Birds in summertime Print

To paint, to experience, to breath in - a career diplomat on ART "You may call it an escape. Far from it. A cadre, a career diplomat, doubling as an artist. A transcendence, rather, an "other way of keeping a diary", as Picasso would have put it. A life devoted to sticking to the minutiae of officialdom. And, at the same time, a life of constant uprooting, of travelling, meeting and conversing with the new. Oh, yes, a life rich in new experiences, of challenges to come to terms with the new, the 'other'. At the same time, a life full of constant creative impulses, to aesthetically transcend difference, to humanise environments, to colour the alien in uplifting hues. To listen and talk, in colour and shape." "Whether the creative urge was there, seeking opportunities to express itself, or constantly unravelling new realities around implant it as a coping mechanism, this is a superficial questioning. There is something deeper, more personal, and at the same time so universal, so intrinsically human, in absorbing new landscapes and faces, through pigment and drawing, as an internal landscaping, arranging the world as an own experience, what my Greek ancestors would have termed it mimesis, and oikeiosis. After all, art is not what one does, but what one is. In creating, perhaps we flirt with the divine in us. Art may well be the most deeply ingrained intimation of immortality, to recreate worlds being nothing else, but recreating the human presence in them. For, that which saves me is beauty, imparting on my human flesh duration and that lasting urge, that is the urge of immortality. A thing of beauty, Keats had as well put it, is a thing for ever. There in lives the artist, life endlessly unravelling as a diary in pigment. Intimations of immortality. In shape and colour." www.facebook.com/stavrosavgoustidesart