crone

wraps the shawl around her
in a way of saying

i’m enough –

sits in front of our block
her old bones chilled –

warming now, us seeing her

knowing we want her,
the wise crone in our lives

Here’s another energetic work by Kevin Meagher, from his recent show at Callan Park Gallery; a work dripping with death, time and transformation. From the Kali entry in Wikipedia:

The figure of Kali conveys death, destruction, and the consuming aspects of reality. As such, she is also a “forbidden thing”, or even death itself. In the Pancatattva ritual, the sadhaka boldly seeks to confront Kali, and thereby assimilates and transforms her into a vehicle of salvation.

Kevin Meagher
Blood Kali Change

Meagher’s work is, for me, a Yantra, a refined instrument of analysis, a conception of how Blood becomes Kevin becomes Blood, how Jesus / Kali /Venus / Mars is the facilitator for a deep and necessary internal reorganisation that must take place: a matter of life and death for the artist. Or it’s something else! Something so mysterious that we’re returned finally to the work itself as carrier of archetypal content that has no other means of exposition.

In May, Callan Park Gallery hosted an energetic exhibition of ceramics and works on paper by Kevin Meagher, an Outsider who’s been hospitalised for some time and who has developed his practice through the Pioneer Clubhouse in Balgowlah. He’s also taken an Artist in Residence role at Macquarie Hospital in North Ryde.

Kevin’s work is brimming with mythological and spiritual associations – and there is a real experience here of someone struggling to find where he fits into the vast staggering schemes of Norse, Greek, Slavic, Hindu, Christian and Egyptian myth. And the inquiry is conducted with an urgency that conveys its importance to him, and sucks the viewer in to his worlds.

(Left, Neal Hawke, and right, Ben and Tim at War.)

For me, Kevin is involved in the classic “Who Am I?” question, with a fury and commitedness brought on by obviously distressing and bewildering personal states. I love his disregard for artistic style, and also for his daring iconoclasm – I’ll post some more of his intriguing works over the next few weeks.

(Works on paper in the top image are Shiva the Bee, Jewel Tree and Super Bella; ceramics are Ra Uranus, Iris Mary, Dianna Venus, Neptune Lir and Ganga Ocean. )

Here’s the entry from my Outsider Art calender for June – and having enjoyed the work just about every day this month I can attest to its power and, somewhat surprisingly to me, its sense of serenity.

Paraphrasing from the calendar notes: “Eddie Arning grew up on his father’s farm in Germania, Texas. Bouts of depression and anger eventually culminated in an attack on his strict Lutheran mother. His hospitalisation for dementia praecox lasted for about 30 years. He was encouraged to draw by nursing staff. He was finally asked to leave his nursing home and went to live with his widowed sister, however, he never drew again.”

Eddie Arning
Woman with White Dog
Cray-Pas on paper, 63 x 48 cm (approx)

Unpacking some books from storage after our recent renovation, I chanced upon Jessie Tatlock’s Greek and Roman Mythology, a primer in the subject and a first edition from 1917. (You can find on-line, PDF and other versions of this beautiful little book here.)

The book has lots of lovely black and white photographs of statuary, friezes and vases – then (and probably still) held in a wide variety of collections. I particlarly enjoyed a small plate (Fig 42) of Cybele and her Car and was pleased to see, on a Google search, that this impresive work is still held by the Metropolitan Museum. Here she is (her “car” has now become a “cart” – makes sense in today’s language) and here is what Tatlock says of her:

Rhea, the mother of the gods,was also an earth-goddess. The people of Asia Minor knew her as Cybele or the Great Mother, and represented her crowned with a turreted crown like the wall of a city; for she was the bringer of civilization, the protectress of cities. Lions drew her chariot, and about her were the Corybantes, who acclaimed her with shouts and the clashing of cymbals, and led her worship with wild dances.

Quite a woman! And whoever the maker was, quite a sculptor! I don’t believe such a work could come into existence without that maker truly being immersed in the reality of Cybele; the Great Mother was not just a concept, rather, was a truly lived experience (that in turn energised the art-making).

