What is it about art that moves you?

thanks for the invite Bruce! and also I check out your website, I dig your work.

"What is it about art that moves you?"

What moves me is the Event of making the work, and I could care less about the 'thing' as artifact. I am moved by the isomorphic happening between the painter's consciousness and the painted thing: if one recognizes this relationship as one of mutual creativity, a road opens up and expands outward. One quickly realizes that it is cosmic creativity - you are the vessel that constructs novelty.

"How does it move you, and where in your body, mind, heart, spirit, soul or other place that I've not mentioned?"

I suppose it is a quest to have it move you in body, mind, heart, spirit and soul all simultaneously. The reality of it, however, is a movement in the body and mind - a movement between the hand and the concept. Perhaps if one is attentive, and this seems the primary goal for me, it will open up to the spirit and the soul.

"How do you as an artist work to create moving experiences in another's existence or experience?"

I am merely the maker of images and objects, illusions really, and for this I am a criminal. I believe images and things cannot aid in any Deep experience, but only surface movements. If I move others it is out of a hope that the viewer is not taken away too much with the symbolic world of signs and gestures I have created. A moving experience to me would be seeing past all that: to move someone's existence the image must speak to what is outside, the realm of the Real that no image can capture. ...of course I have failed at this, so far.

"How does art that you have seen help in your own development?"

Wassily Kandinsky's art and his text "The Spiritual in Art," aided in my viewing painting not as a set of plastic rhymes but as a means of exploring an inward journey. And of course I am moved by the Visionay and Fantastic painters like Ernst Fuchs, Mati Klarwein, Alex Grey, and Robert Venosa - the latter I met at an Entheon event in 2006, and it was a very inspiring experience.

"How does art you have created help in other's development and evolution?"

Even though I recommend the creative Event of making a work of art, I am hesitant to believe that "art" can help in development and evolution because at this point in the history of art it has become another object among objects - a mere commodity. In my opinion the painted "thing" as artifact cannot really help, since what really matters is the movement of creativity. The movement of creativity is what can facilitate, since it opens up new boundaries and helps us evolve.

If my paintings have helped in 'development', perhaps it is because I have attempted to make a painting not merely exist as an object among objects, not just a pretty thing hung on a wall. I refuse to show in galleries, and only show at events, psy-trance gatherings or whatever, settings where I attempt to place it in the middle of an art-happening where the painting is a "one-off" totem object at the center of ritual.

"How can art aid in our own collective Grand Evolution Adventure called Life?"

That is a big question and I don't know the answer....Perhaps one should again ask, "what about art moves you?" Empowering the isomorphic happening between the painter's consciousness and the painted thing is what moves me, and this is a metaphor for the happening between the Subject and the Object. A Compassionate movement between the I and the It could bring about an upgrade in the We, a collective upgrade of new operating systems and parameters of understanding.

www.iaeruo.net

I am drawn to art because of its ambiguous nature. There is no clear definition anymore. Until the mid 19th Century, "Art" had a purpose. It was a skill, a way to record life rather than being a means of expression for expression's sake (not that there wasn't experimentation throughout the centuries). That's what "Art's" job was, it was perfectly clear.

That is, until the camera came along! Art's job had been replaced (or, at least painting, drawing, etc.). And then we have motion pictures.....since then, art has gone from capital "A" to lower case "a". Having to push the emvelope, to compete with 20th Century technology, art then became art for art's sake: modernism, dada, cubism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, etc. Since then, and now in this postmodern world of simulacra, art is constantly trying to find a niche, a way to define itself that I'm not sure can truly be pegged down. I like it that way. After all, how can one truly define sadness or the sky? Instead of being a tool, art is more of a natural force now that cannot be limited by terms and theories.

Hence, why every man and woman may indeed be an "artist".

I agree about the symbols and messages within art. I think the universe itself and all of creation is very much art, and that every piece of it is also language. that is to say, and maybe this sounds a bit like paranoid schizophrenia (but who's to say that this is some sort of "disorder"?), everywhere you look I believe you will find symbols. I think humanity in future years (and already is under the process of discovering this) will realize that events are connected not only physically, but also in meaning. artists while creating connect to something beyond themselves, I think most artists (who are into it for the real art, not profiteers) are aware of something outside which directs their work - that what they have created was not entirely under the control of their mind and body. that is God, to me, the act of creation - an act which is constantly occurring, infinite. and so back to the symbols, I think all art is trying to tell us something, but we do not speak the language very well... artists are unaware even of what their art is trying to say because it's deeper than they can express or form into words and ideas which they can make practical sense/use of.

so those are my beliefs. I would also like to add that what I consider to be the difference between "good art" and "bad art" is whether it was created honestly. of course this is hard to discern so it is much more something one perceives than judges.