Instinctual, beyond reason, we sometimes have a sense of things - a sense of not having to place
everything within a framework of reason, or even within the limitation of the
usual five senses of this five-sensed world…
I’ve always wondered what it would be like to really touch something without “actually” touching, but to acknowledge that there is more
happening within space and time than what we rationally or even sensually tend
to acknowledge. I see carving as a way to move within this instinctual space.
One person has written of Kandinsky's works: "There was no
question of looking for representation; a harmony had been set up, and
that was enough." "Kandinsky is painting music. That is to
say, he has broken down the barrier between music and painting, and has
isolated the pure emotion which, for want of a better name, we call the
artistic emotion."
Then there's Jackson Pollock: "When you look at a Pollock don't worry
about what it is about. It is not about what we want it to be. When you
look at a Pollock, you should be appreciating what art essentially is;
you should be appreciating the freedom of the lines, the thick impasto
of the drips that refused to stop embracing each other, the intersection
of colours, the beautiful dynamism."
It gets me thinking that there are innate patterns of expression within each of us - not only emotional but also functional and structural, as in bodily movement, a sense of physical flow... There is a movement I find myself tending towards when I carve. I search out pieces of wood that somehow hold this also within, as if as an anticipatory physicality. So when I carve, this movement, this flow, emerges naturally, because the physicality of the wood and my self are aligned in ways that allow me to share my movement within the wood even as I respect the wood's own flow, because I have tried to match our physicalities as well as possible within an instinctual space that has us maintain a wondrous freedom of movement and exploration even as we work towards harmony together...
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