The Oak Against The Storm

 

Violence: forceful behaviour with the intention to hurt, injure, abuse, damage, or destroy.

My efforts to create content for people of any age and culture has strengthened. I avoid expressing or condoning violence, although at times my work presents the consequences of it: sadness, trauma, poverty, and homelessness. Violence of any kind, of the mind or body, is the antithesis of love.

With over six hundred kinds of oak in the world, when you make, stand as an oak against the storm.

Pain and Art

 

Pain is something I feel. There are certain kinds of physical pain I find difficult to shake. My only defence against sustained pain is through loosing myself: in a place, person, or activity.

When I view a painting of a person in pain, I am invited to feel empathy. The representation is but a weak shadow of the original intense experience. I look on, wince, or look away.

Pain is at its most when personal. Perhaps art, music, and language must also be so to convey it well.

Sand and The Memory of Myself

 

When children find themselves by fine wet sand, one of the first things they do is to press their open hands into it. They pull back and look at something only they can leave. This is their hollow proof to change the world, the affirmation of existence at a time and place. I continue to enjoy walking bare foot on a beech of sand laid silky smooth by the falling sea.

In part, I make in hope the memory of myself is not washed clean by the coming tide.