So turning now to the Gulf oil spill, here’s a powerful critique of this situation by Naomi Klein:

In the arc of human history, the notion that nature is a machine for us to re-engineer at will is a relatively recent conceit. In her ground-breaking 1980 book The Death of Nature, the environmental historian Carolyn Merchant reminded readers that up until the 1600s, the Earth was alive, usually taking the form of a mother. Europeans – like indigenous people the world over – believed the planet to be a living organism, full of life-giving powers but also wrathful tempers. There were, for this reason, strong taboos against actions that would deform and desecrate “the mother”, including mining.

This, for me, is what we’ve now lost: the lived, experiential reality of the Great Mother archetype, that, if collectively experienced, could be a natural restrainer to our heroic desires for exploitation of the earth. Cybele cries out for this, and the Corybantes clash their cymbals.

(Left, another depiction of Cybele, imbued with mystery, with the living energy of the golden earth – such gold to be revered where it lies, rather than being exploited mercilessly in commerce.)

Another work in the recent exhibition at Callan Park of a selection from Pearls of Arts Project Australia, a collection of works by Arts Project Australia (APA) artists that the collector, Stuart Purves, is giving to STOARC. This one’s an energetic pastel by Leo Cussen.

Quoting from the recent Home Sweet Home exhibition blurb (National Gallery of Australia):

It is has been remarked that Cussen has a deep fascination with aspects of popular culture including the ‘Dr Who’ character from the television series of the same name and has produced a strong series of works based on this theme: ‘His work has an obsessive quality resulting from repeated use of words or phrases or in his intensive use of media. ’

I love the energetic text and the insistent working of the windows in this piece. I wanna know what’s in that tardis!

Leo Cussen
Untitled (Dr Who’s Tardis),2005
Pastel on paper, 56 x38cm

Bitten by snakes? Possibly. At the very least we can say they are slithering around… Here’s Anne Grgich’s Madam Dussa, from the Callan Park show of last November. (You can download a PDF about Anne’s Archaeologies of the Extraordinary Everyday exhibition here.)

Anne Grgich
Madam Dussa, 2009

While we’re back on the snake theme, here’s another from the Callan Park Gallery show (“Snakes”) of last November, a lovely work made from recycled materials that’s been biding its time in my blog photo folder, working it’s way in…

Janine Hilder
Snake from salty lake

More work by a blog reader: here’s a couple of Eddie Wood’s clay and mixed media snakes doing damage to a wild boar. As Eddie says in his recent comment, he’s enjoying the recent snake theme around here, and has some lovely examples of his own.

I notice that Beverly Kay has a nice post on Eddie and his work. Eddie’s snake works are really energetic sculptures, as are the ones of Christ, and both speak of the transformational – about changes of consciousness by shock, biting and astute goading.

Eddie Wood
Towering serpents fight over a wild boar with tightly coiled bodies (Detail)

One of my blog readers, Roseanne Truman, has sent me a lovely work of hers, an appropriation of an appropriation (she says), but with a delicacy that nevertheless makes it unique. Rose says:

I like making connections with ancient art and contemporary art; the discovery just happens anyway, especially looking at my friend [x]’s work. That said, it is always though his immediate environment and life experiences which are amazingly transformed in his dreams and art. He recently painted a big star on the head of a horse – I’m sure he was influenced by his landlady’s pony (he sometimes checks on it when she goes out, as it frets a bit and he has an affinity with horses). The pony has a tiny white patch under its forelock. He also painted himself riding it (he saw himself in the dream in armour)…but it is also like a mirror image and he is facing the viewer squarely. Maybe the small things influence us more than we realise.

Rose inhabits places of soul, often hidden and under-appreciated, that give life richness, for ourselves and for others. (I also think of Bachelard’s wonderful reveries.)

