Images of Earth & Spirit

These premises include the complete autonomy or separateness of art and artists and their undeviating commitment to Progress. In the final analysis art, it has been assumed, should be pioneering and anarchic, produced by self-directed professionals and, it goes without saying, urban, even metropolitan, in spirit. As a result, anything touching on the visionary, the cosmic and transpersonal dimension becomes more or less taboo--as largely, too, has the mythological, the symbolic and anything that could be described as literary or, worst of all, useful to society. In this context, talk about harmony, environmental responsibility or even aesthetics is an anathema to those who revel in their freedoms and sovereign specialness. Art for Art's sake has one and only one theme: it is about art, other art and its practitioners should be left alone to practice it.

The artist's featured in this book either consciously or unconsciously have adopted something of a different agenda.'The best achievements of British art, this century,' wrote Peter Fuller, 'have always involved a refusal of certain aspects of Modernism' and this, I'd say, is probably true of the artists featured in these pages. Some of them have sought to reroot aesthetics in the sudy of nature and natulral form, some to develop a fresh language for expression of the symbolic and the mythological; yet others, hostile to secularism, are seeking to give voice to the transcendental in their work.

But nonetheless its a mixed bunch. Some, say Alan Davie or Cecil Collins and Andy Goldsworthy have established reputations while others are almost unknown. None subscribe to any particular School of painting or sculpture and, as far as I know, most of them neither know one another nor one another's work. This then is a collection of essays about a number of artist's that have little in common except that their work was originally featured in the pages of the bimonthly journal, Resurgence. And why then was it chosen? Quite simply because it could be seen that there was something about this work which was giving imaginative expression to the ideas and values that Resurgence has always sought to promulgate.

Those ideas and values are broadly representative of the powerful sea change now beginning to affect our world view and in consequence, the arts. And if, as has been said, artists are the antennae of the race, it is a sea change of which we will be hearing much more.

Resurgence is not an art magazine nor, for that matter, a strictly green one; yet it exists to question the very roots of Western thought and in their place it proposes a number of positive alternatives. These include alternatives to the chimera of unending material progress, the importance of rurality and the necessity for re-enchantment and spirituality. It also stresses the wisdom of beauty and, above all else, the holistic view--the relevance of interconnectedness.

From the point of view of the artists featured in this book, every one of these factors is of importance; the ecological in its broadest reading and the spiritual in a no less open interpretation. Both, of course, have been understood in a thousand different ways: here the ecological implies listening to the voice of the Earth, respecting its power and beauty, celebrating its diversity and understanding how the human fits within it--not as a greedy, arrogant, self appointed Owner but as a species that accepts the responsibilities of consciousness informed by compassion and reverence.

The spiritual is probably an even vaguer term and not one necessarily limited to a belief in one of the great religious traditions though these can provide an important inspiration. Rather, I suggest, it implies a transcendence of the Humanist, secular and largely materialist culture of our time and a reaching out for the things of the spirit: love, beauty, prayer, wholeness--the values that may not pay for life but always sustain it.

The composer, Michael Tippett, once stated that 'the artist's job is to renew our sense of the comely and the beautiful. To create a dream. Every human being has this need to dream.' Whether or not these, 'inner voids' of the spirit, are called upon, they are always there. Known or not known, despised or rejected, what Socrates called 'a Divine Something' exists to call each one of us to live and give expression to our whole selves. This calling can come as a prophetic dream, a vision, an oracular knowing, an inspiration (such as Blake and Mozart experienced) or the Shaman's joumey; either way it comes as a visitation that directs us to respect the truth of the soul's interior abundance. As artists, we carry a special responsibility to act as its guardians. Our responsibility, in the beautiful phrase of Federico Garcia Lorca is then to sing 'the deep song.'

An attitude such as this may be foreign to the sterile and fashion conscious world of the commodified art market and the tyranny of the museum committed to the pretence of the vanguard. Yet if the painters and sculptors discussed in this book should be as hungry for "success" as, say, some of the most famous art practitioners that is not the reason why they are represented here. They are here for quite another reason. To my eye, their work carries the healing needed for our redemption. It speaks of a new sense of the universe, a new sense of spirituality, holism and interconnectedness, openness and non-determinism. It gives hope for the renewal of life in the future, For just as a sick animal will search for the healing herbs necessary for its survival so we now need to find the nourishment to feed our starving souls. For that purpose I urge a study of the images featured in this book.

John Lane, Art Editor of Resurgence

Image on top:
The Gift II, by Elizabeth Collins

Image on bottom:
Hay newly cut, by Mary Newcombe