Artist’s Statement – Undertow
My feeling is it refers to the psycho-emotional boundary dissolution of working in an expressionist way … in an existential, imaginative territory.
As a receptor of the world I filter information … I process energy currents of the whole, specifically of our epoch (its temporary by design) … its systemic abuses.
Shadow work (Non theatre) … and internal processing is not common in art now … but i can only relay what I actually perceive to be going on.
And i admit i am blind (philosophically) … limited and quite incapable of envisioning a true totality of cosmic and Gaian significance … but i know it’s there.
What motivates me as a painter is THE WORK – the Making!
Transduction of innate energy unconsciousness … ancestral self;
to make seen the unseen – this process is discomforting for me as it
rightly is profound.
I feel morally accountable in some way for the iniquities of our generation …
the apathy and helplessness, as we plunder and degrade our biosphere,
our cultures, and the enslavement of all people under a criminal globalism, a debt system of exploitation controlled by a war economy.
Therefore my work is personal, and social; the expression of a
legitimate anxiety.
And New Zealand used to have a moral backbone (or is this just another myth I absorbed growing up here?). Perhaps the embryonic future will read our vain
scribblings in the sand of luxury’s dust and ponder our ineptitude to effect any
change..
I can only work on my self, out loud … desperately …
so be it.
it’s my job to share it … because art must remind us, we have a Soul.
James Robinson
Port Chalmers
May 2016