Why am I going?
It’s remote, rare, exclusive (?), beyond….?
But it’s a beacon with a subtle power - like the force that has been drawing me forward all these years.
It is a lucid, luminous and intelligent space, I believe it is benevolent. The art associated with it is powerful and benevolent.
I know there is something important about this “benevolent” art. Rather than define it, it’s something you recognise when you see it.
Benevolent is a terms used by Mike Grady, who used to be the Director of the MA in Arts and Consciousness at JFK University. This was a word given to him by Gordon Onslow Ford, who on reviewing Grady’s work declared that it was “benevolent”.
The group of artists associated with the group Dynaton — Wolfgang Paalen, Gordon Onslow Ford, Robert Matta, Lee Mullican, These artists went beyond Surrealism to something deeper. Prior.
The Surrealists remained in the subconscious/unconsicous realm, harvesting images from the dream state which were already known from daily life, combining the familiar in an unfamiliar way, creating a sense of out of placeless, unease. And a sense of foreboding, the presence of some malignant force. No wonder, perhaps, when they were working in the 1920s, after the horrors of the 1st World War and possibly intimating what was to come. At the time the first exploration of the subconscious mind were being made by Freud, revealing the repressed drives — guilt, sexual obsession, the death wish etc.
Gordon Onslow Ford — said that the work of the artist was to “disclose aspects of the inner worlds that had never been seen before. This adventure starts with the anthropomorphic and moves towards the cosmic…………..” “Gordon Onslow Ford A Man on a Green Island”, ed by Fariba Bogzaran
Gordon Onslow Ford and Roberto Matte started to “look deeper within themselves, not so much through the symbolism of dreams —was the first generation of Surrealists were inclined to do - but in the vast space not limited by the language of the unconscious.” “Gordon Onslow Ford A Man on a Green Island”, ed by Fariba Bogzaran
This is important — that they went deeper than the early Surrealists. That they experienced Emptiness, the “Silence Alive” as GOF put it. They drew on Eastern philosophy, Buddhism, Zen. Not only that, they practiced it. Thereby experientially entering the Vast Spaces where the Universe is boing born. Moment to moment.