This Blog I started over a year ago has come to an end in a way. It has developed into the next thing.
To be able to undestand where I´m coming from you can probably read the beginning of the blog:
https://walkingindifferentwaysofseeing.blogspot.com/2017_10_02_archive.html
Today I finished updating it and came to this conclusions and understandings... there might be some ideas of use for somebody, so this is why I share.
Thank you for reading,
Best Wishes, Romanie
https://walkingindifferentwaysofseeing.blogspot.com/p/17th-of-august-2018.html
It has been a few months since I have updated this blog.
Life has it´s ways. Circumstances change and one has to adapt to them.
I had to quit doing this exercise in April because I got two months of a lot of work and had to sacrifice my artwork and investigation to be able to continue surviving in this world of matter.
I believe in the fact that, although I didn´t follow the discipline of walking every day and then painting, I did keep a daily space in me for it, to contemplate how I feel about this experience. Take this break to look back on the way this has affected me.
This kind of information doesn´t come just at once by answering a question, it comes though visiting and revisiting the space and each time, getting a part of the puzzle to understand.
One of the most outstanding aspects I have noticed is a general sense of feeling alienated in social situations. I´m not sure if I like that too much. When I was a child I wasn´t very good at social interaction but as I grew up, I taught myself to be better at this. I put effort into it and interest. Now, I realise that for the past few months I have been struggling to feel comfortable in social situations.
I do well in smaller gatherings where I can focus on someone or a subject. When there is a larger gathering and there is chatter I find myself just watching like an outsider.
Having observed this over a large number of times, I am now very aware of it, and try to make the extra effort to “believe” what is going on. (It´s similar to watching a bad movie where you can detect all the exaggeration and flaws. It is really hard to get into a movie like that because you can´t concentrate on the content. )
I find myself working more alone, although I make myself go out and interact. I think this experiment will only be successful when I would be able to switch consciously and deliberately from one state to the other on my demand. So, work in progress.
There is one social situation where I seem to snap out of it, that is when I´m with my children´s art classes. I might get there feeling like that, then, the interaction with them is here and now and is engaging.
During the months of April and May I would sometimes do the walking exercise while I was walking somewhere anyway. No painting after.
Then I went to California for just over a month in June/July.
I never did this exercise while I was there.
I often thought of it and never had the space to do it.
I could have made the space but I preferred to flow with an extremely social time. The reason I went there, was to visit friends, very good friends. I needed to absorb as much of the shared experience with them as possible. I did so.
Funnily enough, as my attention was still revisiting this concept of Walking in Different Ways of Seeing I was getting more aspects of it, learning more about what it is that I was doing instinctively.
Through a series en encounters, conversations and visits to people I bonded with twenty years ago I discovered that Walking in Different Ways of Seeing is a way of doing the same thing I practiced many years ago with Sensing in the Labyrinth Readers Course. The words are even in the title and I hadn´t dawned on this till I, in a way, closed this circle.
Now I have been back in Ibiza since the beginning of July and I have had the time and space to do the Walking in Different Ways of Seeing but now I feel this new circle has started and the old one closed, after all, I did propose myself to do this for year.
This year has not been totally constant but it has brought on a new form of work.
The fact of working on the concept of the Labyrinth, (composed by matter and space) has brought to me to my current work on abstract art.
When I tried to keep my attention on the concept, I didn´t realise I was pushing my natural boundaries and arriving at a new station I need to explore.
Evolution in art and life are constant and it´s difficult to determine when one part starts and then ends but what I can determine is that I´m in a different space than a year ago.
I felt the need to learn to flow with the original shapes that found their random colours on the canvas, highlighting and complimenting, as a way to dance with the shapes in harmony.
As I look at the pieces I have created though this discipline and I see a molecular world, an atomic or space world. The macro or miscrocosm. Is that a way of focusing closer into the essential structure we are made of and inhabit in? Is that where this study on matter and space has brought me? Has it made a lens in my subconscious and created spaces that can either be exponentially larger than our dimension, or on the contrary, exponentially smaller.
I´m fascinated by the life this initial discipline has taken on, bringing me to a space I´m so excited to discover.
It is not about looking at a work inspired directly by looking into miscroscopic life or into space, and trying to copy it, or transcribe it.
It´s about the pleasure one feels by these images coming to one´s world without searching for that. It´s about the pleasure of recognising this after it´s painted.
What I learn again from this process is that the knowledge one can be taught only becomes real though ones personal experience of discovery. This is what keeps me ticking, the experience of discovering what is new to me, even if it is already discovered by others.
When I discover it in an unexpected form it´s fascinating.
So, I was recently asked, when one saw the amount of abstract pieces I have been working on and producing over these past two months,” But do they mean anything to you? Where is the story?”
What I have just explained is the story that motivates this process. It´s not about personal storytelling, its about learning from the experience of this discipline
I recently listened to an interview of a musician who was asked about his generative music he composes and whether he felt he could take credit for the music he had made and he said “of course”. I totally understood the answer(it was a longer answer). One creates, or places a certain set of rules to go by, and then puts the sound or colours in that system, and this creates a new image or sound. It´s a way of going beyond ones human limitations or conditioning, I think. It´s a way that works for me to push myself beyond myself.