| Shards from the Artist's Studio The world is vast, contradictory and chaotic. It constantly shatters beyond our experience. It refuses to remain familiar. In the effort to align ourselves to altered circumstances, it is rather like the archeologist who fondles shards from a crumpled past that we pore over all we have believed, all that we have learned, and all that we have experienced, straining to discern the tracery of a pattern as yet unimagined. And bewilderingly we each construct a different artifact. The most natural place for the artist to engage in this activity is the studio, which far from a simple physical space, occupies the mental sphere in which the unknowable is confronted as a matter of course. Questions are asked, the answers discarded, then reformulated; connections are made and unmade; there are shocks and surprises, tranquility, turmoil, disasters, triumphs, prizes and always rubbish, lots of rubbish. As Dianne Arbus pointed out, it was what she had never seen that she recognized. And it is this corner of bedlam that these paintings attempt to portray, the detritus of this interior groping for comprehension. If they seem to speak too much of chaos and fragmentation it is well to remember that it is probably only the search that can give our lives significance. After all, there are few certainties other than what W. G. Sebald has referred to as our "appalling ignorance and corruptibility", and provided we relinquish the illusion that change can be averted, paradoxically we might find the freedom to live fearlessly. David Barnett, 2003 David Barnett , Visual Artist/Painter.
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