To be like a child

In the 70’s many winters were spent working on the beach of El Triple in Baja California, Mexico.
Those days sequences were made.
Black and white pictures put together creating a new visual experience.

It was an extraordinary experience to make sequences.
It was new.
It was innovative.
It was exciting.
It gave the feeling of making discoveries and inventions.


Very often extreme feelings of elation and exhilaration were experienced.
It was like discovering the world and reality with all its secrets and surprises.

Very quickly sequences became successful and were exhibited in major museums in Europe, the USA and Japan.
Many museum collections and art-collectors bought original sequences.

In the course of those years something dramatic happened.
On the one hand were the winters spent in great joy and happiness making new sequences on the beach of El Triple.
On the other hand, the confrontation with the business side of the work was more and more experienced.
The more successful and important the work became, the more heavy the influence of the business on life was.

This became so hard to handle that in 1985 the decision was made to cut all ties with the art-business world and even stop completely making sequences.

The issue was that the joy of creating new art was the opposite of dealing with the art-world.
Creating new work on the beach of El Triple was bringing happiness, harmony, peace, joy, excitement, elation, thrills and satisfaction.
Dealing with all the hassle of marketing, organizing, money and PR was giving headaches.

For a long time there has been bitterness about how the business killed the beauty.
But life is to learn and these days a much more easy relationship exists with the business side of the art-world.

This has opened the way to experience the process of creating new images in the same way as it used to be in the 70’s.
These days the extraordinary experience is felt of having the same joy, happiness, harmony, excitement, elation and exhilaration as in the 70’s.

At the time the feelings were incredibly strong because it was all new and totally surprising.
Now, the feelings are as strong but for another reason.
The reason being that in spite of all what happened, the core of being has survived without damage.

There is a similarity with children and adults.
As Hermann Hesse describes in his fascinating book “Beneath the wheel”, a child looses its capacity to feel joy, true happiness and sincere harmony by growing into an adult.
Society trains the child to fit into the system and by doing so the child looses most of its virtuosity.

The joy these days is that this virtuosity has not been lost as is unfortunately the case with most people.
A look at the recent images shows it.
A selection was published on this blog and the images express something.
They show someone who, in spite of it all, still can be happy and surprised like a child.

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To learn more about the book "Beneath the wheel" by Hermann Hesse, click on the links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneath_the_Wheel

http://books.google.com/books?id=3_djQaQ0BEkC&dq=beneath+the+wheel+hermann+hesse&pg=PP1&ots=N_WtdtKduT&sig=OcjUEZ7oX-3Yj8Li_idgvkZEKzs&hl=en&prev=http://www.google.com/search?q=beneath+the+wheel+hermann+hesse&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:nl:official&client=firefox-a&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-thumbnail