“Myth Meets Dream,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 47″ x 38″

*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

Homo sapiens is the animal that means something, or that desperately wants to mean something.  Undoubtedly our thirst for meaning has a lot to do with our petrifying awareness of death, itself a side effect of the imagination, and one that makes our unique position as much of a curse as it is a gift.

As the prime fruit of the imagination, art is the incontrovertible sign of humanity’s presence on earth.  But what constitutes the human itself?  The prehistoric paintings at Chauvet confront us with a dimension of ourselves that, though familiar in ways, remains in many respects unknown and may ultimately be unknowable.  Human consciousness has access to a powerful otherworld, the place of dreams and myth, poetry and lunacy.  [This is]… the “imaginal,” the name Henry Corbin gave to the intermediate realm, central to the inscrutable mind of God.  As a concrete manifestation of this imaginal realm in the public sphere, art calls us back to the source as a matter of course.      

J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice:  A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action 

Comments are welcome!