Where You Are Is Who You Are

By the time I was 18 I had moved 18 times, at 29 I have totalled 27 moves, I have only a few more to meet my age again. Today I find myself longing for a home, not a place to live but a home, resonating in warmth and safety a place to set myself out and gather myself up.

Frances Mayes writes "Where you are is who you are. The further inside you the place moves, the more your identity is intertwined with it. Never casual, the choice of place is the choice of something you crave." Perhaps the transience of the places that I have chosen in my life are a reflection of a need for freedom or more correctly my need to continually be starting over and renewing. Unfortunately the choice has had the opposite effect and I find myself peeled away and left behind in so many makeshift homes that I barely exist as I want to anymore.

These thoughts have me piecing together fragments of an ideal home although a shaky image they have strong feeling. Streaming sunlight through sparkling windows, clean whites tones with earthy reds and oranges. Mint tea brewing a conversation with the succulents on the window sill. Brazilian music winding it's way around the house, fresh carrots and greens humming along in the garden. Day's spent in galoshes, a desk looking on a wall of images, lovingly collected and haphazardly pinned. Provocatively red tomatoes topped with mozzarella and basil, spelt banana bread baking a sweet pungent smell and me playing in the yard.

The Power Of Words

Fragrant wisps of chicken soup are penetrating my deeply clogged nasal passages as I write this tucked up in bed and generally dying with what appears to be a severe cold. As fast as the day snapped into a rigid 17 degrees a cold has descended over me and taken firm hold.

I am a bit lost, the last few weeks have seemed formless, this or that has prevented me from getting into any sort of routine and my sense of continuity has been broken, this packaged with endless days of waiting has me in something of a muddle. If nothing else it is usually books that give my days structure, I look forward to the onward motion of their stories and the continuity of their essence. In that regard I have also fallen in limbo finding myself unable to get into anything with real commitment.

I went back to an old favourite this evening, Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes, I first read this book when I was 18 and still list it as one of my most loved , the tale that started my dreams of walking the Tuscan hills and of growing a feast in my garden, cooking pasta from scratch and sharing a table with friends under dappled vine leaves. Although I can't remember much of the story the mood and feeling it created are still deep within me. Frances Mayes gave me my first young glimpse of the ideal life I would like to live.

Even tonight at it's beginning pages I felt the need to leap out of bed and investigate the alchemy of the soup that is lingeringly teasing me, to take in the tantalizing smells and sights of my humble existence as she has hers. I am constantly amazed at the gifts that writers bring to our lives that I can have drawn a map for my soul or been inspired to reframe my day just by reading tells me the true power of words in our world.

Waiting To Take Off

Over the last couple of weeks I have begun to realise more and more that I must write what I think rather than forcing myself to think about something to write. At the moment I feel like I am stranded in a small airport. I have been planning my future destination, the completion of renovations, finding our own little abode and having a baby - they are the exotic locations I hope to be at. Although my bags are packed and I have my ticket in hand, the plane keeps getting delayed, grouded or I am caught mid pee while the last boarding call is being announced. At any rate I am waiting not at all patiently for my life to take of.

The brief respite from all this waiting has been my daily walks, among bustling commuters, halting traffic and a general atmosphere of things drawing to a close, I feel like things are just opening up. I maze through my suburb and then amble to the park, I walk one side on the path and other through the grass, softly greeting a patch of trees I adopted a few years ago. A slight wind stirs the dense wet autumn air, the ground is sodden with the masses of rain that have been failing daily. My world which has compacted during the day begins to unfurl with each step and by the end I am expanisve again connected the wider world and the even wider universe.

The theme of the last few days has been waiting, about patience and about staying calm in the face of a life whirling uncomfortably around me. Since waiting and the uncertainity that the wait brings are things I have never really been good at, it has been a challenging time and not one I feel like I am getting on top of. I find myself taking small sips of idle dreams rather than the large gulps of life I would like to be drinking down.

