Cecilia Vissers

SO FAR

20 x 8.5 x 1.2 cm each part, anodised aluminum, 2012

http://brenthallard.wordpress.com/2010/05/01/cecilia-vissers/

And what is your aim as an artist?

The entire aim of my work is to elevate the human spirit. We can put the human spirit down so easily. Art reflecting society as it is today is not an answer because it’s already shitty, so why put more shit into it? You have to find a way to actually elevate the spirit so that it’s a kind of oxygen to society. To bring concepts and awareness, to ask the right questions. Not always the right answers, but that the right questions being asked.

Marina Abromovic

http://the-talks.com/interviews/marina-abramovic/

The Ritual Walk: Robert Macfarlane

Everywhere I went on these journeys, I encountered men and women for whom landscape and walking were vital to life. I met tramps, trespassers, dawdlers, mourners, stravaigers, explorers, cartographers, poets, sculptors, activists, botanists, and pilgrims of many kinds. I discovered that walking is still profoundly and widely alive in the world as a more-than-functional act. I met people who walked in search of beauty, in pursuit of grace or in flight from unhappiness, who followed songlines or ley-lines; I witnessed walking as non-compliance, walking as fierce star-song, walking as elegy or therapy, walking as reconnection or remembrance, and walking to sharpen the self or to forget it entirely.

.....

Perhaps some version of this idea is why so many people seem to need the ritual walk now more than ever. In a context of the drastic privatisation of most aspects of culture, walking can offer freedoms that still escape capital's structures of credit and debt, service and obligation. The gifts offered by walking are, at their best, radical because unreciprocal. "They give me joy as I proceed," wrote John Clare simply, of field paths. Me too.

Robert Macfarlane
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/15/rites-of-way-pilgrimage-walks

Practice: Jerry Seinfeld

“If I don’t do a set in two weeks, I feel it,” he said. “I read an article a few years ago that said when you practice a sport a lot, you literally become a broadband: the nerve pathway in your brain contains a lot more information. As soon as you stop practicing, the pathway begins shrinking back down. Reading that changed my life. I used to wonder, Why am I doing these sets, getting on a stage? Don’t I know how to do this already? The answer is no. You must keep doing it. The broadband starts to narrow the moment you stop.”

Jerry Seinfeld Intends to Die Standing Up By JONAH WEINER
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/magazine/jerry-seinfeld-intends-to-die-standing-up.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0&pagewanted=print

Looking at Paintings: Richard Arthur Wollheim

...paintings do not instantly disclose their meanings; and Wollheim has left us an amusing description of his own method of looking at paintings: "I evolved a way of looking at paintings which was massively time consuming and deeply rewarding. For I came to recognise that it often took the first hour or so in front of a painting for stray associations or motivated misperceptions to settle down, and it was only then, with the same amount of time or more to spend looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was. I noticed that I became an object of suspicion to passers-by, and so did the picture that I was looking at."

Guardian 5 Nov 2003

Richard Arthur Wollheim (5 May 1923 – 4 November 2003) was a British philosopher noted for original work on mind and emotions, especially as related to the visual arts, specifically, painting. Wollheim served as the president of the British Society of Aesthetics from 1992 onwards until his death in 2003.

Plates: Jan De Vliegher

www.mikeweissgallery.com
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T4ZW8NZOeA&feature=youtu.be

Tal R

"Painting is a zombie medium. As a painter you are a little bit like a guy showing up in a tiger suit at a techno party. So your dress code is outdated, but you might still have the best moves on the dance floor."

Interview with Mika Hannula on Stop for a Moment
http://www.nifca.org/stopforamoment/presence/artist_tal_r.html