creative forces

BLOG  # 25…SEPTEMBER 2013

“By words one transmits thoughts to another, by means of art one transmits feelings”…if you don’t know who said this, you’ll have to read the rest of the blog and I’ll tell you at the end. Art also gives substance to our feelings and calls our attention to issues when words don’t do the job.

 In his current show at the AGO in Toronto, Ai Weiwei is making powerful statements about injustices and corruption in China. His horror at the deaths of over 5,000 children, killed when their badly constructed schools collapsed during the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province, inspired several moving tributes. The snake which curls around the ceiling in the entrance to the exhibit is composed of schoolbags like the ones carried by the children as they walked to school and to their deaths.

His works are huge and often involve work by many artisans for many hours to execute his ideas.  Hundreds of strikingly realistic hand crafted porcelain crabs scattered across the floor evoke the millions of creatures (including humans!) displaced by the diversion of rivers to create the 3 Gorges Dam project.

Working on a smaller but equally important and far reaching stage Rebecca Difilippo is making powerful statements with and about her art in the videos that she’s recently mounted on Facebook.  Rebecca is the editor of Moods Magazine and has expanded her reach from the magazine into social media to explore the symptoms, emotions and behaviours associated with depression. Creating images was able to help her during the darkness of her own episodes with depression and she hopes that telling her story alongside her paintings can help other people with similar despair.   

“Broken is the title of this work and strongly reflects the way I felt as I struggled with depression. During the darkest time of my depression I felt so incapacitated, so broken that I just couldn't feel any hope of getting out of the black hole I was drowning in.”

“I painted this butterfly as a way to express my newfound freedom from depression, my ability to feel and become something beautiful and living again. I was held captive by my depression for so long that when I was finally able to feel again, to feel the wonderful beauty of the world around me, I felt alive, as though I had stepped into a new world,  as though I had been transformed. For a very long time, I was unable to feel and appreciate so many of the simple pleasures in life... things I had once taken for granted, things that had just suddenly vanished from my life when depression took hold of me.”

“Art is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings…indispensable for life and for progress toward the well being of individuals and society.”

That, and the quote at the top are from Leo Tolstoy who said many smart things about the value of art.