“The best of them [modernists] are doing what honest painters have always done, which is to paint the inner vision, or to bring the inner vision to some outer subject. But in an earlier day the inner vision presented itself in a coherent language of mythological or religious terms, and now both mythology and religion are powerless to move the modern mind. So – the search for the inner vision must be direct. The artist solicits and implores something from the realm of what the psychoanalysts, who are the great magicians of our day, call the Unconscious, though it is actually the Most Conscious. And what they fish up – what the Unconscious hangs on the end of the hook the artists drop into the great well in which art has its being – may be very fine, but they express it in a language more or less private. It is not the language of mythology or religion. And the great danger is that such a private language is perilously easy to fake… and I don’t need to tell you the difference between invention and inspiration.”
(“What’s Bred in the Bone”, excerpt from Part Five by Robertson Davies, 1985)
(to be continued)
(“What’s Bred in the Bone”, excerpt from Part Five by Robertson Davies, 1985)
(to be continued)