Linda Hankin

Our Creative Muse, part 2
Arts Place Gallery, Port Colborne, February 15, 2014

Welcome everyone to the second part of our discussion.  I wish to thank Joyce Honsberger and the Arts Place Committee for choosing this topic to present  because of many reasons.  Beaudelaire wrote that anything that provokes an artist “to perceive reverberating sensations” is in a world of constant motion.   Over the years I have been always curious about such abstract and sublime thoughts.  You would have read this in my notes about Blavatsky, an author of theosophical ideas.  Blavatsky and her followers took from Buddhist cosmology the notion of vibration, so did Emily Carr in her paintings that clearly expressed “vibrations of the soul”.  That means the shapes produced a notion of nervous shaking in the visible and invisible world. Blavatsky

SHOW PAINTING OF EMILY CARR’S TREES OR MOUNTAINS.

In Theosophy, the concept of vibration occupies a central place as a cosmic principle. CONSCIOUSNESS CONSISTS OF THE ABILITY TO RECOGNIZE AND RESPOND TO THE VIBRATIONS OF THE UNIVERSE.  Kandisky

WORDS, MUSICAL TONES AND COLOURS possess the PSYCHIAL power of calling forth soul vibrations.

I was listening to an Icelandic poet this week, I promise to recognize his name to everyone.  From what I heard darting from room to room during his insightful talk, he stated, “grand narratives come from every civilization.  Every narrative has many cosmologies (study of origin and evolution and eventual fate of the universe)  However, according to Wikipedia, there are many cosmologies studied which artists are very much interested in such as Religious cosmology, mythological, esoteric, creation, literature and traditions, astronomers, theoretical physicists, philosophers such as metaphysicians, philosophers of physics and philosophers of space and time.

The Fourth Dimension, which I mentioned two weeks ago, had to do with space, time, and light.  It is mentioned in the glossary.  Here I will show you Fred Varley’s painting

The poet on CBC also mentioned that there awere great systems that crumbled and disappeared.  The world is emotion.  The world is dictated how things should be and are sure to fail.  It is challenging.  Some cultures think that eating fish gives the person intelligence.  Poets are clever people – what do they do with it.  Your own being is at the center of the poem.

Again, I bring you to Lorca, the Spanish poet that Edward Hirsch wrote extensively about in his book entitled, the demon and the angel.

“open the doors wide into the night and welcome into the house the spirit of inhabitable awe”. Lorca

Lorca compared it to The Dionysian spirit (an ancient Greek intoxicating trance-inducing technique like music and dance to remove inhibitions, liberating to a natural state) WikipediaI must mention this now before I forget.  The wind is very sensitive.  Almost the minute I think of someone, that person calls me, if not that day, the next.  David Abrams wrote about the wind, which I included extracts from his chapter on wind.  Be careful what you think.

In this paper, you will see I wander as I look through my books that surround me.  The books reminded me of my paintings, shapes and colour all over the place.  To me I feel comfortable in all the activity.

When I lived in Spain by myself in my little studio flat, I noticed and felt an intensity that I never felt before.  In Hirsch’s book, he writes about The Duende, how it bestows intensity, which it needs in order to exist.

The body is the soil in which it grows.  Like all

Romantic poets, Lorca sought intensity above all.

A passionate openness to the moment- a living

presence-was for him the first value in art

Hirsch’s book continues and continues with fabulous words, flowing and filling my head with ideas that I already paint, such as angels,

The Angelic World p. 113

A History of Angels, the fabulist Jorge Luis Borges seems certain that angels were formed when light was created in the firmament of heaven to divide the day from the night.  This makes them exactly two days and nights older than we are.  “The Lord created them on the fourth day, and from their high balcony between the recently invented sun and the first moon  they scanned the infant earth, barely more than a few wheatfields and some orchards beside the waters”.  Borges recalls that the early primitive angels were virtually indistinguishable from stars, as when the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and remembered the beginning of the world: “When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy” (Job 38:7)

The first literal reference to angels in the Hebrew Bible declares their presence when Adam and Eve are banished from the garden: God “drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life”. (Gen 3:24). These cherubim, guardian of sacred areas, are pictured in Ezekiel as winged hybrid creatures, half human, half lion, like the Sphinx of Egypt.

They are a far cry from the ruddy-faced baby cherubim, of popular imagination.  Rather, they are dreaded, terrifying figures, whose supernatural  presence at the gate announces that human beings will never again return unaided to the “garden of God”.  The angels will be their necessary intermediaries.  I have many paintings of angels.

This discussion is about our creative muse.  “What inspires an artist”​​?  I have mused for years about the stars, the moon, my land growing a different crop every several years, sunlight on the  leaves of plants growing in the field, air or wind blowing, clouds, portraits, knic nacs, horses, angels, these are the items that are chosen for the painting.  These provoke.