The Endless Conversation
Everything is engaged in conversation. Not simply people. Everything.
The wind and the trees. Light and the eye. The moon and the tides. The flower and the bee. The mountain and the river that slowly shapes it.
Every action is answered.
Every vibration produces another vibration.
Every gesture invites a response.
What we call existence is an endless conversation. Human language is only one small dialect within it.
Long before words appeared, there were patterns. There were rhythms. There were resonances. There were attractions and repulsions. Call and response.
Life itself emerged through an unimaginable sequence of relationships that gradually became more intricate until eventually one tiny branch of this great unfolding learned to speak with words.
We tend to imagine language as the beginning of communication.
Perhaps it is the opposite.
Language is simply one late arrival in a conversation already billions of years old.
This I call the Root-Tongue. It is not a spoken language. It is the underlying field from which all languages arise. Music, dance, painting, collage all speak it.
Birdsong, the spiral of a shell, the branching of rivers, clouds, even silence speaks it.
Artists often work very close to this territory. We recognize intuitively when something feels right before we can explain why. A composition settles into balance.A color suddenly belongs. A line finds its inevitable destination. Nothing has been calculated. Something has simply come into resonance and we respond. Intuitive intelligence lives here.
It is less concerned with logic than with correspondence. Less interested in proof than participation. Its question is never, “Is this correct?” Its question is, “Does this belong?”
When we enter a genuine creative flow, it often feels less as though we are inventing something than remembering something. Or perhaps listening. The work begins to reveal itself. Each decision calls forth the next. The artwork becomes a dialogue rather than a construction.
Perhaps this is why artists across centuries often feel strangely familiar to one another.
They are listening to the same conversation.
Different cultures.
Different materials.
Different histories.
Different personalities.
Yet somehow the same current continues to move beneath them all.
Museums preserve the artifacts of this conversation. Archives preserve its memory. Artists contribute new sentences. Viewers answer with their own understanding. Future generations continue reading. Nothing ever truly ends. The conversation simply changes speakers and listeners.
Artworks are not merely objects. They are moments of conversation made visible.
Each one is evidence that someone paused long enough to hear a small part of the endless conversation and answer in the only way they could.
Our works eventually become quiet again. They wait. Years later someone encounters them. They are brand new as if just made to that viewer. Something resonates. The conversation begins again.
Perhaps that is all culture has ever been.
Not the accumulation of objects. The continual deepening of a conversation that began before humanity and will continue long after we are gone. We are fortunate enough to participate for a little while the way we know how, through the arts - the only thing that remains after civilizations rise and fall to become only a memory in the dust. The art is what is left behind to speak for them.
We listen. We answer. Then we pass the conversation on.
What do you have to say?
Finding Your Creative Voice
The problem for many artists is to confuse the difference between following your own creative vision and making ‘marketable’ stuff that resembles art that you think will sell on a market. The first and foremost thing an artist must do is develop and follow their own inner intuitive drive and creative vision and frankly, their own peculiarities.
Intuition is the Internal Compass
At a certain point in one’s process as an artist there is the feeling that we need to get our work out in the public, to have it seen, to be published or exhibited. If one desires to be a self-sustaining professional this will eventually become an important consideration. However, as artists the first order of business is to make the commitment to ourselves that being a creative is our central focus and that we are willing to pursue our path and develop the self-discipline to continue forward regardless of circumstances. It is a lifelong endeavor.
Tell us how you think about the trans-temporal conversation in the comments below.
STUFF THAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK
the following was posted this past week
"Mixing Media" - A Group Exhibition
Coming up soon, a new exhibition in Houston that my work will be featured in. Fly in to see the show and hang out with me.