Roseanne Truman
Brief Moment in Time and Space

My own take on this work is as a subtle pointer to the eternity of the present moment, given due reverence and holiness by the attendant maidens, the redeeming feminine releasing us from the strictures of ego. And the delicacy of the butterfly, gently and relentlessly attracted to the sublime sweetness of this moment! I think here of Jean-Pierre De Caussade in The Sacrament of the Present Moment:

O, all you who thirst, learn that you have not far to go to find the fountain of living waters; it flows quite close to you in the present moment; therefore hasten to find it. Why, with the fountain so near, do you tire yourselves with running about after every little rill? These only increase your thirst by giving only a few drops, whereas the source is inexhaustible.

This set of images by Robert Kinmot has been in my queue for posting since about last September. Quite a bit’s happened since then – we’ve moved out of our apartment, had it renovated, and moved back in, a process much bigger and more disruptive than expected. There have been a total of six moves – including house sittings and two sub-lets in a difficult Sydney rental market fueled by the hot summer and high traveler numbers.

Back to the images – they’re more powerful now than when I first saw them on the SFMOMA site. I know there’s a whole conceptualist backdrop to Kinmont’s work, but looking at these images now, coming back home (literally), I’m drawn at a more emotional level to Kinmont’s own homecoming – his return to art making after a 30 year break. These are poignant images from 1969. They remind me also of dusty roads around Rotorua New Zealand (where I grew up) – riding the Raleigh Sports on unmade roads through dark bush.

Then there’s the real home, the nondual ground, the sublime emptiness; the way the photographer’s eye relaxes into the natural humility and accepting lack of these dependable dust-brushed ways. Very beautiful.

Robert Kinmot
My Favorite Dirt Roads, 1969

Check out also Kinmot’s unpublished notes on the SFMOMA site, which add another level of story, an autobiographical richness, to this work.

There was quite a text theme in the “APA People” selection for the Callan Park show I visited recently (see also the previous post). I found this both playful and energetic. Here’s a work by Julian Martin, born 1963 and started at the APA studio in 1990. He’s now represented in a number of private collections. He works with simple graphic shapes, like this superb letter N.

Julian Martin
Untitled (letter N)
pastel on paper
65 x 50 cm

Callan Park Gallery is currently showing a selection of the Pearls of Arts Project Australia, which is a collection of works by Arts Project Australia (APA) artists that the collector, Stuart Purves, is giving to STOARC. There are about 200 works in the collection, created by people with an intellectual disability who have been associated with APA. Stuart started collecting the works in 1998, recognising in them something very special.

I loved the text-oriented works in the show, and here are two examples by Scott Ferguson, who was born in 1963 and has been attending the APA studio in Melbourne since 1995. There’s a whimsical freedom about these pieces, a lack of self-consciousness that makes them, for me, very distinct from graffiti, with it’s usual insistence on identity.

Scott Ferguson
Untitled (white text on black)
14.5 x 24.5 cm

Scott Ferguson
Untitled (figures and text)
16 x 50.5 cm

Outsider art often grows on me slowly. I enjoy this fact, and wonder if it’s about at the distance in mindset involved – between the artist’s and mine. These dolls are examples of pieces that have been growing on me recently. They appeared in last year’s exhibition of works from the Peter Fay collection at the Callan Park Gallery.

There’s information on Val Sutherland at the NZ Self-taught and Visionary site. And a nice piece in Art News New Zealand:

Working in a world of their own, with their own personal motivations, many outsider artists express surprise when others recognise the quality of their work. Interest in her work certainly surprised Val Sutherland, a mother, grandmother and care-giver whose doll making caught the eye of Australian collector Peter Fay … who visited Masterton’s King Street Artworks in 1998. Sutherland was a helper and participant in some King Street Artworks workshop activities.

Loving the vulnerability and innocence of her doll characters, Fay bought all of them. And Sutherland’s reaction? She thought he must have been totally crazy! Now, eight years later, interest in her work has grown with exhibitions in Australia, including a 2005/2006 solo exhibition touring to Wollongong City Gallery and Campbelltown Arts Centre in New South Wales.

These are works that quietly state their innocence, make no fuss, have their own integrity and conform to their own rules (like how the limbs are connected with buttons). No nonsense creatures – I like that.

Here’s another lovely image from the 2010 Outsider Art calendar that was a present from my friend Ardsley. This one, Sanford Darling’s Lagoon, is for the month of February. (You can see January’s image here.)