I sadly realised this morning that since my destination seems so far away and my airport is small I am feeling rather uninspired and passive about life. Nothing is turning me out of bed in the morning, I am just killing time and it is too precious for homicide. I am not really sure what to do from here, get a new job, take a course, start writing more seriously? Nothing is quite fitting the bill at the moment....what I wonder am I meant do with this time and these emotions.

Please Explain!

A little while ago while doing an exercise from The Right to Write by Julia Cameron, Cameron asked me to imagine that I was sitting under a tree next to my story teller and I could ask him to tell me any story my heart desired to hear. Almost unconsciously my fingers started moving across the keyboard and I found myself typing, 'I want to hear a story that makes me love art again', as soon as I had written them the words brought up a well of emotion and I started to cry I realised that I did indeed want to hear such a story.

Before I started art school, looking at art for me was like reading the traffic signs of my life, it gave me the directions to my soul. It was a heartfelt communication that led me to believe that perhaps being apart of and around art was what I was meant to be doing with my life. After the ups of art school and the downs of looking for a job in the arts, I was left mostly disillusioned. Art had become a casual acquaintance rather than a loving friend. When I really thought about it I had started to feel about art the way that I had heard many people around me relate to it, I just didn't get it anymore and I felt locked out.

It was after this that I decided to write a book about art, about engaging with art as a means to not only show people how to just hang and have a good old chin wag with art, but also as means to reintroduce myself to art and start looking at it the way I used to, with wonder and openness. After one chapter about my own experience with art and the art world, I moved onto the next titled 'That's Not Art, What is Art?' and was completely stuck. It was then that I decided to write about it on my blog to get the juices flowing.

Hope this clears up the sudden detour the blog has taken. Not sure if I will continue with the essay would love some feedback and then I will keep going.

Art Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

To get to the ball rolling for this essay I decided to look up art in my trusty Collins Australian School Dictionary which I have in fact had since high school. I have kept it all these years because I find a calming simplicity to its definitions, and it doesn't fail me with art. Collins believes art to be "....the creation of objects such as paintings and sculptures, which are thought to be beautiful or which express a particular idea". To my surprise I find that I couldn't agree more. Except that the examples of art forms may need a large extension to include, photography, performance, happenings, installations, and even lives. Art definitely has something to do with beauty and expressing ideas. What I like about this definition is it's broadness, since beauty and ideas are individual to each person so it allows art to be.

If you were hoping for something a little tighter I hate to disappoint you, but I wish to point out some of the reasons why it is not only impossible but ill advised to have a limited definition of art. The biggest problem with having a set and printed definition of art to follow when I walk into a gallery is that it immediately disempowers me. It gives me a frame which I must look through instead of allowing my own context and views to form that frame. The issue is someone else would be making the decisions for me, and who exactly should that be? Should artists, galleries or universities decide and would they not have a bias and agenda in coming to a definition as would, men, women or any particular race and nationality. To gain any kind of consensus would be impossible, and to trust others to control our view of the world ill advised.

The other big problem with defining art is that any definition would be limited to its time and technology, if cave men had set the definition of art as "paintings on cave walls representing human and animal figures made with natural pigments", thousands of years later we would not have the juicy and exciting digital art forms and narratives that we enjoy today. Not to mention merely the varying physical perspectives, tall buildings, aeroplanes, speeding cars and trains have given us.

When you really think about it, giving art any sort of definition in terms of forms or types of expression would make it very boring, a limited definition would result in a limited output. If art gives us anything it is a constantly evolving way to understand the world around us and a solid reflection of the cultural nuances of our past.

Stay tuned tomorrow for "What does 'that's not art' really mean

Art: Definition Please!

The question of what is art could not be further from my mind, life has been busy, incredibly busy, time like never before seems to be racing away from me and my head is a bulging sock and undie draw at the moment, all useful stuff but no real order. Reviewing just how busy life has been reminds me that 'what is art' is perhaps a more important question than I imagined, at a time when my thoughts are as functional as cotton underwear, perhaps bringing art into my life might make it feel a little less utilitarian. I liked Warhol's analogy of the department store and the gallery, it means that art can be and is everywhere and it is the observer who is artful rather than the work.

