HEW ELCOCK

All the arts give the participant, viewer or listener the opportunity to experience being alive in the world – in this moment. There is no attendant practical goal. Art, in whatever form it takes, offers a moment of immediate experience for no other purpose than experiencing. Being in the artistic experience may or may not give rise to other thoughts for later reflection, but that is not the purpose of art. Practical concerns or goals can intrude into the artistic presentation, and someone may elect to have art convey an explicit opinion or carry a specific message, but this risks turning art towards propaganda.

By emphasizing pragmatic common sense, social, moral, or political goals as our only ways of interacting with the world, we risk losing the experience of being alive. Visual art implies being open to sensory experiences - to patterns, textures, colours, and material qualities of the world we live in. Art is not a carrier of a specific truth, or a financial value, or ideological statement. Art is more like play, which always has meaning but that meaning is obscure. Painting arranges shapes, colours, materials, or objects in a pattern symbolic of the artist’s experience of the world.

The work on these pages is about the people and places I love, and the experiences that I found powerful.