What of Art?
-It is a malady.
–Love?
-An Illusion.
–Religion?
-The fashionable substitute for Belief.
–You are a sceptic.
-Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.
–What are you?
-To define is to limit.
– Oscar Wilde
Art by James R Eads.
“Illusion is the first of all pleasures.” – Oscar Wilde
Art by Salvator Dali.
“Words are more dangerous than swords and guns. They reach further and hurt deeper.”
― Luis Marques
Art by Charles Vess – illustration for Stardust by Neil Gaiman.
“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
– Albert Camus
Art by René Magritte.
“Art isn’t only a painting. Art is anything that’s creative, passionate, and personal. An artists is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn’t matter. The intent does. Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.”― Seth Godin
Art by Eyvind Earle.
“Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in Kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018),
The Left Hand of Darkness
Art by Édouard Manet.
Sun chokes the atmosphere
Moon dies and takes
the truth and breath of you
Stars inscribe the sky
and determine
who’s alive…
What are your dreams?
Ask your heart
and put an old wish
to the slaughter.
Wild is the conspicuous green grass
that tells itself
to reach the stardust smell of spring.
Old is the key
that keeps away the chains
and charms unfathomed
to open a new gate
As you wear another’s
beating heart
melting in
and dripping of blue lust
Not knowing when
to destroy the dark
and say:
I am saving the meat
of my dreams for you!
© Iulia Halatz
Art by Konstantin Koborov.
Longing = a yearning desire.
“It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.”
– George Eliot
Art by Aleksandr Golovin.
If you were to be enclosed in one word, what would that be?
We are already enclosed in small words, small events, small thoughts making up a bigger picture. But what if you respond to only one word?
My word is freedom. I know of nobody being free, but in our world populated with clouds that sweep away the silence of the sky above blue lilacs of amaranthine Spring, I am free. My freedom is but at the words’ length of a magic rub of the lamp of imagination.
Without freedom we cannot feel the wind’s promiscuous touch as if at ripe flowers and leaves, without freedom we cannot be as young as yesteryear’s roses. We cannot see the Autumn climbing up the vines and the heartbeat of the moon, alive and beckoning.
Only with freedom of vision and thought we can unleash our unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful world inside of us.
“Everybody has a secret world inside of them, I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody – Inside them they’ve got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds….” – Neil Gaiman
You cannot paint in colors and words unless your mind is free to travel to your imaginary legendary lands between the corner of sunset and the verge of dawn. Unless your heart dances at the tune hummed by a water-lily. Unless your mind is raving at the wild immaculate trees. With freedom and broken dreams you can do anything. The shards of olden dreams are lavish land for new unbroken dreams.
“A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.”- Elaine de Kooning
A painting is not a noun, it is a verb – to love. To love with fierce freedom and lovely despair of losing one’s self into the loving.
In love we are maneuvering a human mechanism that at times refuses to work…That is clear, but the trying is enchanting. Buckets of enchantment color ethereal worldly beings in agonizing freedom and…love.
Art by Gustave Adolphe Mossa.
Dread = great fear or apprehension.
…I find nothing fantastic in so-called fantastic art, it is an aspect of reality in search of sanity beyond the normal bounds. I believe that fantastic art is related to the protective dream, that it prolongs the healing dream and finds symbols that change dread into wonder, strangeness and beauty. – Thomas Häfner
After a pack of dogs jumped at my bike wheels, I developed a “protective dream”. The dogs in the tall dream protected me of the dogs in the tall grass.
Art by Kinuko Y Craft.