My guess this work is one of the many images he painted on his house in the 1960s. (You can read an enthusiastic 1971 Time magazine article on the man and his enterprise here.) It’s obviously a lagoon form, and also for me an ocular form.

That the space within the eye is largely empty is appealing to me – an open field within which the world can be envisioned. And that elements of the landscape are also shown within the eye has a tantalising connection to Advaita – the world arising within the perceiver.

Sanford Darling
Lagoon
Latex on composition board, 125 x 125 cm (approx)

The quality of these two images is not great. I’m not sure what was happening, but I visited the exhibition at about the time I was starting to feel unwell last year, so maybe this went with the territory – as possibly does the subject.

Callan Park Gallery held a show titled Snakes last November, and I enjoyed several lovely examples of this mysterious animal by Jose dos Santos. The snake woman on the left was rich and more overtly sexual than the image makes out – complete with painted red vagina (which seems to have become muted in this photograph).

I’m thinking that the approach to dos Santos’ snakes should be as Hillman’s approach to snakes in dreams, i.e. phenomenological rather than analytical. In this nice quote from Hillman’s Inter-Views (1983):

“…a black snake comes in a dream, a great big black snake, and you can spend a whole hour with this black snake talking about the devouring mother, talking about anxiety, talking about the repressed sexuality, talking about the natural mind, all those interpretive moves that people make, and what is left, what is vitally important, is what this snake is doing, this crawling huge black snake that’s walking into your life…and the moment you’ve defined the snake, you’ve interpreted it, you’ve lost the snake, you’ve stopped it…The task of analysis is to keep the snake there…”

Such an approach keeps the snakes of dos Santos (as it does the dream) alive, able to affect the consumer afresh on each encounter; chaotic, disturbing, as is his nest of vipers below.

A new exhibition at Cunningham Dax is due to open next week in Melbourne, and I regret not being able to get there for it. According to the flyer:

Avoiding the Void features works from the Cunningham Dax Collection which reflect and engage with existential ideas and concerns. The exhibition invites viewers to contemplate the insightful ways in which the creators of these works have grappled with difficult questions that are ordinarily avoided.

Joan Rodriquez
Isolation
Charcoal and Conte on paper

There are also public talks on the topic of Existentialism, a topic around which psychotherapy has gravitated for some time, and through the writings of Rollo May, Irvin Yalom, Ernesto Spinnelli and Victor Frankl (to name some of my personal favourites) has been greatly enriched.

(As an aside, I see that Spinelli will be visiting Sydney in November this year, an event not to be missed for those existentially inclined.)

It’s maybe a little presumptive to comment on the title of the exhibition, not having seen the exhibition itself, but I wonder about “avoiding”: is this what the artists are considered to be doing or not doing? In my experience, it’s the latter (the not avoiding), the via negativa of many spiritual traditions, that is the only way through, or in.

I have been enjoying this William Hawkins image during January, during a time of upheaval and a move to a temporary location, due to our upcoming renovation.

(We’re now on the eleventh floor of an apartment block in Woollahra, from which we survey the Russian Consulate, and the AFP (Australian Federal Police) car that’s often idling in front – its sole occupant, I imagine, grateful for his air conditioning chewing on the muggy Sydney heat.)

The image is from a calendar of Outsider art given to me by my good friend Ardslie. I’ll post an image each month from this beautiful production; the images too good to last just a month each!

Willima Hawkins
Untitled (Rearing Stud Horse)
Enamel on Masonite, 122 x 144 cm (approx)

Hawkins was born in rural Kentucky in 1985 but it wasn’t until the 1970s that he started painting in the style of this work, a style for which he became well known. His rural background and long years of manual labour informed much of his work. This man knew about animals (Two Dark Horses is also great; more at the Foundation for Self-Taught American Artists.)

Here’s Jauk Kera Putih (the white monkey) from the Setai Darma House of Masks and Puppets, Ubud. It’s good to come back to these images from last year’s Bali trip – the figures seem to inhabit a pantheon equally as rich, psychically, as the more familiar (to me, anyway) Western (i.e. the Greek). He’s another very expressive dude.

