A Lost Paradise

Lost Paradise

I consider what life would be like without art, simply to appreciate more the good fortune I have of creating and teaching art professionally. I am gript by art theory and history but there is a naivety in the planning and making I have sensed is absent.

A theme of practice is to follow the trail back to the genesis, to recover this naivety, the lost paradise . Cecil Collins was an enigmatic artist of the 1940 s who painted idiosyncratic scenes depicting landscape, fools fairies and maidens. His main point of return was this lost paradise that is forged in childhood - lost in becoming adults. His naivety, a quality of paradise, is both in the subject matter and the process of his work. There is a painting in which he depicts his wife sitting in a tree, his wife sits swaying in a tree, an insight into marriage perhaps? There is a feeling that the artist might be somewhere nearby. The non-artist amateur or outsider artist articulates something original and genuine. Naivety. He has not lost his place in paradise it seems to flow through him as if it always had. How is that? My own naivety has been neglected in the forging of a professional arts career but I am on the scent