“I love you, Lucien, but I am a muse, you are an artist, I am not here to make you comfortable.”
― Christopher Moore
In Greek Mythology, the muses were the daughters of Zeus and the titan Mnemosyne(Memory). They governed over various arts and were said to inspire artists to create. They were alluring and graceful and many an artist tried to woo the muses when they undertook a new endeavour. From a kaballistic standpoint, Zeus would be Chesed (expansion into form). In other words, art’s inspiration comes from the expansion of memory into form. This would include but not be exclusive to the artist’s personal memory. It would also include to my mind both the archetypal memories that live in our collective unconscious and atavistic memories that are buried even deeper thus giving us a bottomless well of inspiration would that we could tap into it.
How can we call on the muses? How can we find the inspiration we need to create? Here is an exercise that you may find useful. Imagine if you will swimming below the surface in a clear beautiful river. You sense that you are not alone in your swim that there are other forms swimming around you. You come out of the water into a beautiful clear moonlit night. As you leave the water you sense that you are not alone. There is a woman there, attractive and somewhat shy. Ask her her name and what she may have for you in the way of ideas and inspiration. Listen to what she has to tell you.
Understand tho that many of the memories that lie below the surface may not be pleasant comforting ones. Then again, we seldom create from comfort. Usually we write or draw or create based on themes and ideas that we are trying to work out within ourselves. Quite often the work of creating art is the purest form of shadow work and in interacting with our creation, we gain awareness of parts of ourselves we would otherwise be unaware of.
Blessings, G
“We might say that the dream transforms the dreamer; that it possesses the ability to ‘initiate’, to bestow new meaning, to motivate new beginnings (Latin: initium – beginning), to permit our entrance (literally ‘en-trance’; Latin: inire init – to go in) to new orders of relation between ourselves and the ‘other’.”
— Andrew D. Chumbley
Dreams echo in the waking breath
and then ebb away
to distant shore’s calling
their transformations
internal and eternal
felt but unexpressed
in the morning light
except in subtle hints.
Once more I play the fool
in daily routines
as I pretend to a normalcy
beyond my reach.
yet in the evening
I create the flow
and the images arrive
through mouse and screen
and my own inner reveries
The tide has returned
and the dreaming begins again.
— G A Rosenberg
“The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.”
— Ezra Pound
Everything is a first step towards a greater whole and every moment both a beginning and an ending. Even if we’re well on our way towards a given goal, the next step we take will be the first one on the rest of the way there. This is both reassuring and terrifying for it means no matter how far we’ve come, the journey is always beginning. Each achievement leads to the next one and we can never fully rest on our laurels because we have so far to go.
Blessings, G
“Come from forever, and you will go everywhere.”
― Arthur Rimbaud
Beyond forever
lies the infinite
where anything conceived may be formed
We play there in imagination’s memories
as we construct sea foam realities
that live outside our dreams.
We enter through being’s void
and in dissolution we create
Next door a universe exists
for we dreamed it into being
and we straddle both
and so many more
through the hole
through beyond
— G A Rosenberg
“The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.”
Willem de Kooning
“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”
Niels Bohr
Create from chaos a new order
like sand castles doomed when the tide comes in
A fun game that symbolizes our lives
we create temporary structures of thought and deed
one day the tide comes in and those structures vanish
while we build another
never realizing the friendship of entropy
for without it we could not create
Eternity would pass and we would stagnate
in castles that have become prisons
yearning for destruction’s kiss
so we could create anew.
Blessings, G
Click on images to see full-sized:
Desire Burning by G A Rosenberg
Caught Up Within the Elements Within by G A Rosenberg
“The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.”
Willem de Kooning
“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”
Niels Bohr
Create from chaos a new order
like sand castles doomed when the tide comes in
A fun game that symbolizes our lives
we create temporary structures of thought and deed
one day the tide comes in and those structures vanish
while we build another
never realizing the friendship of entropy
for without it we could not create
Eternity would pass and we would stagnate
in castles that have become prisons
yearning for destruction’s kiss
so we could create anew.
Blessings, G
Click on images to see full-sized:
Desire Burning by G A Rosenberg
Caught Up Within the Elements Within by G A Rosenberg
“Can you remember how you felt when you were communicating through your artwork? Not just the sense of completion, but the sense of rightness- the sense that you had brought to life something that could live beyond your sphere of being, that held in it far more potential than you ever realized you were imbuing in the work?”
― Charles de Lint
Clarity of transmission
the artist in synch with his instinct
creating
something that wasn’t there before
Colours and layers blending
lights added, lines removed
a palette of textures all drawn
No.. that isn’t right
Move back five steps
add the missing element and recombine
alter the hues so that its right
listening as the picture tells him
what it wants to be..
a collaborative effort
art creating itself through his hands..
The last touches are made.
One last stoke put in
A new piece has entered the world.
— G A Rosenberg
Finding a New Labyrinth by G A Rosenberg 
Rainbow Propagation by G A Rosenberg 