Iam finally interested in blogging again, after being unwell and at the same time preparing for a renovation that Karima and I are having done to our apartment. It’s been a strange period, everything taking its normal but exhausting course at the level of day to day activities, yet below the surface taking a very different, solitary course, one of hyperthyroidism (caused, it appears, by a mercury detox that was insufficiently monitored by the doctor).

The phenomenology of hyperthyroidism was for me centred on the heart, the thoughts being whether that heart could be trusted, what it wanted of me when, thumping hard, it woke me at 1:30 am each morning. Although I felt heat, at a deeper level I experienced icy chill, an existential heart, a cold stranger that seemed completely unconcerned for my sleep and for my well-being in general. I learned something of this stranger: as James Hillman says, sickness can be a vital way for the soul to learn.

Some quotations from Hillman (A Blue Fire, p262 – 263) come alive, seem appropriate not only to my recent experiences, but to psychotherapeutic endeavours in general:

The descent to the underworld can be distinguished from the night sea journey of the hero in many ways. We have already noticed the main distinction: the hero returns from the night sea journey in better shape for the tasks of life, whereas the nekyia takes the soul into a depth for its own sake so that there is no “return”. The night sea journey is further marked by building interior heat (tapas), whereas the nekyia goes below that pressured containment, that tempering in the fires of passion, to a zone of utter coldness.

Therapeutic analysis remains incomplete if it is satisfied with bringing balm to burning problems. It still has to venture into the frozen depths that have so fascinated poets and explorers and that in depth psychology are the areas of our archetypal crystallizations, the immovable depressions and the mutisms of catatonia…

Here we are numb, chilled. All our reactions are in cold storage. This is a psychic place of dread and a terror so deep that it comes in uncanny experiences, such as voodoo death and the tostell [animal trancing] reflex. A killer lives in the ice…

We may recall here that the Styx is a river of icy hatred that protects the underworld and is holy and eternal as are the god’s oaths that they swear by that frigid river…

The icy chasm of Christianism’s shadow is a realm of radical importance that cannot be reached with Christianism’s bleeding heart. An archetypal approach to this zone follows the homeopathic maxim: like cures like. The nekyia into hell’s ice requires coldness. If any connection is to be made, we must be able to work with the cruel extremities of ice itself…

The heart has a coldness, a place of reserve like the refrigerator that preserves, holds, protects, isolates, suspends animation and circulation, an alchemical congelation of substance. The cruelty and mean despising are the surroundings of a private sense of ultimate deepening. Maybe in my ice is my fairy-tale princess, whom ego psychology wants to kiss into life; but maybe she is otherwise engaged in her frigid stillness, deepening toward the Ninth Circle, below everything moving; a detachment and stability reminding of the cold body of death…

What occurs to me is that there’s an “art” of psyche-making, an art that’s an ongoing way to live with what is given us (rather than limiting art to what is depicted or presented in form); which gives a deepening to life, a recognition of certain shades that haunt our homes.

Ihave been somewhat unwell recently, so the blog has not been getting much attention. I have more time for reading though, and there’s currently a rich seam of books I’m visiting and revisiting – including some by Maurice Nicoll, friend of Jung and wonderful interpreter of Ouspensky.

Recently I’ve been struck with Nicoll’s statement that “man is a certain ratio between the visible and the invisible”. Nicoll goes on (in his book Living Time):

Man has inner necessities. His emotional life is not satisfied by outer things. His organisation is not only to be explained in terms of adaptation to outer life. He needs ideas to give meaning to his existence. There is that in him that can grow and develop – some further state in himself – not lying in “tomorrow” but above him. There is a kind of knowledge that can change him, a knowledge of quite a different quality from that which concerns itself with facts relating to the phenomenal world, a knowledge that changes his attitudes and understanding, that can work on him internally and bring the discordant elements of his nature into harmony.

There’s advantage in being unwell – that “ratio” seems more stark, more delineated. And our purpose, distinct from the material, of bringing our natures into harmony, seems more clear.

