On Andy Goldsworthy

I just finished watching Andy Goldsworthy's documentary entitled "Rivers and Tides".  I am still quite speechless.  Adi introduced me to this artist some time last year but I never really found the right time to appreciate the entire meaning of his work until today.  I remember watching about 10 minutes of the documentary last year and told myself, I can't continue watching this because I am not able to absorb it and appreciate it as I should.  Today was a rainy Sunday and it was perfect for watching this piece.  

I am still quite speechless.  It has had a profound effect on me such that it's quieted me down and made me realize what a paradox life really is.  His art is transient in nature.  Taking everything from the earth's landscape: rocks, twigs, leaves, ice, vines.  He uses natural means of putting everything together.  He finds the essence of the piece of landscape and "dialogues" with it until it unravels a creative process in him that allows him to bring to light aspects of nature's beauty and meaning that never would've been noticed by the inattentive eye.

It feels like it's being taken into another world (Goldsworthy says about his piece that has now floated across the river).  Another plane.  It doesn't feel at all like destruction.  That moment is really part of that cycle of turning.  You feel as if you've touched the heart of the place.  That's a way of understanding.  Seeing something you have never seen before but was always there and you were just blind to it. 

When I make a work, I often take it to the very edge of its collapse.  And there's a very beautiful balance.

His introspectiveness about his own craft inspires me to be introspective about mine.  Even if I'm quite not sure what I consider "my craft".  But it's starting to tell me that if I pay close attention to the work that I do (wherever that may be) I will be able to draw out it's meaning and its essence.  I struggle with it most of the time.  The work that I do.  People, he says, drain him.  It's ironic.  Since his work is something that people draw a lot of energy from.  But I suppose there are really  souls like that.  

From that irony I take my cue.  I work in the "people business" and as much as people drain me this is the path I walking now and I am slowly realizing what other paths can come out of this.