The muse

Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye. It also includes the inner pictures of the soul.
Edvard Munch

This artwork, called Leira (which means field in Galego) is a monotype print with a face that appeared to me one day while painting in Betanzos, a small village in Galicia, a remote province in Northern Spain. I'm not a studio artist; I need inspiration, and I like and need to create my artworks in the context of different surroundings. Galicia is one of my favorite places to hunt for these inner images. Actually, one doesn't need to hunt for them, really one shouldn’t; they just appear, the less one tries to "seek inspiration", the more probable it is that one finds it. Inspiration has nothing to do with thinking, and everything to do with feeling.

Inspiration doesn't like force, and whatever inspiration is, it is certainly a free spirit, and a stubborn one. It comes when it wants to, not when you want. Inspiration comes to me when I walk, when I work, and most of all, when I let go. 

I no longer wait to have “an idea” and I certainly don’t think they are “mine”. Ideas are floating around us all the time, like invisible butterflies, you can’t catch them, but if you’re lucky, one of them sits on your shoulder. 

In Galicia, you find inspiration between the trees in the forest, or behind that beautiful green hill, or in the image of a ship on the horizon, or in one of the old fisherman’s bars. I just walk, I don't think and I don't search, I let my soul soak in that beautiful (and sometimes not so beautiful) world around me. 
And then I go back to the studio, take my brush, and images will appear. But because they want to.
Through the years, I’ve learned how to play with the muse, although it was, and is, not always that easy, as this poem reminds me of: 

Two weeks

In the first week, you meet your demons. 
They pull on your pencil when you draw, and fill your mind with lead. 
They step in your way in the middle of the forest. 
They push your muse and make her stumble – 
and out of the mirror, they make faces at you.
Your demons make sure you know that they don’t love you 
(but then again, they don’t love anyone). 
And you know it’s best just to let them be 
– like the ants, the mosquitoes, and that gigantic cricket in your ear. 
Eventually, they will get bored and leave. 

Then, one day, arrives an angel. 
She opens your shutters and makes your day soft. 
She breathes life into the world, and you breathe out. 
She hands you your papers (the ones with the demon sketches) 

and leaves (her visits are always short)
And she leaves you feeling blessed and tall. 
The next day, the muse returns from the hills. 
Her pale face has gained some color – her cheeks are rosy and busy. 
She sits down with you at the table and says: Let’s start! 
You look at her, astonished but determined, 
and you know that half of your time is already over. 
And you bow your head and begin the work. 
And the day is endless and you fill it out effortlessly.  

I wrote this in my notebook two years ago in another country, in another village, in Castagno de Piteccio, a little mountain village in Tuscany. I had been invited there to participate in a two-week-long artist residency, and it happened to me what had happened to me many times before and what I guess most artists are experiencing in some or the other way: I had two weeks to develop a project, and I immediately I got into the vicious circle of pressurizing myself and ending up in total despair, just before, miraculously, everything all of a sudden started to flow. In this case, it started to flow with this poem. 

The muse wants to be seduced, not to be forced. Start to draw, line by line, and it will be one line, you don’t know which, that will be so irresistible for the muse (her other name is association) that she will jump on it and guide you the way. “The muse will come, but it will have to find you working”, says Picasso.
There is no magic way to be more “efficient”, more “productive”, “faster”. The muse refuses these things. Because the absence of these things is not the problem, the problem is that we see it as a problem. 

The artistic process is not linear. It is cyclical, and there is a time to sow, to grow, and to harvest. Good things need time. It is better to accept this and give oneself the time one needs, to surrender, to let go. Going with the flow also means accepting that the flow sometimes comes to a halt for a little while. It is up to us whether the time we spend inviting the muse is a punishment or a gift. If you have time (and patience, of course), it can be a wonderful gift. Searching for the muse with open eyes and an open heart becomes a creative act in itself – it is one of the most beautiful ways of interacting with the world. The muse playing hide and seek with you is a punishment only in the framework of obligations and expectations – the muse wanders around in far forests, or above the clouds, god knows where, while we desperately wait for her in the city, in our studios, in universities, sitting at our desks. This is reality. 

Unlike us, the ancient Greeks did not cherish the illusion that our ideas are something that is coming from inside ourselves. For them, ideas and inspiration come from the genius, which is an entity existing outside ourselves, originally a guardian spirit, and which is etymologically linked to “giving birth”. Every human being has their own “genius”, and all ideas we have are given to us by them. And so I like to see creativity not as an act, something I execute by myself, alone, but an interaction, a collaboration. Abandoning the idea that it is all in our control, which has always been an illusion in the first place, and embracing the fact that everything in this world is a collaboration, and that there is a genius, a muse, an angel, however you want to call it, somewhere out there, coming for help eventually, makes things a lot easier. We lend a face to the faceless, and a creative block in the shape of a mischievous demon who has come to make faces at us, and who we know will eventually leave, is a little bit easier to bear. 

Since I wrote this poem, I’ve become a lot better at dealing with my demons and trusting my angel and my muse*. I have learned to arrange myself with my demons, not only laughing at them but also laughing with them. If they want me to draw nonsense for three days before getting any result, I’ll give it to them. I’ll have to, anyway. 

I have also learned that, no matter where I am, my angel is always with me, and I’ve learned to let my muse get out of sight, let her lost in the dark forest, and trust her always to come back to me. 

