Every venture is a journey. When naming this blog, I was thinking of my aversion to paths. I don't always know where I'm going when I set out. And I had Robert Frost on the brain. The way, in "The Road Not Taken", the traveler looks down one road as far as he can, where it disappears into the undergrowth. With a path, you can be quite sure that you will get Somewhere. Granted, you can't see the destination, and you might miss marvelous things by choosing one path over another. But unless the path is liberally scattered with corpses in varying stages of decay, it's safe to assume that travelers before you have gotten There; maybe back again. So it's off the path that intriguing discoveries are waiting to be made. Perhaps this is justification for wandering. I'd like to take Robert Frost's traveler and shake him a little. What? Two roads? Look around you! Embrace the Undergrowth!
So, getting there. A physical walk, a piece of work, life in general.
I'm doing a lot of path-gazing. From the undergrowth of course. Where I've wandered.
I plan to post about drawing and painting outside, and hopefully link to other artists whose practice is based in the landscape. In preparation for an upcoming project, I'll be gathering my thoughts on my creative process; how experience, perception, memory and energy find a physical vehicle. How by analysing and developing what is realised, I learn from the relentless repetition of the cycle. It would be great to have some dialogue on interpretations of our relationship with the landscape. Hopefully, we'll get Somewhere.
Oo I like the sound of that - being led along a path that leads to where no-one knows where. Although it's not, as far as I know, embodied in the Declaration of Human Rights, the "right to go missing" is a right we should exercise from time to time, if only to turn the heads of those who are shuffling along the supermarket aisles, gravitating slowly and in a clockwise direction towards the inevitable checkout.
ReplyDeleteOh yes, thanks for the comment you left on my blog. Nash, Sutherland and Craxton are indeed artists who have helped me glimpse a little further under the blanket of understanding, to show what goes on where culture kisses nature.