MAINTAINING HOPE

People who recognise their need to be artists do so for numerous reasons.

(At the bottom this text is an audio read of this essay.
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Perhaps they have a compulsion to paint or write or photograph.
That is not enough.
They also must be driven to become who they believe they wish to be.
That is not enough
because dabbling in a medium leads to little
unless it is driven by compelling needs.

DaVinci’s study for ST ANNE, THE VIRGIN MARY AND CHILD an exquisite reflection of the development of individual consciousness in the early 16th C

Do they have an idealistic vision of the world,
wishing for others and themselves
a better life and a better world to live it in?

Are they haunted by rising inequality, corruption at every turn,
increasing numbers of wars and the doom laden climate crisis?

Have they investigated their own reasons to exist?

Have they come to understand what they value, more than any other thing?

Is it an idea, a material something, or a person or people?

Have they asked,
what is it they would miss so profoundly that all hope would be gone?
If not, they will only produce hollow forms,
unlikely to be filled by their despair,
knowing they have little to hope for,
nor anything of value to contribute,
and less to say.

Thin beliefs, thin ideals, unrecognizable values,
lead to a generalised world.
One cannot create work of value within the stupor of generalizations.

An artist must be committed to beliefs, to values
and to changing a world whose very corruption has forged their creativity.
Art begins in the particular and flows out to the general.

All the above, wars, corruption, inequality, forced migrations and the loss of hope
are a result of this amoral neoliberal capitalism which dominates our lives
and has spread throughout the world.
It has made of much humanity’s work an ash filled plain
through its senseless criminal destruction of all that was good,
and it has vomited a wasteland from its insatiable hunger for wealth and power,
and has drowned many of us in its soulless world of materialism.

One thing was assured;
that they understood their need to silence truly creative and wise men and women
who could have risen lasting structures for their love of humanity,
so that our world would have been more beautiful
and people would have lived better and more easily.

But soon this will everywhere and for all time, with time itself, vanish,
and it will mean that the love of goodness and our human journey
will have been extinguished and disappeared from this burning earth,
because of a fistful of demonic and depraved men and women,
while we and many artists, discouraged and without hope, sat in silences
or preferred to service the elite with decorations, entertainments and banal ‘art’.

Still, there are artists around,
willing to stick their necks above the stifling parapet of conformity,
to reveal that they still have hope in humanity and in a better future.

I recently read the Anglo-Turkish writer, Elif Shafak’s beautiful, indeed mesmeric novel,
TEN MINUTED 38 SECONDS IN THIS STRANGE WORLD.
I have also seen her speak several times,
with dignity, diplomacy, acuity, and always with a base of rich humanity.

This gives one hope that despite all the horror perpetrated against us,
we can resist, while daring to still hope
which is one of the keys to help us remember the best of who we are.