measuring your own grave...(mixed-media collage)

Continuing from yesterday’s post……it seems important to comment on the other side of waiting…..the other side being the artist’s truth….

Allow me to introduce Joseph Cornell….one of the most fascinating people I’ve ever studied…..

Joseph Cornell’s dreamlike boxes are some of the most intriguing & unusual works in this century. An enigmatic collage artist, he redefined collage & artistic temperament. His boxes with their quizzical nature, abstraction, nostalgia & mystery call us to look closer. His themes connect us to more universal ideas. Joseph Cornell and his obsessions, contradictions, idiosyncrasies, & brilliant visual intelligence have sparked poetic & reverential participation.  His cosmology is dense, elliptical & easily misinterpreted, yet his boxes remain a point of return, a touchstone to our own ideas of meaning and willingness to reflect. Cornell wanted us to share his boxes, make them our own, & then transcend our limiting world.

Cornell is easy to obsess about. As a student of aesthetics, it is perplexing to note how he worked within the realm of beauty, elevating authenticity through pure imagination.

‘I Went to the Gypsy’……… a poetic short about Cornell by Charles Simic…..

What Cornell sought in his walks in the city, the fortune tellers already practiced in their parlors. Faces bent over cards, coffee dregs, crystals; divination by contemplation of surfaces which stimulate inner visions & poetic faculties. DeChirico says: “One can deduce & conclude that every object has two aspects:  one current one, which we see nearly always & which is seen by men in general; & the other, which is spectral & metaphysical & seen only by rare individuals in moments of clairvoyance…” He’s right. Here comes the bruja, dressed in black, her lips & fingernails painted blood-red. She saw into the murderer’s lovesick heart, & now it’s your turn mister.

A little lesson in living your own artist’s truth……