Note: This Document Was Originally Written In Microsoft Word 2007.

Note: This document was originally written in Microsoft Word 2007. The images didn't carry over, and neither did the formatting. This is the raw copy.

INSPIRATION, NO. By Ben Prudden: Introduction There are many people that look at discord and see harmony; a harmony within the randomness, chaos, and strife between the elements that in their conflict unite to beset your senses with claustrophobic explosions. Specifically discord within art concedes that it can deliberately shatter the linear progression by combining various elements out of turn; concluding that discord, as much as harmony, pushes the medium of art forward. But what are we pushing forward into? Much like the fundamental questions of this world revolve around the future where; where is this relationship going? Where is the universe expanding in to? As much as we want to live in the moment, human beings fundamentally feel insecure without understanding their progression from the past to the future. It can become life consuming. The medium of art has never collectively wonders where it is going next; it relies on instances in time to spark a change, indicative of the fundamental basis for the medium, expressing the realities that surround us. But it therefore becomes near impossible for an artist to remain relevant for a significant period of time with the progression of art reliant on incompatibilities with the past. Admittedly the likes of Michelangelo have stuck, but haven’t sparked change; created that burning ember that burns bright for the most present second, changing everything. Changing the air we breathe. He was Inspirational, yes, consistently remarkable, no. “Inspirational, no.” Is about making realities consistently remarkable. It is no longer acceptable to reinvent the medium through a chaotic process that renders previous artists and experiences irrelevant in the pursuit of a deliberately uncertain future. If discord is defined as a lack of agreement, art itself is fundamentally a lack of agreement between representations of reality; for discord to be represented, a lack of agreement with this fundamental basis comes in the form of agreement. This project is not inspirational, the art and artists included are not modern cutting edge or refined in the renaissance. Instead you will find artists that create art around an experience, a form of reality; they create in the moment with a passion and a confidence in their representations of that reality, their work only becomes only more significant as time progresses. It is complex to define this in your own work for it can come across arrogant and excessive. However through a combination of looking at artists that critics believe are slowly progressing toward a similar end, and artists that I think through texture, forms, and manipulation of time, represent the formation of realities now that will culminate into agreement between past, present, and future.

Inspiration, no. – Chapter 1 Texture: Contained within this essay are 3 chapters, chapters that express a progression of thought through art coinciding with the 3 instances of time; past, present, and future.

Note: This document was originally written in Microsoft Word 2007. The images didn't carry over, and neither did the formatting. This is the raw copy.

Texture underpins all art. Artists are only as good as the materials they use; especially considering that an increasing majority of modern artists use industrial processes exclusively to create their work. It brings into question the nature of an artist that wants their work to look like it has never interacted with, touched by the artist’s hands; it directly violates human instinct from a young age to explore, to touch everything. Inspiration, no. defies this convention and allows anyone to touch the art in front of them. Although not tied to any particular artist, it has been a long standing personal aim of mine to create art that can be touched, grasped, licked if it so please the person in front of the work. Because of this increased interaction, the work must have a solid basis in reality, but remain elusive enough for the audience to be driven ever closer into the experience. For an example of this, one only needs to look in the direction of Richard Nott; the physicality of his work purveying the language of war as he battles, scars, and burns the surface with industrial materials that juxtapose experiences of the natural, placing himself and his works in a material reality. It could be likened to “extraction,” if it were not for the organic sensation created through the materials themselves. It is because of the interaction between the mind’s eye and the means to create it that fickleness occurs and becomes uncontrollable; fire, brimstone, and everything in between not only change the piece, but they give it a timeless dynamism where the familiar becomes remarkable every time the work is presented. It could be argued that the materials that create art ground it in reality; the logic being that if the world is made of these materials, then the same must be said of art. But, when the media is populated with images of Jeff Koons and his man made inflatable dolphin, this relationship becomes distorted. The superiority complex instilled in us all says, “We are better,” we are better than anything; everything. The truth people forget when trying to discern a deeper meaning behind a semi-naked woman, a set of inflatable’s, and a set suspiciously akin to that found in cheap pornography, is that it was all of this earth at one point. Any texture you touch is a variation on a formation of reality. Juliette Paull realised that there aren’t words to truly describe such a crucial nature, her art instead tries to alert people to its presence; furthering the work of Richard Nott, she creates a focal point representative of life, only to draw you into the “discovery of moments” left behind in the texture from the remnants of previous work.

