“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
What am I trying to convey in my work? Is it of value? Does it matter?
I remind myself that it doesn’t, that it CANNOT MATTER how I “fit in” to current zeitgeist or if my work has “value.” I just do it.
PROCESS is my art form, obsessive ongoing process, either when teaching it, facilitating it, doing it.
So there in lies what MATTERS. The PROCESS.
Process art is an artistic movement as well as a creative sentiment where the end product of art and craft, the objet d’art, is not the principal focus. The ‘process’ in process art refers to the process of the formation of art: the gathering, sorting, collating, associating, patterning, and moreover the initiation of actions and proceedings.
Process art is concerned with the actual doing and how actions can be defined as an actual work of art; seeing the art as pure human expression. Process art often entails an inherent motivation, rationale, and intentionality. Therefore, art is viewed as a creative journey or process, rather than as a deliverable or end product. – Wiki
I have come to terms with the fact that my particular imagery is a stream of consciousness process. I suppose I am interpreting text in my illustration projects, but it seems more that I land on a particular word or phrase and play from there. So the resulting image becomes a type of riff or image play.
I have tried other ways to work, but only my personal stream of consciousness expression makes me feel authentic.
I am thoroughly enjoying Caroline Spurgeon’s book, Shakespeare’s Imagery- and what it tells us (1935) as she contemplates the evidence of Shakespeare’s thoughts in his imagery.
The bare fact that germinating seeds of falling leaves are actually another expression of the processes we see at work in human life and death, thrills me, as it must others, with a sense of being here in presences of a great mystery, which could we only understand it, would explain life and death itself.
For me, drawing and embroidering the drawings is to lie down into life and take time to look at the PROCESS as it slowly unfolds. It is about TRUTH.
I would actually argue that the current art period is PROCESS.
… the permanent analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth… – Percy Bysshe Shelley
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And which is what I think the thing that we call the Arts contains something that’s kind of alive. And I, I think image is the right word for it, and what the biological function of this thing we call the images or the arts might be. Because my argument is we wouldn’t of dragged it through all our evolutionary stages unless it had a biological function. So, that’s kind of what I’m going to be talking about. And then, work that I’ve been doing with students and scientists about this very thing. Weinman so I think, you know, when we’re little all of us are really connected to our inner artist and then the majority of us, as we get older, cut that off. – Lynda Barry
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