Dec 13, 2022·edited Dec 13, 2022Liked by Sophie Strand
I have been at a loss to describe what I've been feeling and why I seem immobilized and unwilling to create using the tools that are familiar to me. Something in me is reaching toward something I cannot yet see and I feel the transformative dance. While there is euphoric joy at times, it would be dishonest to say the experience has been pleasant.
There are other reference points throughout history to the creative process you describe, such as Michelangelo's depiction of the Ignudi in the Sistine Chapel, but duende (and how you describe it here) is very illuminating and comfortting. Thank you for this.
This really articulates something I've been feeling... I definitely feel artmaking as an extension of life's drive to proliferate. How else to explain why the drive to create is such a primal and intense force? Sometimes as I'm spending hours meticulously covering a surface with tiny paper lichen I am amused by the thought that the lichen in my ecosystem might be using me for their own artistic purposes.
This is wonderful and a thread I have been following while in a creative reimagining of my art and life. There are gritty, hagish, dark soil smeared forces from within and not from without that I hear calling and feel pulling me. Duende seems a good metaphor
The duende! I have been struggling to recall this word! It popped up on one of your talks recently with one of the magicians you invited to dance and I have been swimming deliciously yet disturbingly ever since in its glowing afterbirth without an anchor. At last, a word to help temporarily contain the uncontainable while I/we drift into the Forest to bow before the World Tree sprouting upwards from the bones of that which went before. May we all be hollow bones.... Time is Art.
I have been at a loss to describe what I've been feeling and why I seem immobilized and unwilling to create using the tools that are familiar to me. Something in me is reaching toward something I cannot yet see and I feel the transformative dance. While there is euphoric joy at times, it would be dishonest to say the experience has been pleasant.
There are other reference points throughout history to the creative process you describe, such as Michelangelo's depiction of the Ignudi in the Sistine Chapel, but duende (and how you describe it here) is very illuminating and comfortting. Thank you for this.
Thanks, again and again Sophie. You have helped me clear up what my art ought to be, and that I must allow it by stepping out of its way.
This really articulates something I've been feeling... I definitely feel artmaking as an extension of life's drive to proliferate. How else to explain why the drive to create is such a primal and intense force? Sometimes as I'm spending hours meticulously covering a surface with tiny paper lichen I am amused by the thought that the lichen in my ecosystem might be using me for their own artistic purposes.
This is wonderful and a thread I have been following while in a creative reimagining of my art and life. There are gritty, hagish, dark soil smeared forces from within and not from without that I hear calling and feel pulling me. Duende seems a good metaphor
The duende! I have been struggling to recall this word! It popped up on one of your talks recently with one of the magicians you invited to dance and I have been swimming deliciously yet disturbingly ever since in its glowing afterbirth without an anchor. At last, a word to help temporarily contain the uncontainable while I/we drift into the Forest to bow before the World Tree sprouting upwards from the bones of that which went before. May we all be hollow bones.... Time is Art.