Do Seasons Influence Artists? (a painting by Caspar David Fredrich) Do seasons influence artists? Great writers, musicians, dancers and visual artists including photographers and filmmakers have drawn inspiration from changing seasons. Some artists like wintry days, some sunny and some like the music of rain. Some are influenced by forests and some by deserts. Artists traveled many miles to capture sun, moon and their effects on earthly things. The great men and women who stood on the heights of creative pinnacles alone and watched the passing clouds in silence came back to their studios created those moments that had the ability to change the course of human history. And artists like Da Vinci led by curiosity traveled into the body and soul of human beings with imaginative, scholastic, poetic and scientific verve. Have we lost it, the sensitivity to be affected and moved by seasons? Have we become too conceptual to think about nature? Has our over reliance on projects and never ending pursuits after newer mediums taken us away from the finer aspects of the vivacious nature and its several mood swings? Why do we think these days about settling back into a fine studio and manage our art like managers of assembling units? Has globalization and the changed realities caused by internet revolutions forced us to think alike, taste alike and feel alike? Why don’t we do different art which expresses our nature and our issues thereby create works of art that could universalize such experiences? I come across artists these days who think a lot about working on projects and then finding opportunities to exhibit in galleries or places of importance. They live in/with a sort of impatience and walk along the edges of depression. I believe this overindulgence with projects and idea based art causes a lot of depression amongst the artists as these days they do not find any support to continue with their art practice. Our art scene, in that sense is in a state of degeneration. Most of the artists create unconvincing works or works of art that look like something that has been adjudged as ‘successful’ or they do cold and detached works of art or they imitate themselves. This repetitive coldness is not only seen in visual arts but also in every field of creativity including films, literature, music, dance and theater. Before degeneration sets in completely like gangrene and asks for amputation of thinking minds, it is high time that artists go back to their primal simplicity and humaneness. They need to leave herd mentality. Each person should stand alone and travel alone. Each artist should get inspired by the immediate and then translate it into the universal. Only honesty and simplicity could do this. An artist should become a researcher of his/her own path. And the micro worlds would reveal the secrets of life of today and of future. The days of spectacles are over. Time asks us to walk into the micro worlds of nature and self. It is not the time of trees but the age of seeds and saplings. I sit here at a computer, away from my studio, far away from my work place, and listen to the music of rain and think about the artists of this country. I can see each of them thinking of being alone. They are feeling an intense longing for breaking free from the clutches of ideological and generic thinking. To think unique and act unique, one should see the worlds that lie behind the perceivable worlds. Those worlds are there in the changing seasons and everything that are touched by these seasons. Stand alone and walk alone. The time has come to speak to the excluded. The included are already in the malls, multiplexes, museums and galleries. Speaking to/about the excluded is the future. I will see you there in that bright future. JohnyML
Posted on: Mon, 10 Jun 2013 02:00:18 +0000
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