Liberators: Paul Davids

Lightning at Courthouse by Paul Davids, 2000

My friend Paul Davids, besides being a successful film producer / writer / director, and a talented amateur magician, is also a wonderful artist. Lightning at Courthouse was painted in 2000. Everyone always gets their own thoughts and feelings from a painting, of course. With this one, I love in particular Paul's use of vibrant colours to bring out the intensity of the moment, which for me evokes the memory a drive through Northern New Mexico in 2004 with my brother Jim, and the thunderstorm that struck as if hurled from Zeus himself as we drove through the mountains and down into the plains near Cimarron.

Paul Kimball

Liberators: Stephanie Steele

Another piece from Nova Scotia artist Stephanie Steele that I quite like.

I think that at some primal level, colour is one of the ultimate ways that we communicate with each other.

Paul Kimball

Thought du jour - 4 August 2011

"Most people don’t know what they want or feel. And for everyone, myself included, it’s very difficult to say what you mean when what you mean is painful. The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things – but above all, we must dare to fail. You must have the courage to be bad – to be willing to risk everything to really express it all." - John Cassavetes

That's about as true a statement for an artist, regardless of the medium, as you can get. Of course, I think it's also true about all professions, and life in general, but it's in the arts that the principle is put into practice in the most public of ways.

Paul Kimball

Liberators: Alexandra Jicol, "Muse In Torment RDHB"

Muse In Torment RDHB

"Ask yourself what one would be without passion, without art and artists, without those who are enough "crazy" to keep believing that there's much, much more to feel, to love, to express, to share, to embrace." - Alexandra Jicol

I'm drawn to the work of artists such as Alexandra Jicol, for whom the expression of their passions is a fundamental part of the process of creation, because art without passion is form without substance. It doesn't liberate the spirit, or the imagination; it imprisons them.

Paul Kimball

Liberators: Stephanie Steele, "The Truth"

"The Truth", by Stephanie Steele.

Paul Kimball

Transcending the Barriers to Communication Through the Arts

Stephanie Steele is a Nova Scotia artist and friend of mine who works in a number of different mediums, creating a wide variety of compelling and intriguing works of art.

I've always believed that in artistic expression we have the unparalleled potential to transcend the barriers to true communication that language and culture impose on us. In essense, it liberates us from the confines of the "here and now", and allow us to imagine, and to feel. It's a shared experience, which transcends the temporal boundaries of our linear existence. The artist creates a work; we then create our own interpretation, and by doing so, become artists ourselves. That the artist may be long dead is irrelevant; we can still communicate through the work.

Here's another example of Stephanie's work that I really like, and that "speaks" to me as a disciple of Kerouac and Bukowski and the rest of the "Beats"...

As always with art, what it says to me might not be the same thing as what it says to you, because the conversation that art and music inspires in people is the most important one of all - the conversation that we have with ourselves. This is why I consider art, in all its myriad forms, to be the highest of callings in a world desperately in need of real communication, and a new Enlightenment.

Paul Kimball