Blog Posts - ARTIST - Eva Lewarne

Does Canadian Art Exist?

10/1/2020

We need to stop expecting that Canada will ever be homogeneous in life, culture or the arts. To say Canadian art is a fallacy, unless we mean world art. Because we have all arrived here from different worlds.

Canada is a multicultural country with many immigrants. I have never felt more like an immigrant then when I took a writing course at Ryerson in autobiographies. I happened to be in a class with predominantly white women whose parents were born here but great great grand parents came from Scotland or England. Our first assignment was to write about a memory from when you were 4 years old and we were to share it next class.

Well, I was one of the end readers and listened to others who wrote about chimneys, lovely Christmases, toys and nicknacks on the mantles of their nana's place.
I wrote about how the KGB pounded on our door in the middle of night and dragged my grandpa away to prison for being a "kulak", a business man, terrifying all of us.

The other ladies were stunned into silence. No feedback for me...

I dropped out of the course.

As immigrants we all arrive with different past experiences. As artists we express those experiences and also the archival ones from where we came from. It is the childhood ones that last the longest.

Corporate Capitalism and Buddhism

9/13/2020

It Is amazing how corporate capitalism can just swallow all new philosophies and paths whole and use it to service its own agenda. For example mindfulness and yoga in the west have become tools to help individuals caught up in bad circumstances and environments to accept their reality and normalize it. The New York Times has described Google's Mindfulness program as WD 40, a necessary lubricant between driven employees and Google's demanding corporate culture.

The philosopher Slavoj Zizek says in his view Western Buddhism is becoming, "the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism" because its meditative stance is the most efficient way for us to fully participate in capitalists dynamics while retaining the appearance of mental sanity."

Buddhist practice initially focusses on the individual in helping him to overcome suffering Eventually though it really leads to forgetting the self and a realization that to help oneself one needs to help everyone because we are all interconnected.And when you realize that, corporate greed and narcissism becomes abhorrent to you.

You realize that you are not separate from the people living in the street. In other words the practice of mindfulness was founded to develop compassion, not just a stress reliever from untenable situations. Mindfulness in its proper use would help you realize how those situations need to change.

In other words navel gazing becomes an eye into the world, into right living, thinking and action.

Creativity v/s Artist

8/25/2020

I am sick of everyone who has had one lesson in art immediately setting themselves up in that profession, as an artist.
Creativity makes you whole and balanced and happy no matter what profession you have...Anything in life can be seen as a chore or a creative act. Zen Buddhists teach how to wash dishes and become enlightened, while doing that creatively.

Artists are professionals with that particular calling, a vocation. You don't have to be an artist to live creatively. Doctors and engineers can be creative or work by rote...
Today in the gallery a man came up to me to say he is an engineer by profession but has decided to be an artist now that he is retired and made a better mobile with better action configuration than a well known mobile artist. He than asked me how he should price his art? He obviously thinks that if he makes something technically similar to Picasso he can charge the same fee or close to it.

Well needless to say I gave him a piece of my mind. First I said art is not about technique it is about communicating something to the world. Good technique in your chosen media just makes it easier to say whatever it is you are meant to say.

I suggested it is a good idea that he wants to expand himself into becoming a creative individual but he is a long way from being an artist by just producing a well engineered mobile...

Being an artist is first and foremost something that you do not decide but it decides you. Really how many people would choose to spend the best part of their life struggling and poor? Only if you are propelled and obsessed do you first go to college then become a professional in that trade.

I explained that creativity is a mindset that changes the way you live and do anything, anything can be creative. Asking me pricing first as the most important thing in the art world is a sure sign he is not even close to being an artist.
The poor man was shocked but took it in stride. He left knowing there was work to do on himself, not just building well oiled mobiles!

CATHARSIS IN ART

8/15/2020

The way art heals is through catharsis, not by painting pretty, well designed innocuous stuff. Catharsis in art began in Greece where they used drama in that way. People went to the theatre not to be entertained but to experience a catharsis, a purification and purgation of emotions—particularly pity and fear that resulted in spiritual renewal and restoration.

Aristotle states that the purpose of tragedy is to arouse “terror and pity” and thereby effect the catharsis of these emotions. For example, In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo commits suicide by drinking the poison that he erroneously thinks Juliet had tasted too. The audience usually finds themselves crying at this particular moment for several reasons. Primarily because losing a loved one is a feeling that all of us have experienced. Watching or reading such a scene triggers the memories of someone we have lost (either by death or by mere separation), and because we are able to relate to it, we suddenly release the emotions that we have been repressing.

