Metaphor. Someone said yesterday that if you can find a metaphor for a problem, and look at the situation from that point of view, you’re half-way to solving it. I like that.
Another friend has a theory that good art is metaphor, bad art is simile. He reckons it’s very straightforward. Personally I don’t think I can define art in blanket terms like that. I think art can be so much in the eye of the beholder. (An example: I was in someone’s studio a while ago and was transfixed by the paint splashes on a small patch of floor. It seemed to me to be so much more lyrical and successful as a painting than any of the works on canvas… except that, of course, it wasn’t an artwork at all, it was neither consciously created nor held up as a piece of art.)
Anyway, right now the main metaphor in my life is that of an axe crashing through my head – I’ve been suffering for three days with an awful migraine. I want to get in the studio but there’s no point trying to make art in this state: with a migraine, my way of looking, thinking and acting gets narrow and tedious. Idea: maybe I should work with the axe metaphor somehow, and imagine the positive aspects of what an axe can do – opening up, loosening, freeing, and releasing pent-up energy…
