Journeys through life and art

I recently read a wonderful story 'A Need to Believe," by Daniel Pinchbeck, about his father's life and work as an unrecognised abstract expressionist. This is my response to his article.

Years ago as an aspiring poet and artist, I lived and worked in a poky pub in Greenwich village London, pulling pints of brown swill for an endless procession of tourists who filed up the hill to the Observatory. They stopped to sample T&J Bernard's podgy pies and complain about the shabby British service. None of the staff in the Tavern were British and I had my suspicions about Hussein’s pie preparation. We were grossly understaffed and overstretched to maximize profit margins. The Kings Arms Tavern was more Mcfranchise than English tradition, with hundreds of identically furnished establishments placed strategically along tourist routes, and appropriately priced for customers who were never likely to return. T&J's authentic pub experience could be relied upon to dampen moods more thoroughly than the insipid London weather, and I marvelled at how many people travelled so far to have such a thoroughly awful time.
My parents, worrying that I had been drifting aimlessly for far too many years, visited me from New Zealand, sugesting that I return to finish a Degree. They looked doubtful when Hussein reassured them that I was doing all right. I personally felt less in need of orientating influences than the aged tourists who hoped to capture 'Greenwich Mean Time,' on their video cameras, or any other edification the Observatory might offer. Being so desperately short on time, I wondered if they sat in the pub contemplating how a life of hard work and responsibility was culminating in the abject suffering of an eternity waiting for Hussein’s podgy pies. I cheered myself by reassuring the most miserable whingers that at least that much of their experience was thoroughly English.
In the evenings, the locals would filter back in, wary from their grey office jobs, and resign themselves to their places in front of the slot machines. Or take in the England Germany game, resuscitating the tired glories of "two world wars and one world cup," in a histrionic chorus of drunken song.

At the local markets, I bought a book on Ancient Chinese Landscape art. Opening its dusty cover revealed a world far removed from the pies and pokies of the tavern; it elevated my imaginings to the mystical peaks of Taoist philosophy. The landscapes and accompanied writings danced with poetic and mystical significance, speaking of the lost ancient world of the Chinese philosopher sages whose beautiful scrolls revealed “waves of silence” their mountainous peaks shrouded by “intangible, instinctive, and emotional perceptions, such as flavour and resonance, which escape recognition by the eye and definition by the mind, and defy linear drawing.” The writing was unapologetically romantic, yielding an ethereal quality in words and images, sentiments of a profound spiritual reverence for nature that I felt was sadly absent from the mediocre world around me. Inspired by youthful idealism and romantic escapist fantasies I copied into my diary a sentence that had particular resonance. “By freeing oneself progressively from the demands of false ideals, academia, and stylistic convention, the minds contact with the surrounding universe becomes correspondingly closer.”

Worn down by the monotony of menial jobs I eventually returned to New Zealand to finish a degree in Fine Arts, mindful of the polarities between the business materialism of the commercial art world and the joyful child like purity of undiluted creative freedom. Reading this wonderful story about your father’s life and work has prompted me to recollect this episode in my life, stimulating my contemplation of the relationships between the grating callings of life and responsibility, and the romantic artistic struggle for pure authenticity and sublime creative release.


The need to believe available: http://www.realitysandwich.com/need_believe


In his paintings Wang Wei could sugest the indescribable and the unshapable, instinctive and emotion perceptions such as flavour and resonance which escape recognition by the eye and definition by the mind and defy linear drawing. He could capture those ineffable perfumes and waves of silence which can only be siezed upon by a highly aware sensability and picked up by a heart that is perfectly calm, devoid of egotistical desire and fully contemplative, an echo chamber at the centre of being wich must not be desturbed by interuptive inner sounds. The heart should be a celestial promenade. The depths of the heart must remain permeable to the influx of heaven