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The Sasse: Where love stories develop between art and viewer | ||||
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Go Fish |
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| "New artists must break a hole in the subconscious and go fishing there." Robert Beverly Hale (1901-1985) | Artist-curator We think of creativity as building, as making, as constructive effort. But Hale suggests something different: that the artist's first task is destructive. Break a hole. Crack the ice. Shatter the familiar surface that our conscious mind presents to us every day. What lies beneath that surface? Not chaos, but a teeming world we've never fully explored. Memories half-forgotten. Emotions we couldn't name. Connections our logical mind would never make. The subconscious doesn't organize experience the way our waking thoughts do; it layers, it associates, it keeps everything we've ever seen or felt in a kind of eternal present. And we must go fishing there. Not mining, that would be too aggressive, too certain of what we're looking for. Not diving, that suggests we know where we're going. Fishing. Which means casting a line into dark water and waiting. Which means we cannot predict what will come up. Which means sometimes we pull up treasure and sometimes we catch nothing at all. The established artist has a well-worn hole, a familiar fishing spot. But the new artist must break through fresh ice, must find their own opening into the depths. This is terrifying. It's also essential. Because what makes your work yours, what makes it new, isn't your technique or your training. It's what you pull up from those particular depths. The strange catch that only you could hook. The images and feelings that surface when you, specifically, drop a line through your specific crack in the ice. The subconscious is generous with those brave enough to break through. It has been saving things for you. All you have to do is just fish.photo by: Gene Sasse | Fishing still-life |
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