Tag: self-examination

The true avant-garde is internal

Sometimes artists approach me for creative guidance.

Sometimes this happens out of frustration with their creative process, sometimes simply to get an outside perspective. In those instances, I try to help them direct their attention towards what matters most.

Quite often, this means leaning more into the parts of their work that requires them to let go of frameworks, reasoning, guardrails. It even means letting go of any preconceived aesthetics and notions of beauty and desireability. Often, what matters most and touches us most is not something that fulfills our expectations, but that subverts them.

In my own processes over the years, in which I’ve had and continue to have the blessing of many wise teachers and guides, I have consistently found those moments the most rewarding and illuminating.

This is why the explorations into AI imagery are so important to me right now. They require me to let go of all knowledge, skill and technique, and simply explore. This means to first go wide – find something that resonates – and then go deep: iterate beyond any reasonable point until the real gems emerge.

“To find a gem that shines in darkness you must venture deep into the cave.”

In that spirit I’d like to share a selection of images that make me uncomfortable, that at times make me want to look away in disgust. Yet they still fascinate me in a way I had probably intuited in myself, but that I have never been able to explore before.

The true avant-garde is internal.

More images on my Facebook page.

Where I’m coming from

( … among other places.)

Once when I was a little child, I was at my father’s parents’ house when a friend of theirs brought a beautiful shining crystal. Their friend, my grandparents explained to me, was a Strahler – a mountaineer and a seeker of crystals and gemstones. What a vocation! I was enchanted, and for a while, when asked what I wanted to become later in life, I answered that I would be a Strahler. And, by another route, isn’t that what I became? Or what I realized I already was?

What’s more, the verb strahlen in German means to shine brighly, to radiate, and, when ascribed to a person, to beam. I am reminded of that whenever I meet someone who has stepped into their vocation and embodies their true self – something I’m working to move ever closer to.

These kinds of ruminations take courage to share, as they may seem self-absorbed or creating a story in hindsight. But first, better to author your own story and create meaning in your life. And second, more and more I find that one of the artist’s (and the teaching artist’s) jobs is to look within and learn about who they are so they can nurture it and bring it to bear in their work, and so may inspire others to do the same.

Here’s something that I wrote last year when I was in the middle of an exploration that I hope to pick up soon, and the above memory was on my mind: Notes for the current and future expeditions.

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