Artsramble Archive

While sitting and listening to an artists’ panel discussion in the newly opened LongView Gallery (in Raleigh, NC) I had an epiphany. Considering my present state, I probably had that same epiphany many times and just forgot it, but it certainly crept up like a stranger on the landscape.
This is the joy of memory loss. The show was LongView's first: Expressions, A Survey of Spiritually Based Art in the Triangle. Although this is not a review as the show is long gone, but let it be said that the LongView Gallery is a laudable and necessary space and the work is serious and honest. Go visit it. The panel moderator was Pam Winfield, of Meredith College, who led the three, well-spoken artists Martie Baird, Cathleen Rieder and Georgia Springer, into various discussions including the shifting sands of the meditative element in creativity. They did their best to find descriptive words for the nebulous and untouchable.

Many in the audience understood exactly the phenomena they were struggling to define–indeed, understood perfectly “the struggle” itself. Tom Sayre contributed eloquently. To paraphrase loosely, he spoke of thinking without thinking, seeing without seeing. His metaphor was our eyes’ disability, to not directly see low level light–a falling star for instance. Instead one must look at it obliquely allowing our peripheral rods, the primitive part of our eyes, to deal with it. If our gaze is allowed to glance to the left or right of the object, we pick it up. We see it by not looking. Likewise we access our creative intelligence by declining to consciously click on to its link.

Art students tear the concepts out of themselves, poor, serious dears, (No, I’m not condescending. I’m thinking of my own art school years. Well, maybe I AM being condescending.) sometimes creating forced or cliched work. It must be part of the learning curve. Later things loosen up, and we go back to a more natural process, akin to the flow when we were very young–before art school–but now with a world of experience, learning and seeing embedded in our lives and memories.

Seven years ago I found out that my cognitive and sight problems were due to multiple sclerosis. It was a bit shocking but a relief as well, to finally understand what was happening. In fact what was happening was that the meditative process was eroding. It’s to the point now where I rarely experience it. That was my epiphany sitting and listening to Mses. Baird, Rieder and Springer. I don’t think you’ll find this described in the medical literature. I doubt the doc community would find this to be a serious disability. But it’s a robbery nonetheless, albeit not definable like sight loss, limb weakness and the host of other neuro-goodies. I’ve been burgled and that’s somewhere between serious and irritating, I reckon. I am a person who makes art. If I am not, then I am a person that_________…? And so I devise strategies to substitute my heretofore zen state of creativity. Here is a problem of an invisible disability, further, specific to me being an artist (though I’m sure it affects everyone who is creative and thoughtful in its own unique way.) But I’ve got the need to make art and, as such, will find my way back. Reader, we’ve all got something ailing us, right? I’ve lost the negative space.

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