More than Art

More than art, my interest is what delights the mind. 

What delight it are ideas, but not just any idea. The idea that delights has to grab the mind and not just grab it but grab it totally. The idea must take center stage and squeeze out everything else.

Where there is delight there is attention. The mind attends to what seduces it into delight and the mind "sees."

I have been exploring the way of images to counterbalance the emphasis I have always placed on words and concepts. Images are a more complex expression of ideas in the mind. Many times words fail. Concepts fall short. They only represent what the mind sees but does not comprehend it. Images by their very ambiguity allow various interpretations. Ideas, as Plato also conceived it, are primordial, before thought, before the attempts of reason to give solidity to what is inherently immaterial.

For years I've viewed my coming to America as my search for a bigger world, a world not limited by the little that I knew. To understand and live my life more fully I needed a larger ocean so that the mistakes I made would not cause a maelstrom but be a simple ripple in its vastness. As a child I attempted to comprehend experience by tying it to the Christianity of my upbringing. It was only after coming to America that I obtained access to other systems of thought and belief. America gave me access to media - books, movies, television programs, magazines, and, most powerful medium of all, the Internet. Through these I've come to know the many ways that men and women have understood themselves through the millennia and throughout the many parts of the earth they inhabited.

Perhaps my most important discovery in America was Asian  religions and ways of thinking and being. It took my coming to the West to find my East. Never shall the twain meet, wrote Kipling. They are meeting now despite our deaf ears and blind eyes although to only a very few is this realization dawning. We need every part of our heritage as human beings to see more of the whole, what Nikos Kazantzakis caused his protagonist, Zorba the Greek, to call "the whole shebang."

Artists can play a vital role in all of us someday realizing we're all in this together. Art if genuine has to be rooted in something universal in the human spirit. We use the details of our workaday lives to flesh out the universal. What is universal is delight, the joy of our being.