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Artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to a conflict in which the highest values of humanity and civilization are at stake.
–Pablo Picasso
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I always worry about alienating people who come to this blog to read about art and are greeted with my opinions and beliefs on the world. But reading the words above from Pablo Picasso this morning reminds me that my art is a product of all that I am and all that I witness in this world. I like to think that the work is about the human spirit and emotion. As such, I can’t remain indifferent or ignore those things that set off my emotional alarms nor those that eat away at what I see as the collective human spirit that we all share.
Thinking this made me look for another blog entry that I wrote just a couple of years back that featured some other words from Picasso as well the painting above, his masterpiece Guernica.
Here it is:
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Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.
—Pablo Picasso
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Many of my favorite artists worked and produced their greatest works in times where the world was under great stress. Two World Wars only decades apart and– in the case of Picasso– the Spanish Civil War in between. Here, we had the Great Depression. Times of social transformation and spiritual upheaval. Even when the work didn’t overtly deal with the events of the day, much of the work reflected on the collective consciousness of that time.
I think that is so because art is, just as Picasso so succinctly states, a lie that makes us realize the truth.
Artists fabricate, often creating work that is on its surface pure fantasy with little relation to the world as others might observe it. But their fabrication is made up from everything that impacts them– their knowledge, their observations, their opinions and emotions. Artists take in the world and create something that seems like a pure fabrication.
A lie.
But what seems the lie often proves to be built of ultimate truths, just constructed in a manner that allows others to see this truth clearly.
I don’t know that we artists always succeed. I certainly don’t feel that I do as often as I would like. But when a piece succeeds and shows us something far beyond what its surface represents, it is a true revelation.
Believing that, so long as we feel deeply and continue to create our lies, we will at some point reveal a truth.
Got to get to work now…
Redtree Times 