THE IDIOT
1996
Egg tempera
3x2ft
ENQUIRE
This painting was in part inspired by the character of Dostoyevsky’s ‘Idiot’ , who embodies the sufferings of the pure in spirit in a world of moral collapse and decay .The values the ‘Idiot ‘ embodies does not fit values of the dominant industrial culture around, but still the spirit of the idiot glows brightly in luminous colours that contrast the drabness of the reflected factory. The water offers promise of life as the fish swim freely.
in 1940 the artist Cecil Collins wrote an essay called the ‘Vision of the Fool’ in which the fool is described an archetypal energy that is not recognised or valued by industrial society. The artist and the poet that embodies ‘the eternal virginity of spirit, which in the dark winter of the world, continually proclaims the existence of a new life, gives faithful promise of the spring of an invisible Kingdom, and the coming of light’. The fool symbolises an untainted spirit that is hard to hold onto when all around is madness. because ‘The fool does not see the world with the disillusioned knowingness of the scientist; rather he marvels; he looks with the eyes of a child.’
The idiot and the fool in this painting is the inner spirit of myself the lone artist somehow trying to make sense of the world around.
in 1940 the artist Cecil Collins wrote an essay called the ‘Vision of the Fool’ in which the fool is described an archetypal energy that is not recognised or valued by industrial society. The artist and the poet that embodies ‘the eternal virginity of spirit, which in the dark winter of the world, continually proclaims the existence of a new life, gives faithful promise of the spring of an invisible Kingdom, and the coming of light’. The fool symbolises an untainted spirit that is hard to hold onto when all around is madness. because ‘The fool does not see the world with the disillusioned knowingness of the scientist; rather he marvels; he looks with the eyes of a child.’
The idiot and the fool in this painting is the inner spirit of myself the lone artist somehow trying to make sense of the world around.