But seriously I wonder is it possible to go through life like you would a gallery in hallowed silence and challenged wonderment, would you even want to? And if art becomes everything in our lives what happens to the gallery does it serve any purpose? I can see here that I am asking more questions than I am answering. To be honest I starting writing this book about art out of questions that people constantly asked me, and to be honest again no one has actually ever asked me what art is, what they have told me often and vehemently is 'that this not art'. I could only presume for people to have such a strong understanding of what is not art, there must be a solid understanding of what is art. After four years of art school and further mulling over the question, I can really only tell you what 'I' think art is, and I believe if we really took the time to think about it, every one's answer would be completely different.

I have been stuck in writing this essay for a long time, after I finally committed myself to writing about it on my blog, I discovered why, underneath my reasonably calm willingness to discuss art, was a nasty voice telling me that quite frankly I didn't know what the hell I was talking about, and questioning who the hell I was to be defining art. I have only broken through to write this, because I truly believe that everybody has a right to define art and that it is only through the consensus of artists, galleries, critics and the public that art can be defined, and that this definition should be and is different for everyone and that everyone within their context is completely right. Were to follow this method of creating a definition art would organic growing and changing as our environment, society and culture does, our definition of art would be held within our own context taking into account our very personal journeys and histories.

The only sticky point in this business is this 'that's not art statement' which quickly cuts down what other's believe to be art and demands that the boundaries of art be somehow drawn closed to disallow this or that work. I guess in the larger scheme of things human beings are classifying animals our whole science is based on classification and ordering, naming and defining things, it makes a chaotic life seem somehow under control. To have this aberration called art that is constantly breaking out of its own boundaries, questioning itself and us can feel something like torture, as soon as we think we have got it down it goes and starts changing. If only we had a definition we could better control and classify it, it could not be challenged and we could understand it implicitly.

Unfortunately despite being a keen area of study within the creative arts for hundreds of years, the wheat and the chaff are yet to be separated and a set definition of art remains rather elusive. Art not having a standard definition is both it’s biggest problem and its greatest possibility, if artists were not to challenge our conventional views on art, then things would always stay the same and we would still be looking at staid portraits of the royal families and dramatic religious scenes for all time. In order for art to progress it needs to be limitless and since art is a human response to the world and humans have such varying and different views, giving art a solid definition would prelude it’s creative and exciting nature.

Stay tuned tomorrow "The Problems with Defining Art"

What is Art?

My writing has wound down lately, beside a few entries in this blog and my journal it has ground almost to a halt. I have hidden it in the folds of life like you would an article in a notebook, something important to keep but not urgent enough to be dealt with now. Largely its been a matter of not knowing what to write. I want to listen to Julia Cameron and write what I think about, but would the same register of 30 or so thoughts really make for entertaining reading. Deciding that I needed to fertilize my mind, Greg and I went to the Andy Warhol exhibition at GOMA Brisbane on the weekend.

The show was absolutely exhilarating, it was like being in an amusement park, grocery store, celebrity party and gallery all at the same time. I had intended to use Warhol to illustrate my essay titled 'That's not art, What is art?'. I was inspired by a Christmas camping trip conversation about art that centred on Andy Warhol's soup cans and how they could not possibly be considered art. Warhol certainly was the father of pushing the limits of art, he once said that art galleries are like department stores. There are several connections you could draw, art as commodity, the mass marketing and consumption of art, I like to think that he meant that everything can be art depending on your context and by context I don't mean a gallery I mean your mind. It liberates art from something that needs to be housed in a gallery shrouded in the complexity of art history and transforms our everyday into art.

I want to the write the essay from a really personal perspective, like a conversation you would have with a friend as you walked around the gallery, but the conversation is stuck and I can't seem to get further in my mind that the paragraph I have above. I have so many things to say but no fluid way in which to say them. Cameron says writing is so much more the act than the words and I know that I have to just sit down and write. Thus I am making the declaration here and now that I will write a little each day next week and post it as as I go.