To me, “artist help” means two things: inspiration for the artist and inspiration from the artist. And the older and, it’s hoped, wiser I get, the more I realize that the latter – artist help defined as service to humanity at large – is the best way to get the former.
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Reflections on vision and artists help.
During my art school years I spent a lot of my time experimenting and probably not being as conscientious with aesthetic decisions as I like to be these days. I think I probably wanted to be somebody famous and outrageous. I remember having aspirations of arriving somewhere in the calibre of the Australian artist Brett Whitely, who’s not with us anymore. In the late ‘70s he was winning all of the art awards at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He won the trifecta, the Archibald, the Wynne and the Sulman prizes in 1978, in the midst of my art training.
I guess he was somebody that I was looking at emulating in some way or other, however he also had a serious drug habit with heroin, which was a choice I had absolutely no intention of following. I did like the way he approached art. I felt in his career he was incredibly courageous and had an amazing natural talent, and somewhere I got a taste of wanting to achieve something along those lines minus the tendency for addictive substances!
I feel much more in the service of people now. My vision is shaped more around being in the service of people and humanity as a whole. I am enjoying my role as a mediator between nature and humans, expressing universal truths in my work and inspiring viewers as much as I am able. When I deliver my lectures about my environmental work in Australia and overseas in the United States and Europe, I often I begin the lecture with a blessing for everybody- a blessing for oneness.
I strive to act as a reminder of our need for oneness and the necessity to help each other.
This is where my vision has evolved, a place where my lectures and art making inform and dovetail into each other. If there’s any way that I can serve as a messenger of positive change and consciousness, it is all worth it.