____________________________

*If you have read Gabriel Garcia Llorcas Theory and play of the duende, you will have noticed that my triangle of angel, muse and demon, alludes to the triangle he describes in his text, except that I have replaced Llorca’s Duende with the demon, which of course is an entirely different thing than the Duende of course – its opposite, actually. 

Living with the gods

Last year I created several artworks inspired by Melusina, the two-tailed mermaid, a figure that really fascinates me – the Melusina is an old matriarchal symbol uniting the erotic and the motherly aspect of the female nature, two aspects we have been gaslighted by patriarchy to perceive as a contradiction but which, of course, always have been two sides of one and the same coin. 

These are two of my favorite works, an aluminum sculpture I created after a papercut and a lithography. These two were ordered together by an art collector from Vienna. In the last years, a few collectors have mentioned to me that they feel that certain artworks they purchased from me protect and guard their homes, and I have to admit that my artwork being perceived that way makes me happy – because sometimes, some of my figures also remind me of old guardian spirits. 

It is, of course, not difficult to tell where they come from. What has influenced my work the most are my journeys, and what I discovered on them: From ancient temples on the Arabian peninsula where weather and time has washed away the faces and limbs of deities to the archaic smiles of greek goddesses after being kissed by Buddha, to the endless strips of Italian Frescoes repeating the stories of their holy book over and over, Islamic miniature painters veiling the faces of their saints with flames, and mythological creatures in the patterns of carpets, to deities so old that their names have been forgotten by everyone and new ones had to be invented, and most importantly, the thousands and thousands of deities living in India. 

For most of the time in human history, art and religion have been closely intertwined. Religion always has needed art, but art doesn’t need religion and has turned away from it, for the best reasons. But as enlightened as we might be, or think we are, there is and always will be a great need of the human soul to surround itself with magic. 

In the West though, we no longer feel the need for deities, and much less to lend a face to them: Our gods have started to fade away. Sometimes we go into a church and in the dim light of a candle we see a blackened altarpiece that depicts the gods and goddesses of yesterday. They look half-asleep, turned away from us, as if they were behind veils. They have become museal. It is clear that they are not amongst us anymore. 

In other places in the world, the gods are still alive. Just go South, perhaps to some Mediterranean islands, and in every corner you find shrines where a candle burns day and night, burning for the Virgin Mary, who once was Venus, who once was Aphrodite, who once was Al-Uzza, who once was Inanna. 

Big bright gods are ruling now great parts of the world, each of them ruling in a totalitarian manner that leaves no space for any other god, much less a goddess, but the dark corners he (it’s always a he) spares, because he doesn’t like darkness and he doesn’t like corners, are the place where small deities live. 

In the East, you find all sorts of creatures protecting spaces humans have created for themselves – rooms, households, temples, streets. They live on the margins of our lives in their niches and tiny houses, almost like the small animals sharing the spaces of us humans, and I must admit that it has happened to me that I mistook a god’s house for a birdhouse. Everything and anything can be a god, because god, of course, can be everything and anything: A bird, a stone, a sexual organ even.

Unlike the big god, this old monopolist, who’s grown so tall he has become out of control, a caricature almost, these small deities co-exist in some kind of spiritual democracy with humans, and with other deities. They‘re not aloof creatures who sit clouds and judge, but they live amongst us, and their tasks are humble and important. They are our spiritual housemates: If you feed them, they teach you that what you nourish nourishes you. They provide company, blessing, protection, mutual care, characteristics in which they, again, resemble certain pets. Others are mirrors of aspects of ourselves or of aspects the world we like to be reminded of, some even are a way for people who have died to continue to exist in some way. 

There are many reasons for a god to exist. 

But most importantly, they are representatives of the other, or however you might call it, they lend a human face to that which is faceless and make it something you can face, something you can address: They are a way to communicate with to something that is too big to be communicated with. You can talk to them, and they stand and listen, and I think this is their most important aspect: 
They are an embodiment of a sentiment human beings need to survive: That on this earth, we are, essentially, in a safe place. Through them, our deepest inside can communicate with the farthest outside.

You don’t need to be religious, and not even spiritual, to have a god. The moment you see a thing as more than a thing, the moment you attach a sentiment or a meaning beyond its mere function to it, you have created a god. 

I’ve seen many goddesses and gods on my journeys through the East, and some even in the West. I’ve seen their faces, which sometimes looked as astonished as mine, sometimes their features were washed away, some where alive and some were dead, and sometimes it was a stone that was worshipped, a stone onto which someone had painted an eye. 
I’ve met deities in lively churches and dormant temples, in street corners and in museums and in books, and sometimes in the houses of people. I’ve been a guest in houses of gods I’ve never heard of, local deities that only exist in a city, or even only in a single household. I’ve met many strange deities, while others, like the face of Botticelli‘s Venus, always has been as familiar to me as the face of my mother. And somewhere, deep inside of me, I’ve stored all these glances, these faces, these personalities of this enormous family of beings that exist, and don’t exist. They all sleep inside of me now, and sometimes when I make an artwork, they become alive and real again, and I recognize their faces in what I just drew, or sculpted, or painted.

And other people recognize them too. Maybe not as what they were when I saw them, or as what I intended them, or thought that I intended them to be, but as whatever they are meant to be now, and god knows what that is. And if they are meant that they bring a spirit of protection to some household, if they’re picking up that old, honorable godly duty of guarding over something, I’m content with it.