Here’s Denawa from the Setai Darma House of Masks and Puppets, Ubud. He’s the bad guy in the Maya Denawa story. The maker is Wayan Tangguh. The mask has jewellery, real hair and mother of pearl. And as usual, they know how to do teeth!

Denawa is associated with the Tirta Empul Temple – you can read the story of his evil involvement here.

I am now the proud owner of number 892/2000 in the first edition of Susan King’s comic book, which I bought at her recent exhibition at the Callan Park Gallery. Here’s a snippet from the book, brimming with energy and much strangeness.
According to the comic:

Susan stopped talking around the age of 4. But she drew and drew and drew and drew and drew – expressive, rich, imaginative and complex drawings. In the mid 1980s, Susan stopped drawing. Then towards the end of 2008 as new people were starting to discover Susan’s work, she started to draw again. It’s late 2009. Susan has an exhibition happening imminently, a documentary is being made about her, wonderful people from the art world are studying her drawings… and Susan continues to draw.

There’s lots more of her work at Susan’s web site, and here are a couple of favourites of mine from the show (the one “happening imminently”):

Below is an image from her web site that I couldn’t help thinking fits closely with another of Susan as a child, drawing in the sand at Waihi, New Zealand. Maybe it’s my New Zealand connection, but I feel an emotional pull from these images; she’s managed to keep alive a fresh, child’s view and a child’s creative use of the natural resources around her. And I guess for me that’s the kick I get from Outsiders – their ability to remind me of things I’ve pushed out of my awareness, in my construction of a “normal” adult psyche.

Susan’s also on Facebook – I searched for “Susan Te Kahurangi King”.

Another image from Robert Adams: Landscapes of Harmony and Dissonance, a current exhibition at the Getty museum.

Robert Adams
West Edge of Denver, Colorado 1968 -1970
© 2009 The J. Paul Getty Trust. All rights reserved.

Adams, in the audio accompanying the image on the Getty site, says:

Two things, I think, brought me to make the picture: one, the loneliness of the figure, and two, the remarkable high altitude light which bathes the entire scene.

The traditional view of art, and I subscribe to it, is that art should delight and instruct. It’s in that sense inevitably political I think. The woman as she is isolated in that window suggests to me indirectly that there is something inhumane about the way our housing is conceived. The delight, if there is such, comes in the panoply of light that bathes rather mysteriously this frightening, dark isolation that is at the centre of the picture.

This is a powerful image from 40 years ago, one that strikes me all the more so after my recent Bali experience, where housing is conceived in quite another way. Partly this is due to climate, but also due to a collective view of housing (so there’s no homelessness), to arrangements of communal living that weave the need for housing into the overall ensouled process of everyday living.

Coming back to Sydney, our clean city streets seem in one sense empty (expunged of soul) and in another cluttered with traffic and (in the inner Eastern Suburbs at least) peopled by, to a greater or lesser extent, the homeless (in both an outer and inner sense).

Another beauty from the Setai Darma House of Masks and Puppets. This one is Ratu, from the secular Topeng Panca dance. (There are evidently very few such secular dances in Bali; most have a religious significance.)

Panca means five – the dance was originally performed by five people, for purposes of entertainment. Ratu is is a queen or other consort. The maker is Wayan Tangguh. I loved the painting on this mask, and the delicious attention given to the mouth.

As I mentioned previously, I’ve now a great storehouse of photos of puppets and masks from our recent visit to the Setai Darma House of Masks and Puppets near Ubud, Bali. I had a great time, in completely empty galleries, the D700 clicking away at ISO 6400 (available light only) and getting good results.

Here’s what welcomes you at the entrance to the fourth Joglo house, which contains a wealth of puppets, these being the first examples. On the left, Prayitno (director and collector of the works), on the right, You Know Who. (More details on the “House” are here.)

On our recent trip to Bali we spent 2 wonderful hours at the Setai Darma House of Masks and Puppets. It’s near Mas, maybe 15 minutes from Ubud, but even our hotel driver didn’t know where it was. I recommend it highly – over a thousand masks from Indonesia, China, Malaysia, and other Asian countries, and thousands of puppets as well, all housed in four antique Joglo houses, which the director, Prayitno, had shipped from Java.

