Title: Self Portrait
Custom Fields
Artist: Toby Whittaker
Medium: Oil
Size: 9in x 12in
The best way to explain what art is, from my viewpoint, is to observe that the creation myths of most religions involve a personal being or beings 'creating' the world, because for the people who first told these stories, human creative endeavour was the best metaphor available.
This is to say that art is the generative activity of the human psyche – I use the term 'art' in its widest sense, as I believe that there is no fundamental qualitative distinction between, say, a painting on canvas and an aircraft: each are results of creative endeavour, and lovers of aviation (myself among them) might justifiably say that an aircraft can be as beautiful as any painting – although the speciation of arts is such that an aircraft can never be tragic, or comic, or otherwise meaningfully beautiful; and a painting cannot fly.
I think of my personal practice in the visual arts as “plastic fiction” – that is, the creation of concrete objects that evoke imaginary realms. I do not think that there is any categorical boundary between figuration and abstraction; I prefer things to inhabit liminal territories, and adhere to the maxim of Edward Gorey: “Ideally, if anything were any good, it would be indescribable.”
Further examples of my work can be viewed at www.mvone.netfirms.com
