‘Unwilled Reception’: Poetic thoughts from Lewis Hyde and John Berger on creative expression as gift, the artist as ‘receiver’.
“An essential portion of any artist’s labour is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made. It must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that ‘begging bowl’ to which the gift is drawn…We are sojouners with our gifts, not their owners: even our creations – especially our creations – do not belong to us”
Lewis Hyde, ‘The Gift'( Random House 1983)
John Berger on a Van Gogh drawing made in 1888:
“the lack of contours around his identity allowed him to be extraordinarily open, allowed him to become permeated by what he was looking at. Or is that wrong? Maybe the lack of contours allowed him to lend himself, to leave and enter and permeate the other. Perhaps both processes occurred – once again as in love”
From ‘Shape of a Pocket’ (Bloomsbury 2001)
The permeability of the artist, universal energy, all things are one?
An opposition of the instinctual vs the analytical in making artwork?
