the cave. prints available
I’m a week out from the Portals (my heart is a flower) exhibition. I’m feeling quite strange. It’s a combination, or not actually a combination but a co-existence of not knowing what the hell I am doing and knowing exactly what I’m doing, step by step, as if literally following instructions, no question. Get a three metre by two metre raw canvas. Paint a massive flower. Hang it from the wire at the ceiling. Slash it with a knife so people can walk through. Write a poem on the wall. In pencil. 6B. Print the posters. Read the poem and record it. Add cello. Not like that, like this. And an ambulance siren. White organza – yes. Blue lights. Order the Gaza cola.
So when I say I don’t know what I’m doing, that’s clearly not true. It’s more like not having a clue why I am doing it. Thank heavens for artist friends, because it was starting to feel like a mild case of insanity. To just create something with no outside incentive, nobody asked me to, and it has no purpose aside from being what it is and doing whatever it does, in interaction with whoever comes. I would like to sell some paintings, of course, but that’s not the reason I paint them, or show them.
Why do we feel as if we need reasons?
It was happily a quite well known feeling to my soul-sister artist friend. She has no idea why she does it either, but she knows she has to. You could call this an ‘inner knowing’ or a ‘self-directed’ kind of activity but I am not so sure, it feels more to me like being quietly informed what to do, or receiving stage directions, not from any particular source, but not exactly from my ‘self’. If it was from myself I would know why, I’d have a whole rationale.
More than listening to an inner voice, it’s like listening to everything, and it all filters down somehow, through my very specific body and brain, experiences and memories and all my relations, into oddly specific knowings. I think it’s the natural way that people create art, I guess it just seems a lot weirder when it becomes so large and material, when other people get to physically enter the world of my ‘ideas’.
It’s an odd feeling, standing on the threshold. It feels actually quite dizzily wonderful to be absolutely sure about what I am making, with no explanations, justifications, or excuses.
It feels, in a world where that seems to have been edited out, like being free.