The Cloud Gallery - Artist Tony Schaefer - Articles

I am looking at the idea of how perception, so easily tricked, can be used by the artist to help translate falsity into Truth. Is it even possible?

Looking at the role the artist has played throughout time, from the early cave paintings up until this day, it's not hard to see that their role has been one of translating the outside world (things and events) into recognisable moments that express a shared reality. With the advent of photography, this "moment capturing" has now become commonplace and allows anyone to do it. In terms of collective consciousness does this make the role of artist redundant? If Reality were simply a string of discrete and sometimes shared moments, I would say yes, yet the photographic image doesn't always give us the whole picture.

If we take the famous quote from Picasso "Drawing is a lie which tells us the truth". We can begin to see, even on a very fundamental level, that using a 2-dimensional plane (paper) to present reality, is obviously an illusion. And that includes photo and video. Yet we are all quite happy to go along with the lie, a shared experience.

Of course, within the questioning nature of our human existence there lies a subtle recognition of the unreality of time and space or at the very least, its impermanence. To ask the question is to imply that "something else" must be available, i.e."Where did grandma go?","she went to heaven"… so now we have "this other place" that isn't available here.

Artwork, along with all sorts of creative practices can and do allude to it but the experience, which is universal, while it may include the form takes us so far beyond the form that the idea of trying to draw it or write about it does not even enter the Mind. Yet if you happened to experience this as an ongoing occurrence you wouldn't be IN time and space and would certainly not be able to relate to it. In this sense, you would be there and not here.

Having had a spiritual experience and also being an artist, I am always looking at the purpose, meaning, the story that I am expressing. I know without any hesitation of a doubt that beyond this; frail, shallow, fearful sense of perception lies a Truth and a Reality, that once experienced will ruin you for this idea of a world as being anything but fantasy. The realisation that my only true purpose here as an artist is to translate or transmit the new vision, to the best of my abilities, so as to share a greater awakening. Now that doesn't mean creating only ethereal works because my experience of God or Reality is in the commonplace, that may seem paradoxical but for me, it makes perfect sense that we are not separate from the Source of Reality and that Reality is not separate from us. It just doesn't have anything to do with a limited perception of form. And so the task is to utilise that which is limited to express that which is whole and True. And this is what makes the act of creating as important as the artwork its self.

I don't really know how much my artwork can reflect this broader agenda, especially when EVERYTHING is trying to call your attention to just that fact but I am here and I create as I am inspired to do, everything else will take care of itself.

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