Thoth Painting

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” Roald Dahl Like most things nowadays something profound has to be reduced to a sound bite morsel for the convenience of the busy culture consumer! Yes I do find joy in the detritus but it’s not necessarily about anything like that, it’s the hidden magic, making the seemingly irrelevant –relevant; and giving the significance back to things. Making stuff is a magical event, an idea, immaterial, just electrons becomes something material, crystallized in reality, manipulation of matter to change consciousness is the goal of all art. I make things that I would like to see, what I think of as visually beautiful and arresting and hopefully so will others – but the ritual element, the ideas, working with the ideas then committing it to materials is exciting, stirring something up deep inside and hoping that viewers are stirred up by it also. I like that place where ideas float about like balloons just out of reach, and the fact that you can’t necessarily find or use words to anchor them down and give meaning to art like a science project. The doing is the meaning! A work of art is an artifact of the doing! Hopefully sometimes both the doing and the artifact have equal potency, that’s the measurement for me. I am aware of the shamanic overtones, but it doesn’t have to be all twigs and mud, I use the things in the world at large to inspire me, it may be bright and shiny or covered in dust, I just want to make people look firstly, then for something to seep into the conscious mind from the unconscious bit and maybe take a mental excursion to somewhere good that informs the viewer about how profound and significant it can all be in any given moment. “I remember Eno saying that you only have to look at how high a priority art was in terms of human life to understand that it has to be there for a reason. I mean, when we descend from the trees, we find something to eat, we find somewhere to sleep, we find a warm place to shit, and then we go out and we draw a picture on a wall explaining how we found the stuff to eat, the place to sleep, the warm place to shit. Art is about our fourth survival priority. And one can only assume that it therefore must have importance.