"Wilderness of the Inner Life"
Description
I’ve waked into the separate
Wilderness of age,
Where the old, libidinous
beasts assume familiar shapes,
pretending to be tamed.
Stanley Kunitz, Racoon Journal
To re-structure images abstracted by way of the unconscious as in painting, or artistic format, provides a remarkable conceptual sensitivity and clarity. It purposes most eerily that a life can be lived through its physical and universal presence.
From artistic thought and its process, my history could be best written with images formed by way of composition and structure, not specific dates, people, family, friends, religious, secular, education or teaching requirements. An art life is not, nor cannot be, measured by failures, successes, sanity, insanity, desires, deduction or legitimacy.
The unconscious is very much akin to what, in other frameworks, I call wilderness. It resists the forms, the limits, restraints that civilization itself imposes. I’ve always felt, even as a child, that there was the decorum of the social structure, the family structure, and so forth, and then there was the wild permissiveness of the inner life.
There’s no formula for accessing the unconscious. The more you enter into the unconscious life, the more you believe in its existence and know it walks with you, the more available it becomes and the doors open faster and longer. It learns you are a friendly host.
Rather than writing history, the Painter’s work may best reveal the "wildness of the inner life," with intrepid consequence.
I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.
The Round
I am not done with my changes.
The Layers
Quotes from "The Wild Braid," by Stanley Kunitz
Studio Assistants: Joe Serna and Karen Chapman
Studio space provided by Todd Green,
Aromatic Fillers, Custom Scented Candles
Greenfield, MA