This feeling can also be aroused when looking at works of art. What we often call Dark Art serves this cathartic purpose, by allowing us to experience our deepest nightmares and fears, the biggest one being death, and release it. The art does not cause the fear, if it is real art, it simply brings up what is sitting in our unconscious. People avoid looking at it because they mistakenly believe that it causes them to feel a certain way, but the fact is the the feeling was already there. It is like people talk about avoiding socializing with certain individuals because their ”vibrational level” whatever that is, is too low. Wrong again. All that person has done is triggered your own experience. If we took responsibility for our own emotions, tasted them and allowed ourselves to feel them deeply, our lives would have much more meaning and depth because we could purify enough to finally start tasting our spiritual nature. Humour in art that evokes the paradoxical or absurd of life also serves that purpose too. Not slapstick rabbit balloons…(Jeff Koons)

Our society now is enamoured with showing no affect anywhere, positivity has caused us to squelch our deepest fears and emotions not just individually but as a society, so that we have become walking zombies, feeling titilation but never deep joy. For to feel joy you must have acknowledged all your deep seated emotions conscious and unconscious, (grief, anger, fear) explored, experienced them and accepted them as part of being a human. We have become so numbed that we need porn to feel anything at all. Sensuality is dead.

That is why we need expressive art more than ever showing all our gamut of emotions to help us purify. Photographically correct art without emotions is pointless in my estimation in our times. Abstract art is dying. We need to meet the hate and violence and fear dead on in ourselves to cleanse it from our souls, collectively and individually. Love as a heart painted on canvas will not wake us up…it is just another false decoration like all the silly pop art around that says nothing like, flying pigs… Stop the judgemental positivity and political correctness and lets get down and dirty.

REALLY SEEING

8/13/2020

Being a visual artist is really all about seeing things as they are below the surface, below your conceptual mind. You learned to create visual shortcuts in school from about the age of 11, when abstract thinking became more important than seeing. So you created shortcut images in your mind for the everyday world. When you heard the word dog, you immediately conjured up an image of a hot dog with ears, a tail and four stick legs. Then your mind did not have to linger any longer on the image. You knew what the other person was referring to. Unfortunately due to the fact that left-brained activities became the most important through your school career and later on, you stopped really seeing altogether.

Drawing is really about learning how to see light and dark shadows and the edges of things, contour lines. Most people never pay attention to these things preferring to use their symbols conjured up in there minds.

When I taught adults art, who were beginners and did not have time to go through four years of art college and learn technique, I would teach them to see and think like an artist instead. Often times they were able to draw a decent self-portrait after eight lessons, instead of four years of school.

Why you ask? Because they learned how to really see what was there.

One of my exercises was to have them view a white bland coffee mug for ten minutes without thinking about anything else, a sort of mindfulness meditation. At first they struggled due to an overactive mundane mind, thinking to themselves “how boring, I came to learn to draw faces, not white mugs.” But with encouragement they overcame their resistance and started to become involved in the seeing itself. One of the reasons they struggled is because they were used to being primarily in their left brain with the kinds of activities demanded of them in their everyday life. The extreme left side of the brain functions in a very fast way, needing more and more stimulation and being easily bored, needing constant novelty. Thus the technological fast-paced age is born, feeding that need.

To help my students pop over more to the right side of their brain, they needed to stay with their feelings of boredom until the left side gave up (apparently it gives up only in times of boredom or shock and I could not bring a gun to class) and the right side to take over a more leadership function.

Things would suddenly change and people began to get excited about the activity and find meaning in it. People who insist we always use both sides of the brain maybe are correct but we need to understand that the brain is vast and unexplored and it is useful to talk about the continuum line, where activities are placed, to understand how we can have more control of the brain. There is a lot of research on this topic I won't go into, just share my own experience of how to move people from an uncreative way of perceiving the world to a creative one.

What happened next astonished them. All of a sudden they began to enjoy what they were doing and were able to see more and more of what the cup actually represented, in other words they saw more than just the cup, plus the cup as is, and they felt wonderful doing it.

I used to tell them if they actually looked at their partners and children and pets in the same way, life would be nothing but adventure and a miracle for them. Unfortunately after the initial honeymoon we start imagining we know our partners inside out, have a shortcut version of them in our minds and actually stop seeing them at all.

Out of touch with our senses, imprisoned in our conceptual mind we also stop feeling and need more and more stimulation to know we are alive. It is no wonder porn is big business.

The adults in my classes did not necessarily become professional artists but their lives started to change, they learned to enjoy and appreciate every moment of their existence, they become more tolerant, less judgemental and saw the world as mostly beautiful. That is what really seeing will do for you.

Gift Of The Dreamer

8/9/2020

The Gift of the Dreamer Is a Double-Edged Sword.

