The enjoyment

Inspiration may be gleaned from numerous and diverse sources. Below a drawing by Michaelangelo.

I have just been absorbed in Petr Wittlich's 'Art Nouveau Drawings'. In this book he discusses the life and art of Mucha, Beardsley, Redon, Rodin, Klimt, Schiele and others. Yet it is with the drawings (particularly of the female nude) of Rodin, Klimt and Schiele that I find a home. However, here are two pieces of text, from the book, within which I also find a home. For me, they help my understanding of what it is I am experiencing in my process. I have often referred to 'art as process' or 'process art' in order to emphasise that for me the outcome, the final drawing, is of secondary importance. My art is meditative, it is therapy. It is personal. It is enjoyment.

These two paragraphs are with reference to Auguste Rodin:

"The main thing for him was, apparently, the enjoyment derived from the source of the drawings themselves, the general psychic response of his personality reacting to the stimulus of natural reality (the naked figure): the moment in which he mobilized all his subjective faculties - the perceptive power of his eye, the nervous excitement, the skill of his hand to grasp and give expression to something that sprang from his emotions"

"The act of drawing, which is here practised on the intimately-known shape of the female body, involves the total concentration of all his abilities, knowledge and energy of its performer, who, in experiencing a sympathetic balancing between his personality and the female as representing 'human nature', moves from the dead calm of the academic pose to the inexhaustable wealth of living expression and movement. At the same time, the artist goes beyond a traditional work of art with its limits of accepted meanings. Art thus becomes an aid to raising the intensity of a positive attitude to life in quite a new, modern, dynamic and practical sense".