Art is the seeker and the sought

Art is the seeker and the sought

This spread in ink and watercolor, each 8″ x 10″, was made for a collaborative project where Laura Jaworski invited multiple artists to contribute a visual interpretation of her quotations about art and creativity. Working on this made me think about what art and imagination mean to me…

The Dreamer and the Dream

The right-hand illustration shows the flourishing imagination of a creative mind — the child doodles in a sketchbook and over these giant pieces of paper where she can stamp on paint with her own hands, and her mind is roaming free. The tree she has drawn on paper grows into real branches in her imagination; the scene of the traveller in the desert that she has just read in a book enters her dream; and the ocean of space and water in her vision flows out beyond the confines of her sketchbook in powerful waves. 

Message in a Bottle

The waves that come alive from the imagination of the child flows across the page into the left-hand illustration, carrying the pages of her sketchbook with them. The fish that she drew pops out of the pages, forming a trail of bubbles, and in this world of transformations, they soon splash out of the water and turns into birds. There is a whirl of leaves in the air — leaves of pages and imagined leaves materializing into this dream world. The old, abandoned boat on the cliff could be the trace of a traveller that reached their destination years ago, or the sign of a beginning of a new adventure. 

The message in the bottle has a special significance for me. When I drew it, I had this passage from Neil Gaiman’s Art Matters in mind: 

“A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back.”

You never know whether that “message in a bottle” would ever reach anyone or come to anything, but you keep on putting it out to sea anyway. And even if no one finds it, what you put in each bottle can show you new things, or carry you away like the waves…

Imagination

Together, these illustrations show a landscape of the imagination when one is absorbed in the process of making art. The journey is embodied in the art. And the destination — the purpose and the meaning — is embodied in the journey.