The Hidden Sphere
(of Artistic Concerns) Cecil Orion Touchon

11

A painter prepares his canvas with gesso.
It is the emptiness of the white ground
that gives rise to a painting.

The potter shapes clay into the form of a vessel.
It is the emptiness within it
that gives it its shape and usefulness.

Before the concert begins,
all musicians enter silence.
It is from this emptiness that the symphony emerges.

Thus we spend many years of disciplined preparation and study
to become artists, musicians or writers.
Yet, it is the deepening of the accommodation within
our hearts and minds that gives a place
for the creative harmony to express itself through us.(1) 
 
 


footnotes

(1)  Anonymity allows me to give up myself, but in giving up myself I end up by affirming myself more. Similarly, silence is a refusal of noise, but the result is that the least sound, in silence, becomes enormous. 
 The same approach makes me seek the sound hidden in the silence, the movement in immobility, life in the inanimate, the infinite in the finite, shapes in emptiness, and myself in anonymity.

Juan Miro, Taillandier, 1959

 
 

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