What’s It All About Then, Eh?

I'm often asked this question, in one form or another. I've always felt being an artist was the right choice, but why this is isn't always clear. Why do I make art and what do I want the art I create to do? As I develop my practice the answers to these questions will change, here's my latest.

It’s about truth. It’s about me and my experience of the world. It’s about looking for beauty and trying to find something joyful and true, even just for a moment.

It’s not about being important or remembered. It’s not about legacy. It’s about now and connecting with what is true for you. Even if that’s mad or mundane. It’s not about a conversation with your internal voice, but with the rest of Art History and other artworks that have captured the artists experience of a connection to their present moment.  It’s about recognising that each individual lives in their own reality and we’re separated by the vast void of alternate, verisimilar worlds. It’s about trying to bridge the gap between our realities.

It’s helping to connect individuals in the present moment. It’s not hard to come back to the present, but it’s so easy to be lost in the swirling sea of memory or to be dazzled by the light of the future, which is impossible to see.

The present is always true, the truth is always interesting.

It’s about saying this is what I see and this is what makes me happy. What makes you happy, what do you see? It’s about celebrating each moment as different and embracing that each answer is different in each moment.

Don’t be a fucking coward. Have the guts to pursue your own happiness. Find your personal truth in each moment. Fuck the rest of it. The worries, the bills, other people’s demands and feckless desires.  Connect with the present, learn how to do this otherwise you’ll be eternally lost in worry or regret.

It’s not about hedonism or thrill seeking. Learn to connect with your full conscious experience and cut through the overwhelming force of impulse, the crowd of voices, whispering and screaming at you 24 hours a day. Recognise thoughts as something transient. You can observe them and choose to bring them in to reality for others. Vocalise them, write a song, make a picture. But you are not them. Thoughts are simply another object of experience. Connect with yourself and the present moment of experience and all words, thoughts and images will dissolve, their meanings will fall away, and you’re left with the raw data.

That raw data is more real than the layers of language and meaning that we pin to it to try to transmit our experience to others. In the hope that they can strip it all away and find the same pure kernel of truth, the same experience at the centre. It will change. There’s transformation in the translation. Transmutation in the transmission.

It’s going to be different and unique so embrace it and enjoy it. I know what you have in your experience now, is yours, is unique. It could be all that there is, so it’s very special.

In each moment we have a choice: to be present, or to spend it elsewhere. Planning the future and reflecting on the past are essential processes but being swept away into a winding dialogue with an audience of one, is less useful. We can find truth and beauty in the present moment, if we connect to the raw sensations of experience. We can try sharing these moments with others, trying to induce our experience in others, but know that through our communication, the experience will change and will be different. That difference and change is also beautiful and true.