Inspiration, no. – Chapter 2 Form: Form is an interesting concept in art. Considering the dramatic rise in abstract art, you would be inclined to think that form has been in decline; the precision of the past masters in their study and implementation of anatomy has not been forgotten, but replaced by weird and wonderful shapes. These shapes are as much forms as anything that came before them. If anything, the creation of these forms has accelerated the learning and observation of forms in reality. As much as the past masters, including the likes of Leonardo Da Vinci, could draw and paint with precision what they saw around them, as artists they began correcting reality. They saw imperfections. Expressionists furthered this by using technique to blur reality somewhat. However, abstract artists create what they see. It is an honest representation of both the “light and dark of human emotion.” Not only do we get increased diversity within art and artists displaying their work because of

Note: This document was originally written in Microsoft Word 2007. The images didn't carry over, and neither did the formatting. This is the raw copy.

this, but we also get work that is possibly not the most inspiring, it could for all intents and purposes be revolting to look at, but it is always remarkable; always relevant, new. The most famous artist to do this was of course Pablo Picasso, the Spanish painter that founded cubism. However, the artists this project focuses on need to be united, therefore two artists that perfectly personify this are Trevor Bell and Matthew Lanyon. A particular interest can be found in Trevor Bell’s use of forms that extenuate his shapes within the work outwards. The shapes of his canvases are as pivotal to the work as what is expressed on them; the large controlled sweeping colours create shapes and forms that jump off the piece and out into the world. The use of 3 dimensions over a large surface fills the audiences’ view, fills their reality, with forms that can both envelop and repel them from instant to instant. This concept of making the canvas part of the art itself is remarkable; regardless of Da Vinci being able to draw a perfect circle; the imperfection in Bell’s shapes makes them infinitely more entertaining. Matthew Lanyon does something similar; instead of making one giant shape, his work uses the forms of multiple perspectives of the same view to create a sense of timelessness. The intersection of these various realities within one piece of work combined with his use of very specific forms to symbolise the most fundamental nouns of man, woman, and sun create an abstraction that burns itself into the consciousness. With Matthew often being known as a “colour genius,” his use of colour serves to perpetuate a state of higher being, as if we are looking down on his work somehow. The artist Yonatan Levy describes this as, “any expectations or personal preferences are left out of the process” everything is generated without compromise, enabling the remarkable.

Inspiration, no. – Chapter 3 Time: Time is the strangest of things; not just in art, but in the fact that its formation was both natural and manmade, driven by the human need to quantify its own overall context. Time itself is constant, but it changes from moment to moment as the second hand ticks past another quantity of time. For art, time is not so much a quantity as it is a reference point; photography captures the quantity (hence it’s popularity), art does its best to express it with relation to everything around it. Time is essential for this project because of its desire to unite past, present, and future so that those expressions of time are relevant across time, rather than isolated in the context of the past or proposing the future. The Japanese have a competent grasp on this concept through the need to keep old traditions of the samurai alive while making progress as a technological innovator ever faster in the “digital decade;” so it should surprise nobody when I use a Japanese artist to illustrate Inspiration, no’s concept. Shinichi Maruyama is a young artist that has only recently made large strides in the contemporary art world when exhibiting in the west rather than in his home country. He, ironically, works primarily in the medium of photography; however, he first creates what he wants to photograph. The decisive moment is not in capturing the quantity of time with the photograph, but in the millisecond difference between discord and harmony; emphasising the unquantifiable reality that happens between seconds. It is this reality that artists observe, but it is also this reality that makes or breaks them. Artists often try to express it the instant the observation happens, or worse, try to anticipate it by looking to the past for indications of them. Art becomes stranded.

Note: This document was originally written in Microsoft Word 2007. The images didn't carry over, and neither did the formatting. This is the raw copy.

Like Richard Nott, it is only in the extraction of these instances can we make them relevant. They are inspiring in themselves, and artists are more than capable of expressing that; but to make them relevant they must be based in reality, their effect must be, for the lack of a better analogy, extended like a drop ink making a splash in water. An example of this reverberation effect is from another up and coming Japanese artist, Motoda Hisaharu; who, by expressing a very physical calamity in his prints of postapocalyptic Tokyo, shows us the result of when the point of discord and harmony is reversed. It becomes like looking back upon something that never happened. Yet it’s still hard to shake this feeling that it could have happened. Time may be constant, but there is the equivalent of leap seconds happening all around us as time begins to be expressed in 3 dimensions. They should be attested to; past, present, and future.