I took many photos, and from time to time will post exquisite examples of both mask and puppets. Here’s the first: a topeng tua (old mans’ mask – topeng is mask in Indonesian, and topeng also refers to the masked dance). The maker of the mask is Wayan Tangguh. More notes on the topeng tua are at Mask of the World.

For the opposite of that breath of soul I’ve just re-encountered in Bali and in the Sedgwick piece, and always look for in art, here’s a scathing review in The Australian by Christopher Allen of the 2009 Blake Prize. The Prize is run by the Australian Blake Society (“named after the visionary artist and poet, William Blake”). The review’s quite long but well worth reading.

It’s all pretty depressing stuff, but I sparked up at Allen’s intelligent attempt at tackling the “notion” issue. Here he is:

The [winning] artist told this newspaper she was interested in “notions of worship and ecstasy”, which is a bad start: a notion, a perennial favourite in artspeak, is a vague entity that is no longer the thing itself but has not achieved the clear and distinct nature of a concept. When an artist claims to be interested in notions, you know they haven’t thought anything through properly.

Well said. Anyone who’s survived five years of art school, yet wants depth (me) is pretty sensitive to the “notions” position. All I’d add to Allen’s exposition is that it’s about position as well – i.e. maintaining a safe one, so your fellow art institutionalists won’t hound you out of the pack.

Ok, this one’s not obviously about Bali, yet in another way it is. This is a work by Paul Sedgwick (2006) that I saw at the recent exhibition of works from the Peter Fay collection at the Callan Park Gallery. I photographed it then, but wasn’t initially moved. Yet this strange canvas has been working on me over the ensuing weeks (and even while in Bali) and I now love its language and its delicacy.

That got me wondering about how good Outsider art works – how it operates, as though on a different plane from much mainstream art, breathing from deeper levels of the psyche. And the painting fits well for me with my recent Bali experience – Bali and this work hold something related; another, fresh way of inhabiting the world.

Before I went to Bali I spoke to Peter Fay about this work, and he gave me some of the background. Paul works out of an arts workshop in Hamilton New Zealand. He compiles lists of street names, of mountains, of local landmarks. (This one has entries from the Auckland phone book.)

I like Peter’s take on the work: to him it’s “the dying of a breath of wind” (the way the letters fade). There’s much delicacy here, in the text and in the underlying abstraction of colour (which the photo doesn’t quite do justice to). An art piece that’s prepared to die away, to breathe in quite a different way. I like that.

Just back from Bali, where Karima and I have been for a little over a week, and we’re now both adjusting to the busyness of our Sydney life after the very different pace there. And though collectively we, as tourists, have changed the place (since I was first there in 1990 anyway – made it more urbanised, more oriented towards shopping), the spiritual “embeddedness” of the Balinese people is still very evident.

People who make bamboo and flower offerings every day, and place them in doorways, on roadsides, in their temples. People for whom a reverence for their gods is primary, and alive. Certainly there’s a superstitious downside, but to me, overall, there’s strong evidence of a healthy, happy way of living.

Though the locals we met where mostly engaged with us commercially (hotel staff, drivers, waiters) what repeatedly remained with us was the feeling that commerce was only the practical aspect of this engagement. Beyond it was their pleasure in connecting with us, in ensuring we had a good time, in showing us their way of life, and in sharing the beautiful aspects of their island – from exquisite rice fields to local coffee beans, from a beautifully presented mango lassi to a careful elucidation of the complexities and realities of local corruption.

What does this have to do with Art and Psyche? It’s a great reminder to me of a graceful way of living, where art is in every detail that happens in one’s life, where there’s psychic health – which means there’s ongoing inquiry into our soul and that of the world. It’s what reveals itself when we give its space, which is what artists (particularly those not driven by the institutionalised art systems, often known as “Outsiders”) continually rediscover. I’d like to blog more on aspects of our Bali trip, and the beautiful reminders it’s given me.