To lack the ability to imagine and to dream is an easy road to contentment. Like the cow that chews grass all day, everyday, we are encouraged to dumb down, be positive, be happy and forget the still divine voice of our dreams and visions.

Our industrial and corporate society has been encouraging us to be content and happy with buying the products of pedlars and merchants, at the low low price of giving up our dreams and imagination. It has been drummed into us that artists and dreamers are flakes except for the few geniuses who made the business world more profitable for the pedlars. Even the art world has played into this with Pop Art and meaningless Abstract Art, playful and innocuous, not motivating anyone to change themselves or the world or expand their perception of life.

Education is focussed more and more on producing adults with no creativity or imagination, just survival skills in the marketplace., using fear of being poor and deprived as a motivating factor. Even art colleges that are rapidly becoming universities are forcing young people to analyze rather than create. They no longer foster the development of imagination and do not provide the proper tools for expression of creativity.

The nature of dreams is a double-edged sword. The price of our imaginations is to live with a constant presence of discontent, a need to share it with the world, a need for transformation. And it means you are going against the grain of the society you live in and ultimately do not fit in it, are rejected by your peers who have accepted the myth of contentment and positive thinking that brutally shuts down your small voice of imagination that says all is not positive and needs to change.

It is a privilege, to be able to dream, and it is a complete mistake by the world to put down the dreamer, to attempt to pacify the imaginative mind, for it’s by that very power that the future can be made a brighter place.

But industrialists and corporations who run our world don’t want a brighter place, they want the status quo that has made them content in the fake world of money, material goods, and comfortable lifestyles and gold toilets.

They would rather kill dreamers than change, so in the art world they exploit artists by asking for fees from them to show their art, thus keeping them hungry or promoting those artists that have bought into their ideology and paint decorative meaningless artwork that reminds people who own it of abstracted cows chewing cud in a idyll setting.

Why Are Young Artists Running From The Real?

8/6/2020

Why is mythology so popular in modern art? Visual artists are looking to ancient mythologies as references in their works. MOMA recently had an exhibition called, “The Modern Myth: Drawing, Mythologies in Modern Times”.

And not just Classical Mythology but Futuristic Ones as well, as invented by the artists and then given a name and storyline.

The enduring appeal of course to modern artists is that they can interpret the myths through their own personal experience. Rather than confront their reality head-on, which is often conflictual, full of humanities’ sufferings and woes and negativity (now a word synonymous with sin), artists are rejecting real life as is and creating make belief phantasies of their own choosing, often void of any meaning whatsoever, human or otherwise. At least when using classical mythological symbolism, there was evidence of human longing or traits but with Futuristc mythology there only seems to be a wishful wanting for plastic perfection, a Goddess Xena, with big boobs who wields a mighty sword on those who are less perfect, and makes the world right again.

The human element of empathy is gone in this vision. Only a tiresome, shallow barbie-like doll of existence, no psychology here, no depth, no understanding of why a human could be negative, or an analysis of society or politics in any way. Paula Prego is a great contemporary artist that most young artists, who aspire to never be, “negative’”, shun because she speaks volumes about society and human relations.
So what is left, something a magazine calls “Beautiful Bizarre”, kitschy, smooth, expressionless doll like figures with a little something meant to spark interest. BORING!

EVOLUTION & GESTALT

7/15/2020

Even though we have all been weaned on Darwin's theory of evolution saying basically that humans began as a mineral, then emerged into plant life, after into an animal state and finally into being human, we don't really seem to grasp the full meaning of this. In Africa there appeared an animal that stood erect,used tools with care and began to speak. A new kind of species had evolved with a brain greater than any before it and a capacity for self-transformation.

The Climate Crisis on earth now has made us realize this fact again and suddenly we are jostled out of our delusional reality that humans are a walking machine-like brain, akin to God who can make human life comfortable by exploiting the earth and its resources. Comfortable for only the few lucky ones who got rich. We stopped being aware of how we evolved and where we are headed, namely back to the beginning gestalt of creation. We stopped the self-transformative process. We ripped ourselves away from the evolving life process and disconnected our brains from our bodies. We suddenly thought we were the kings of the universe, the creators of life and we are still trying to prove that by manipulating our DNA to design the next generation according to our limited understanding. And working our bodies in the gyms to look like the Hulk so we live longer. Because the brain as it turns out is very limited in the way we have been utilizing it, namely in self service and competition with each other and the Universe. The body is in fact our doorway to our connection with Spirit, but we are not interested, preferring to remain on the treadmill of our present false security of existence.

