Finding our place

By Toni Cogdell

 

 

“For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.” Vincent Van Gogh

 

 

A half consumed mug of Rosehip tea, slow burning incense snaking out through the trees while music permeates the painting lined walls, a head of blonde and red curls slightly tilting to one side…The artist is in the studio.  

What is it that compels me to spend every spare waking hour here. Poised in front of a canvas, or curled around a piece of paper, painting and making marks as if my life, my entire existence depended on it. (I actually believe it does.) What is it that follows me as I drift into sleep, whispering stories and composing scenes in my mind that stay with me as I wake, then taking me by the hand, sometimes with force, and leading me back to the studio to learn how to speak them out loud?

 

We all have creativity within us, by their very nature our spirits are creative, but we each choose different ways to express it, in varying measures. My language is art, my lexicon painting, and each day I yearn for fluency.  To be able to coherently piece together the fleeting echoes and fragments of a million unspoken seedlings of inspiration that chase each other around in my mind. Their origin is unknown, they appear as mysteriously as they vanish. Perhaps Morpheus himself plants them there, a sprinkling in the mind and heart, before allowing your own creative rhythm to compose a rhapsody.

 

However the ideas are transmitted I find myself seeking to create as a means to explore who we are, how it feels to be living and breathing in our two-legged form and how we connect to so much more than we can ever physically touch. Working in the woodland studio I’m blessed with I cannot help but overhear the stories the trees and nature spirits willingly share with me, and I’m learning we are not so different after all.  

Like all artists, I have a necessity to respond  to these infinite sparks of thought, memory and feeling. Inspiration, whether it be of light or dark, peace or pain, my fascination for the whole process will never cease, from the seedling of an idea, through the agonising trial and errors the artist encounters during the painting’s journey, to the final artwork that will stand before countless pairs of examining eyes.  

 

I know now why the Muse is often deemed harsh and unsparing, demanding and overpowering, because this is how it can feel when you are driven  to sail on such ambiguous waters. To grapple with matter so intangible and elusive, images flickering in the corner of your mind’s eye, having to first unravel it all, then weave it back together like a master story-teller, delicately and precisely,  retelling it through the language of your soul. All the while being your own, most harsh, critic, trying to fulfil the promise you made to yourself of  never giving up and never compromising your dreams. Yes, she is unrelenting, she revels in exposing your shadows and breaking your heart, but how can an artist be anything but willing to allow the torrent of inspiration she connects you with to flow in the bloodstream.

 

This is what keeps me here, in this place of glass shards and butterfly wings, love and hate, my studio, where I begin and where I end. Anticipating this endless alchemic mixing of beauty, truth and loss, infinite stories untold, told and retold, this is my path, my journey.  Finding my place in the chaos of life’s symmetry.

When the day leaves me cold I’m reminded how my journey unites me with other creative minds, both those who are compelled to shape their dreams into art form as well as those who hear the siren call and immerse themselves in the melody of the artwork, deciphering its code. An unbroken magical chain, lives touching others without ever meeting, engaged in silent dialogue, unison of thought.

 

As lonely two-leggeds we crave to be inspired, to be moved. We yearn to touch something far beyond ourselves, to reach for Van Gogh’s stars to dream, and to look back at ourselves with glistening eyes and understanding, finding our own place, every one of us.  What do we know of the creative mind? Everything and nothing. But I do know that in our uncertain times there are reflections behind mirrors, shimmering wisps on the periphery of sight, light within shadows. A whole world waiting to be revealed to us.

The studio will always call to me and the stars will always make me dream.

 

 

 

 

 

First published in the Summer 2009 edition of Faezine