In the evening
I just came back from a restorative yoga class which is different from the normal anasura yoga I do. Much more restful, closer to meditation. While I was lying on my back, feet up on the wall, arms over head, I felt the muscles across my chest relax and a kind of releasing of well, my heart. I’m not usually that close to those kinds of feelings but thought well of course those are the kinds of feelings that I want to be close to because they open me up to expressing things on a deeper level. All this made me think of my old friend Tom Nelson, an artist and letter carrier who lives in Kennebunkport, Maine. Tom reveals his work (printmaking) by letting his past, and the past of others travel through him; a psychic transmission that he receives via voices, through the house that he lives in and through exploring his own personal history. What I related to in the moment of restorative yoga was that what I was doing was connecting to my own history, i.e. my feeling history. I was flooded with my own feelings and then wondered how much these feelings were truly my own and how much of them I had inherited on a bodily level, on how I held my feelings, and where, why and how did this come to be? And so this lead to feeling/thinking that what I always hope to reveal, and what I think most artists, even the ones that have a vast intellectual construct around their work, hope to reveal, is their truest feelings about not only their life, but of all life. At least this is what I hope to reveal and what I hope is through this transmission of feelings via something visual that I can connect on the very deepest level with the person who may be in a physical/psychic space that allows for that particular transmission.
May 20th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
June, I have been thinking about this most of the day. I find this very intriguing and in many ways you have hit upon a truth that I have trouble expressing. While I have tried to express feelings through my artwork, I think it is more a case of my feelings bringing me to the subject, to the work. Sometimes I am able to convey the feeling that brought me there, but more often I lose it in the translation. I deliver mail in an old 8 story apartment building, floor to floor, door to door. It was built at the beginning of the century by the Governor, as an office building for women. I have gotten a lot of inspiration there. Intuitive thought. The other day I could sense a feeling in my subconscious that I couldn’t bring to my conscious. I could sense it and feel it, but I couldn’t translate it. Aha! Very much as my art work! A message in a non-message!