Now that the demise of the earth is a possibility, we suddenly realize how much more connected to life animals are than us, how we have veered off course in our evolution somewhere along the line. So we turn to worshipping animals and plants. Caring for them is great and important but worshipping them by buying ballet tutus for your dogs, all the while that we ignore dying and hungry children in our world and other continents is not going to save us.
We need to get back on the evolutionary train and restart our motors and think about what is the next possible step to take in our growth, what does Life require from us at this point?

We first ask ourselves these questions, then begin to realize we are not the end of the road for evolving no matter what brilliant technology we have invented to date. The next step in our evolution is to expand our brain sufficiently away from just information and data input to understanding our spiritual selves. I realize this is very inconvenient for Capitalism, but too bloody bad, that is where the evolution process is headed. So either you are on board developing compassion in this life or you are run over by the train.

REVOLUTION BY ART

7/9/2020

Born and raised in Poland and living in Canada a graduate of OCAD. I have received a Medal from France in a Painting Festival in Avignon. (Grand Prix). Photography is a second passion. Completed Digital Photography Certificate at George Brown College.The more I view our world the more politicized my art is getting. People are slowly losing their humanity as fear overwhelms them, they are afraid of Climate Change, losing their way of life, their money and as a result are hoarding it, instead of sharing for the good of the community and the whole, embarking on new ways of living in the world. Instead they are retreating into authoritarianism and fascism. The people in power don’t realize that the great divide between the poor and the rich will only result in a revolution.

And it is time to have a revolution in the world because we have become a culture of war, violence, greed and despair for the majority of people, the have-nots. The new revolution will not be achieved by any political parties or factions, it will be achieved by an about turn in the fascistic path we are presently headed in. Fascism needs war and it needs scapegoats to empower itself. These will eventually be found in minorities, and difference.

No one person or leader is the cause. They are the symptom of our present culture, the mirror. We should look deeply in it and decide to change our ways, our thinking, our actions before it is too late and we, like the comic roadrunner fall off the edge of the world because we forget to stop.

It is not too late, like there was a moment back in Germany when Hitler could have been stopped by bringing to bear just laws and holding him accountable to them. If we held all our citizens accountable, like Iceland did it's bankers, we could create a just and compassionate society.

Economics thinks only in one direction and we have to stop relying on what economists think because economics requires wars to continue towards its goal of financial success. We need economics to be replaced by "humanonics" and "earthonics" that place life above money.

We need to find our humanity again and our soul and learn to dance and sing in life and cherish the earth and animals and above all ourselves, each other. We are all alive and when one of us is suffering, or homeless or hungry, we all are whether we know it or not

We need to find a new way of functioning and sharing and cooperating in society that minimizes competition and fosters love for one another, that destroys classes and hierarchies and gives everyone a chance to be happy in their short lives. I know that sounds utopian and idealistic but all we need to do is get creative and try new ideas on and see where they lead.

Our anger and rage must be channelled in a positive direction one of creative action. First we look to ourselves, acknowledge what we feel, then come together to brainstorm a new way of being in this life, this earth, with each other.

We Are Nearing The Eleventh Hour

6/8/2020

There doesn’t seem to be any point in painting pretty pictures anymore, when humanity is on the cusp of annihilating itself. It seems that even the covid plague did not instil enough fear into our bosom to actually change our direction in regards to Mother Nature and the devastating way we have been treating her.

Artists who persist in losing themselves in pretty pictures are really ostriches hiding their heads in the sand while their whole backside lays exposed to the elements.

There have been many plagues and wars in history, but none as devastating as what is happening now at our own intelligent hands. While demonstrating our brilliant technological prowess in making humans comfortable in their homes and workplaces, helping them to amass money and endless stuff, and travel to the ends of the world, we have in fact destroyed life on earth, the very essence of what sustains us, air, water and food. Air is permanently polluted by cars and industry, animal factories torture the poor animals we then consume and chemical pesticides are sprayed by planes to all fields. I doubt organic farming near regular farms is truly free of them. The fish in the oceans and lakes are choking from our artificially produced toxins and thousand-year-old trees are crying out when axed.

As artists we are not innocent in this complicity with the naive assumption that if we create beauty (decoratively speaking) we are enriching people’s lives. But are we really? When all around us people, animals and plants are suffering, should we just bury ourselves in our canvasses and ignore the world?

Alas we can not return to life in caves and tents, but we can return to our spiritual source to discover what path we need to travel at this precarious juncture.

As artists we have an obligation to be aware of the injustices in the world and aid people in returning to their source for answers.

We need to get our heads out of the aesthetic sand and look reality in the face and act by showing it to others on our canvasses and screens and platforms. We are nearing the eleventh Hour.