Augury II
Mixed Media on Paper, 2007
Why this inclination towards the curvilinear in my work? After my parents passed away I began learning more about my ancestry and realized my Celtic roots might have something to do with it. Frank Delaney in The Celts describes Celtic art in the following, "the deepest basis of Celtic art grew from a primordial dependence upon the natural life experienced in the emergent Europe north of the Alps, east of, and along the Danube Valley - or, come to that, in the sloping fields of what is now Herfordshire, or Northumbria, or Wicklow. The early motifs showed great consistency of pattern, geometric, angular shapes, concentric circles, whorls, lozenges, revolving spirals, chevrons, cross-hatched repeating patterns - mechanical, auto-suggested means of filling a blank space on a pot. Later, the images of small creatures begin to materialise, swans, ducks horses: on the lid of a Hallstatt bucket, a goat, a sphinx, a lion, a deer...to the Greeks a spiral is a spiral and a face is a face and it is always clear where the one ends and the other begins, whereas the Celts 'see' the faces 'into' the spirals or tendrils."
Wikipedia paraphrase - Like nature itself, Celtic art abhorred a straight line, pushed organic influences - observed in trees, plants, water, the earth - to deliciously abstracted infinity. In Celtic art there is no beginning, no middle, no end as it ultimately becomes its own inner world through freedom of movement.
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