Art And Divinity

What I Did With A Fine Art Honours Degree

I understood one day, that the things toward which I aspired to be, which I struggled so hard over; other people were doing it so much better than I could achieve, so much more fluidly and naturally, that I was trying to be the wrong thing, something I wasn’t and instead it would be much healthier for me simply to be myself. So I quit doing all of the wrong things. I gave up making art under the hope that the pressure to make art I had inherited from my fathers influence would leave me. It did not.That pressure is a constant thing, a drive which I cannot ever seem to satisfy. It hurts. The beatings I got for not confirming to his desire that I be Van Gogh to his Da Vinci in later years i came to terms with that it was childhood abuse, that he was psychotic and i was his victim. This understanding did not get rid of the inner tension. I cannot paint without feeling a wall of pain. I cannot make art without feeling...

...and in a higher plane I would be writing the words, immune to all of that, the aspiration which he projected upon me. Instead I am honest, the more accurate word is blocked up and stifled, there is for me no liberation in making art, only disappointment that it does not turn out not better than it is.

Only the process of … it feels like moving my arms through glass, shapes and patterns with the bones between my elbow and wrist, amplifying this energy, the creativity, not through my and to me and into the canvas but deflected directed away, syphoned and pouring into him, drank up by my father. The greatness of leaving wonderful imagery in the world after my death as a gift to the world, as an attempt toward history longevity, a sign of my passing through life; this bullshit is irrelevant, my truing as a shaman taught me to detach. I understood why the successful transmigrant Egyptian kings had their own faces chiselled away from the carvings on walls, it was to protect their passing and free themselves from attachments to the past.

Painting is old, a stifling musty link between the fluidity of an evolving self later in time, pinpointed to a moment, a portal through which observers may syphon that creative energy. It is not a gift to the world from my soul but a method by which others can tap into us and drink us. I learned this thankfully before I had made too many works of visual art. What happened to the ones I did create? Stolen if they are any good, I did not receive fair investment for them, nobody paid me to be an artist I did not make a living from it. My creativity was stolen by those who would drink my lifeblood if they could. I chose to avoid that entire circuit of people. My fathers bitter envy of a talent i did not genuinely possess, projected onto me and my fathers distaste for my life choice not to create art, which to me seemed pointless. There is one other thing; one other reason I chose not to make art.

I could not afford to pay a model. No sexy female agreed to pose for me, when I asked they heard instead of a request to pose for study painting, the words ‘I want to have sex with you but am a liar so I am trying to trick you by this device’. I lost prestige over it, and offering to pay they thought I accused them of prostitution. So I made up imagery from imagination instead of study observation. And when you tap into imagination, strange things happen. For one, imagination is not fantasy and make-belief. It is a way to access that which is real on other planes. I made some paper mach dolls and for three years myself and a friend went through a series of adventures involving people who looked identical to the paper mache dolls, people we did not know existed before the dolls were made. I made some drawings of characters in situations and then those situations manifested as lived events for myself and my friends. I showed wherever I could; the evidence to the people involved and they got very frightened because they could see of themselves the raw power of art to tap into the otherworld. I do not know if cause made effect or if effect made cause, whether linear time has anything to do with it in activating an event by making a picture or if merely that I was drawing something which would have occurred had i drawn it or not. The language offers the clue: we draw water from a well.

When art comes through an artist, that artist is drawing water from a well and others tap into it. However the vampires I cohabit this society with tap not the source, they have no ability to do that. Instead they tap the artist who is channeling the source through attunement to it, and happens to record a symbol of that well onto a canvas. I do not want to be tapped, I have barely sufficient energy for myself.

I studied Primitivism in university and from that an interest in shamanism, discovering for what use the African effigies were put originally before they ended up in European art galleries exhibited not as tools but as ornaments, inspiring early 20th century art movements and philosophies. I engrossed myself in that but underlaying all of it, I became a spiritist. Then the same vampires who had stolen my work and forced me to paint against my instincts, decided that a clairaudient medium is technically ‘hearing voices’ and so I was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic. I do have post traumatic stress disorder, yes but I am not schizophrenic. The misdiagnosis fits the model of reality projected onto me by my father that I am Van Gogh to his Da Vinci and the more I complain against it, the more those complaints are twisted into being evidence of a schizotypal disorder; for how dare I disagree with his ego and control game?

So I disowned my family and attempted to have a reassessment. No mental health worker can agree to help me because they are afraid they might lose their jobs over it. These are people more interested in money and personal gain than in truth and reality. Not one of them has a spiritual bone in their body although they do hide behind the face value mask of calling themselves christians. I ask them to live by the teachings of christ and they fail, they describe themselves then as church rather than christian. I am so gratefully pagan to be able to see reality for what it is instead of having to see through the eyes of those who cannot connect with the divine flow of the creative source.

And now when I do, I do so through words instead of pictures for although they say that a picture tells a thousand words, there is a safety valve. These are my words inside your mind, and I am free from that connection because I am controlling your mind, not the other way around. With a visual picture on canvas, I am being stared at and looked through with no way to protect myself. You can see the difference clearly. In truth it is not quite so clear-cut a difference for all gates are two-way gates. Yet I find more personal safety in writing because of the dedication it takes on your part as reader, the focus you are using to read this and make sense of the meaning here; I am harnessing that focus for myself and using it to sustain myself. Do not be afraid that I am writing this way, be grateful for a lesson in how all things work.

All things from the food you eat energizing the grower or the shop from whom you bought it, to the clothes that you wear who vibrate energetically to the vibration of whatever deity your clothes conform to. This is what it is to live as a slave, self-aware and aware of the jungle of energies around us. We are no longer the primal savage, free in itself to exist with liberty. We are tamed by contracts done in ancient times by our ancestors whose dealings with the external macrocosm and the many demons which sustain it, have made the world the way it is. Every brick of the dwelling you inhabit, inhibits your flow. There is no freedom in the material density of time-mass. There is freedom only when we personally connect within to the divine flow of creation. And for me this is words rather than paint. For you, I hope that you find your own way and that you are not inhibited by the vampires who drink your energy through your arts.

There is a fundamental important secret here: I give this information to you for free, and in doing so, both of us are free of any energy tithe between us, because no leech-demons of trade are invoked. Were I to use commerce to share this information, we would all pay toward that deity and there would be muddied complexity between us. Know this is why old books and paintings fade to yellow with age; it is not age measured in time but by how much they have been drained of their life. You might want to contemplate why true artists starve in garrets while wealthy artists have material plenty but very little other than accumulated skill to cover the lack of their own divinity.