"Dance with the movement that your manifestation has created for you."
"The artist as the sole creator motivated by a desire for self-expression."
* ART FOR ART'S SAKE
Notebook
Be careful where you step. Everything here is important.
In his vast sculpture studio in Roxbury, Connecticut, Alexander Calder made it clear that what seemed to be clutter was in fact highly organized chaos. Calder admonished me in a friendly but emphatic tone, busying himself with snipping at a triangular piece of metal from which he was fashioning the prototype of some future stabile. Works in progress were strewn about, although Calder knew exactly where everything was. [page 22]
Filled from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall with his creations, the Roxbury house was more like a craft museum than a home. Believing it almost a sin to buy something he could make himself, Sandy would drop anything he was involved in, no matter how important, and beat out a roasting pan for Louisa or fashion a large-capacity serving ladle or a sieve. This do-it-yourself dictum was undoubtedly a carryover from their earlier, leaner days, but it had become an obsession with Sandy. [page 32]
Louisa's hand in the Calder household was obvious. She infused colors into the stark surroundings made the interiors stunning. Working on designs that Sandy drew on canvas, Louisa hooked rugs that complemented the paintings and artwork of their genius friends. The floors were Louisa's, the ceiling belonged to Sandy, and their friends festooned the walls. From Louisa's sensibility came the objects and the wares and the plants that filled the surfaces. [page 41]
There were no limits to Sandy's inspirations when it came to making jewelry for Louisa. He fashioned rings and earrings, bracelets and belt buckles, broaches and combs for her. Earrings might be small animals and insects or tiny mobiles. From initials to fancy swirls, his brooches often intertwined gold, silver, or brass with small stones or pieces of colored glass. Like his rings, they could be marvels of one-piece simplicity. Louisa displayed some of these unique creations over her dresser in Roxbury. The peasant blouses and colorful native fabrics she bought while traveling in Mexico, South America, and India made wonderful backgrounds for this wearable art. [page 44]
Excerpted from Calder at Home. The Joyous Environment of Alexander Calder by Pedro E. Guerrero
For more, visit: CALDER FOUNDATION
Jewelry is the artistic sublimation of a natural human urge.
"The enjoyment of beauty produces a particular, mildly intoxicating kind of sensation. There is no very evident use in beauty: the necessity of it for cultural purposes is not apparent, and yet civilization could not do without it. The science of aesthetics investigates the conditions in which things are regarded as beautiful; it can give no explanation of the nature or origin of beauty; as usual, its lack of results is concealed under a flood of resounding and meaningless words. Unfortunately, psychoanalysis, too, has less to say about beauty than about most things. Its derivation from the realms of sexual sensation is all that seems certain; love of beauty is a perfect example of a feeling with an inhibited aim. Beauty and attraction are first of all the attributes of a sexual object."
That is what Sigmund Freud wrote in his essay "Civilization and Its Discontents." And his words serve very well as an introduction to the question as to why we wear jewels. In fact, beauty and sexual attraction are two of the attributes man seeks to attain by self-adornment.
But if jewelry is worn primarily for the sake of beauty and sexual attraction, we shall see in the course of our investigation that there are other factors in our relationship with jewelry. In fact, jewelry must always be considered as closely related to the wearer; like clothing, it is only that relationship that brings it to life. In nature, beauty and the sexual instinct go hand in hand as a matter of course; in human society jewelry is their point of coincidence. Jewelry is the artistic sublimation of a natural human urge. This concept is amply confirmed by examples provided by the history of civilization, literature, and tradition.
- Ernst A. and Jean Heiniger, The Great Book of Jewels
pina :: a film for pina bausch by wim wenders
Press play to view Official International Trailer.
Meeting Pina was like finding a language finally.
Before I didn't know how to talk,
and then she suddenly gave me a way to express myself - a vocabulary.
When I began I was pretty shy. I still am.
And after many months of rehearsing, she called me, and said,
"You just have to get crazier."
And that was the only comment in almost 20 years.
Pina was a painter.
She consistently questioned us.
That's how we became the paint, to color her images.
For example, she'd ask for "the moon"?
I depicted the word with my body
So that she could see and feel it.
Sometimes she said things like:
"Go on searching!"
But that was all she said.
It meant you had to keep searching,
without knowing where to look,
nor whether you were on the right track.
Pina was a radical explorer.
She looked deep into our souls.
There was one particular subject she kept asking us about:
What are we longing for?
Where does all this yearning come from?
Click to visit the official webpage : http://www.pina-film.de/en/
"Dance for love." - Pina
NEO-TANTRA
The most important concept found in the tantras is the necessity of unifying (ceasing to separate) apparent opposites in order to attain enlightenment. These opposites are usually represented as male energy (Shiva) and female energy (Shakti) or as the individual (purusha) and nature (prakriti). Thus the equality, or complementarity, of male and female is a foremost aspect of tantric practice, as the union of both is required in order to achieve the highest understanding.
According to the tantras, male and female (or the individual and nature) are not really separate, but are only seen that way from the viewpoint of worldly phenomena. When one has achieved a state of perfect enlightenment the two will be seen as completely integrated. In fact the equilibrium of the two is considered to be the very nature of truth.
[Sharma, L.N. Kashmir Saivism. Varanasi: Bharatiya Vrdya Prakasham, 1972.]
Cosmic Art by Piper/Piper/Swann (published 1975)
EMIL BISTTRAM
The artist must be a philosopher, a psychologist, a student through his entire life. The search for knowledge, not only of one's craft but of one's self and the world around, is necessary to his growth and to the maturity of his art.
Emil Bisttram, Oversoul, c. 1941, oil on masonite, 36" x 27"
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York
Emil Bisttram, Cosmic Egg Series no. 1 (Creative Forces) , c. 1936, oil on canvas, 36" x 27"
Private Collection
Bisttram considered this one of his most important works.
[images and words sourced from emil-bisttram.com]
Emil Bisttram’s artistic career is of special interest because of the fascinating array of spiritual, philosophical, and scientific traditions he brought to bear on his painting. Profoundly spiritual and convinced that all intellectual disciplines lead to divine truth, Bisttram enriched his compositions with references to such varied subjects as electricity, rebirth, the growth of plants, the healing power of the dance, planetary forces, the fourth dimension, and the male and female principles of nature.
Bisttram’s essential goal in building his compositions, however, was personal redemption. For Bisttram, dividing space on a blank sheet of paper replicated such proportional divisions as were made by the Creator when He separated day from night, and earth from water. Bisttram’s essential belief was that harmony was proportional, and that making harmonious, proportional divisions on a sheet of paper was a productive, life-giving, redemptive enterprise that combated negativity and disharmony.
The manner that Bisttram used to proportionally divide his compositions was dynamic symmetry, a method of picture composition based on Euclidean geometry developed by Jay Hambidge (1867-1924). Bisttram used dynamic symmetry for the structure of his representational, abstract (cubist and futurist), and transcendental (non-objective) compositions. For Bisttram, dynamic symmetry functioned as a compass that guided him through the many stylistic experiments he undertook, and provides the essential coherency for his work as a whole.
Twyla Tharp - The Creative Habit
“The most productive artists I know have a plan in mind when they get down to work. They know what they want to accomplish, how to do it, and what to do if the process falls off track. But there’s a fine line between good planning and overplanning. You never want the planning to inhibit the natural evolution of your work.”