art must be a monster to cast servile minds into terror…”
* In the year of 2011 Tzara might well be regarded as an artistic terrorist!
The Dadaists spoke of indifference. Sometimes I have no argument with that, but then I swerve.
Although there have been times I have enjoyed creating what I call anti art such as it is.
A child draws on the pavement. The rain comes and it vanishes. The child is not bothered. The child makes a paper boat and it sails down a gutter to disintegrate. But the child is happy. It was the act the child was concerned with. Some of this still exists within the artist and, I hope, the viewer.
Through mechanisation, we are fast losing the ability to use the senses. – rejecting our own powers in the face of machine and science.
Paintings are an illusion. A deception. A surface upon a surface, with no actual third dimension, Traditionalists have attempted to create the illusion.
Painting is magic. We begin with the raw material and from one point to another, a colour passing through another colour, it grows.
Art is freedom. Art is levitation. Abstract art is a distillation – like poetry.
Art provides windows to look through for that something beyond.
We must rethink and analyse all the time. Remove the barnacles; peel off the (skins)
In my own art I have been leaping from rock to rock, sometimes from a rock to a hard place or fallen between rocks. Stumbled and got up again. I am still leaping. Sometimes back. Sometimes over the same rocks. Sometimes ahead – to a place I don’t know/haven’t known. Sometimes lost my way. Imagined it. But not climbed there. YET.
The artist is like the splendid earthworm that devours, digests, renews, discovers and uncovers. Walks out into space and brings back new worlds. Shows us how to do the same if we want. Picks up a rhythm and dances. Beats a tattoo on a taut canvas. The sound is colour and line and shape. Important to the artist (and to us) is movement. Movement where? Into the future. Over the past. And in the present. Our hopes are in the future.
©Janet R. Boddy
2017