Saturday, January 07, 2006

A new friend of mine pointed me in the direction of an artist living in Ireland who I wasn't familiar with, Patrick Pye. I am in the process of reading and digesting an interview published in Logos Journal by St. Thomas University. Here is a quotation from Pye who is responding to a question about intelligibility and meaning as well as pleasure in his own art:

"Well that is another very difficult question because in a way the artist doesn't know what he does. That's why the whole business of seeing is so preposterously difficult because it is impossible to see without meaning. We are human beings. We have our search for meaning deep in our personalities and even though we can't put it into words, what things mean to us, we are concerned to express a feeling meaning or a meaning within feeling. [Pye had earlier written that the artist, 'is thrown straight at the deep end of the metaphysical question...The artist is naturally in line with the writers of the gospels for whom the heart was an organ of understanding, not of feeling. The artist must learn to see with the heart.']"

This view expressed by Pye seems to me to be harmonious with Tarkovsky in his view that artists exist in the metaphysical realm. That question of meaning in being permeates one's life. I'd like to think more about this. I thought it was in line with my last blog and Tarkovsky excerpt.