"What does it mean? I don’t really know!” Says David Quinn when I speak with him about his work. He pauses momentarily. “It's not meaningless though.”
Quinn lives and works in Shillelagh in County Wicklow, Ireland and his small scale, palimpsestic paintings are usually titled in series’ after evocative place names nearby. However, it would be inaccurate to assume that these paintings are intended to be viewed as a minimalist, quasi-abstracted representation of the Irish landscape. He concedes however that perhaps they could contain an essence of place, in the way that we all contain within us the suffused essence of our own experience.
Quinn is an artist who discovers through the act of doing. “We need rituals” Quinn claims. He tells me about his beloved late Grandmother, and how he used to watch her patiently knit for hours in front of a glowing fire. The calm prosaic process of repetition became for her and him, a meditative act. The honest cycle of doing, repeating and growth akin to the honest work of a fishermen who makes and mends his nets. Again, we return to the word ‘essence’ as the paintings undoubtedly contain within them the same ritualistic routine where patience and perseverance is key...
All of Quinn's miniature paintings are now made in one of two sizes, which he returns to again and again. The majority of works are 8 x 5 inches, a scale familiar to us through our relationship with books or more recently, digital tablets, and is perhaps the perfect size for Quinn to best experience the intimate relationship between head and hand. It is a scale and form that also reflects Quinn’s interest in orthodox icons, which may also elucidate the prayer-like surface quality of the work. However, Quinn refers to them as ’notebook’ scale, where he approaches each piece as if approaching a diary, notating, getting it down, erasing, repeating, losing, finding and so on, each layer is a page, studied, developed, and concealed through planning and intuition - built like layers of sedimentary rock. Time spent in contemplation with honest endeavour becomes encased within each panel. The process may not be precious, but each investment becomes so through the devoted act of doing with freedom and sensitivity. The cumulative nature of his practice is also enforced as series' of works begin to grow. Individual paintings become part of a collection of works that all begin to inter-relate. A unit part of a greater whole like words in a sentence, notes in a tune or hours in a day.
We continue to discuss the focus that can be attained through patience, practice, and ritual. Quinn’s fascination with Japanese philosophy and spirituality extends beyond an inherent interest in the wabi sabi aesthetic which can be seen in his work and incorporates the practice of meditation. Once aware of these eastern influences it is difficult to avoid their mark made upon the work. Much of Quinn’s talking is about the process of making a painting or a way of working which he prescribes to - an honest graft - losing yourself in a days work - but this is the journey and not the destination. Or perhaps as Quinn reminds me it is just “a finger pointing at the moon.”
Joseph Clarke, 2022
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To explain a work of art is a bad idea.
To be explained by a work of art is worse.
- Jamshid Mir Fenderesky
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The only solution for art to be appreciated by more people is what the Orientals have understood, especially in Japan. They are educated in sensitivity from birth to death, making them understand that they can raise the level and make a work of art out of eveything.
- Antoni Tàpies
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Everything is a mystery, ourselves, and all things both simple and humble.
- Giorgio Morandi
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Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
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Everybody asks me what things mean in my films. This is terrible! An artist doesn’t have to answer for his meanings. I don’t think so deeply about my work — I don’t know what my symbols may represent. What matters to me is that they arouse feelings, any feelings you like, based on whatever your inner response might be. If you look for a meaning, you’ll miss everything that happens. Thinking during a film interferes with your experience of it. Take a watch to pieces, it doesn’t work. Similarly with a work of art, there’s no way it can be analyzed without destroying it.
- Andrei Tarkovsky
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It is not in the role of an artist to worry about life — to feel responsible for creating a better world. This is a very serious distraction. All of your conditioning has been directed toward intellectual living. This is useless in art work. All human knowedge is useless in art work. Concepts, relationships, categories, classifications, deductions are distractions of mind that we wish to hold free for inspiration …
The way of an artist is an entirely different way. It is a way of surrender. He must surrender to his own mind.- Agnes Martin
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I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. "What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and "best" was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.
from ' Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'
- Robert Pirsig
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“I once told my wife I was going out to buy an envelope:
“Oh,” she said, "well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?”
And so I pretended not to hear her. And went out to get an envelope because I have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.
I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I'll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know.
The moral of the story is - we're here on Earth to fart around.
And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don't realise, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it's like we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.
Let's all get up and move around a bit right now...or at least dance.”
- Kurt Vonnegut