The Hammock Papers: Flow.

27 September 2010

Flow.

From a 2003 interview Russell Chatham did with The Bloomsbury Review ...

Russell Chatham: ... develop your brain as much as possible. It broadens and deepens everything. All art comes first from the heart, the brain is the train that delivers it to the station.

The Bloomsbury Review: There's a metaphor that the mind is like a muscle, so it's important to keep it engaged.

RC: Everyone has seen examples of a state of mind, positive or negative, affecting physical health. People have been diagnosed with terminal cancer, said no i don't think so, and gone on to live when medical science they shouldn't have.

TBR: Georgia O'Keeffe must've been nearly 100, legally blind, yet still working with clay, staying engaged with the universe, and keeping herself young at heart. She kept the child alive, that innocent, sweet part of us I think is so essential to the creative process.

RC: Very important. Without vulnerability and innocence, things become cynical and hard, which ultimately disallows any kind of translation I look for in art, and that I hope to deliver. You can't afford to become bitter in any way, or else the world will no longer be able to flow through you.

Further ...

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL