Statement of Intent

                                           James Lord

"When we trace back the roots of the artist's evolution, we rediscover in his being the various incarnations, or aspects of hero which man has always represented himself to be - king, warrior, saint, magician, priest, etc. The process is a long and devious one. It is all a conquest of fear."

                                             Henry Miller

In Rollo May's book, The Courage to Create, he quotes Marshall McLuhan's description of artists as the "...dew line", because they give us a " distant early warning" of what is happening to our culture.

MEANING

I believe that the direct confrontation between the painting and the viewer provides the most authentic context for understanding. The observer is, as Rollo May has said, "...experiencing some new moment of sensibility. Some new vision is triggered in us by our contact with the painting; something unique is born in us."

There are problems with viewing the art of today. Because the "meaning" is not always easily understood, there arise critics who claim to understand what the artist is "really" saying. Unfortunately, the search for the meaning of contemporary art has often served to muddy the act of confrontation between the art work and the observer. A lot of meaningless nonsense has been written that claims to uncover the meaning behind this or that art work. By focusing so much attention on this search for meaning, I think that we may have trivialized the act of looking at art. There are many other things going on that are way beyond merely trying to verbalize a "meaning". Susan Sontag has written about this problem.

EXPLORATION

In making a work of art I am attempting to reach for that which unites us, that which reveals us to each other and that which reveals our connection to the earth. I believe that nature remains our best teacher when we are trying to discover new images.

THE SPIRITUAL IN ART

Some friends recently gave me a book by Madeleine L'Engle - Walking on Water - Reflections on Faith and Art that speaks intelligently of the person of faith who has chosen a creative life. The author also wrote A Wrinkle in Time, which some of you may know. A couple of quotes from the book really made sense to me:

"It is the Heart that is not yet sure of its God that is afraid to laugh in His presence."

                                          George MacDonald

"It is a great mistake to think that God is chiefly interested in religion."

                                          William Temple

If you are perhaps wondering what is the connection between laughter and painting, it is that both derive from the largely hidden part of ourselves that emanates from the left side of our brain, and so are both part of the world of poetry, music, dance, laughter, art, and story telling. This leads me to think of some remarks that Henry Miller made in his book of essays The Wisdom of the Heart (New Directions Books 1941):

"The art of living is based on rhythm, on give and take, ebb and flow, light and dark, life and death. By acceptance of all the aspects of life, good and bad, right and wrong, yours and mine, the static, defensive life, which is what most people are cursed with, is converted into a dance, 'the dance of life', as Havelock Ellis called it. The real function of dance is - metamorphosis. to sorrow or to joy; one can even dance abstractly.... But the point is that, by the mere act of dancing, the elements which compose it are transformed; the dance is an end in itself, just like life. The acceptance of any situation, brings about a flow, a rhythmic impulse towards self-expression...It is the religious view of life: the positive acceptance of pain, suffering, defeat, misfortune and so on. It is the long way round, which has always proved to be the shortest way after all. This is the path of wisdom, and the one that must be taken eventually, because all the others only lead to it."

DIONYSIAN/APOLLONIAN

Another quote from May: "The Dionysian and the Apollonian must be related to each other. Dionysian vitality rests on this question: What manner of encounter releases the vitality? What particular relation to landscape or inner vision or idea heightens the consciousness and brings forth the intensity?" The very basic issues of creativity are addressed within it's parameters.

REMEMBERING

The act of painting is also a way I have of reaffirming my authenticity. It is a process for expressing the power of human spirituality. It is about my connection to the surface of a piece of cotton canvas, which represents the physical world of which I am an integral part, with which I enjoy a cellular similarity. This similarity, this familial connection, goes deeper than the biochemistry we share. It derives from the beginning, from the act of creation before which we were all one. So, in the most elemental sense, we are still all one. We have separate existences, but we share a common ancestry, a common birth, so we are kin. This kinship includes all beings, and the whole of nature. To be aware of this kinship is to remember our natural selves, to remain authentic beings.

MEMORY AND ECOLOGY

A writer named Barry Lopez has written of the psychologically symbiotic relationship we all have with the environment where we spent most of our life. The relative humidity of the air on the skin, the degree of warmth of the sun at a particular latitude, the curve of the earth and the temperature and color of the water - all these are imprinted in the mind and the being. I think these are part of the collective memory we carry from our creation as a world.

My work explores the nature of the relationship of human beings with the natural world, and with the consequences of losing the sense of that connection. It is an important aspect of being human, this connection with the part of the earth where we came to consciousness. I know that it provides me with a type of rootedness in a real place, and gives me a virtual plane from which I can depict actions in space.

FEAR

"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."

					James Joyce

Rollo May, in his book The Courage to Create, says many wise things about the courage it takes to be creative. He describes this type of courage as "...the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns which a new society can be built."

Each creative act carries with it the possibility of failure, and each artist has to face down this fear and overcome it with every creative attempt.

PROUST

This quote from Marcel Proust was drawn to my attention by an article about German artists:

The greatness of true art is to rediscover, to make ourselves fully aware of that reality, remote from our daily occupations, from which we separate ourselves...

But art, if it means awareness of our own life, means also awareness of the lives of other people -... It is only through art that we are able to go outside ourselves, to know what another person sees in this universe which is not the same as our own...

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, send us still each one its special radiance.