Elizabeth Kuth

 

Statement of Mentoring Philosophy
Elizabeth Kuth, Painter, Mentor
Warm Mentor Program, 2011-2012

As an artist I believe the commitment and passion from yourself is essential to develop a high sensitivity for quality and meaning in your work.  Only you have the power to do the work, endure the struggles and sacrifices it takes to translate your inner world into a medium of expression. With conviction you must daily have the courage to seek a depth of creativity and empathy within yourself developed through higher sensitivity to the formal elements. This plastic form increasingly relates to memories of your sensory experience only through the process of destruction and construction molding it into you authentic re-creation of reality. My effort is to facilitate you in this process of discipline that takes searching, listening, trusting and doing the work necessary to find simplicity in the chaos, to find an essence what’s you in your creation.

Empathy is the artist powers “to feel” and “is the intrinsic quality in the medium of expression” states Hans Hofman in his book “Search for the Real.”  This word, empathy and the philosophy in his book have mentored me in my search for the essential nature of the forms and plastic expression.  The definition of empathy is that our emotional experiences can be gathered together as an inner perception by which we can comprehend “the essence of things” beyond mere, bare sensory experience. The physical eye sees the shell and the semblance. The “inner eye” however sees the core and grasps the opposing forces and coherence of things. These things present us with effects that are supersensory and transcendental in their relations and connections that force us to create meaning.

My mentoring is founded on my experiences of artistic development, it’s core in modernism focuses on the formal relationship of forms, line, color, and texture and how its tensions, its conflicting forces, create symbolic meanings in the mind as they add and subtract and play against one another. I strongly emphasize the importance of drawing to develop fluidity, confidence, significance of visual form and a channel for personal and universal meanings. I am inspired by my life as I create simplified organic forms in relationship of conflicting forces as a metaphor of humanity, its struggles, its circular motion of birth and death.

Artist Statement

How am I to create in a visual formal language the sorrow that tugs at my heart and cries to find expression?  I look at this last series of drawings and paintings on Childhood Spaces and feel an anxious and lonely feeling in these formal elements. They exhibit organic forms floating in circular movement as conflicting forces struggling for autonomy. These simplified forms go beyond my experience and speak to me as universal symbols of humanity. They dance and play in rhythm to a sacred ritual that seems to carry an ancient wisdom and deep empathy through significance in form.

In the act of creation the vitality of organic form and engaged tensions are given meaning in contrast to geometric form and empty space and can be felt as a paradox to joy and sorrow, beginnings and endings in nature, life and creativity. In the struggle, spirit comes from matter, meaning out of chaos in staying with tension, isolation and anxiety to experience the magic in its resolution. As, also, in the rituals of birth, marriage, religion and death where constant change and meaning in loss give renewed hope and life.  I have come to a crossroad in a creative process that drained my energy and felt like an empty void. In seeking unity the tensions necessary to create life in the work need balance and quiet reflection. So, I akin myself to Carl Jung’s theories, journaling dreams and mediation to guide me toward understanding symbolism in formal expression of this paradox of birth and death.

In nature and humanity the metaphor of this paradox of opposites are mysteriously exposed through creative act joining the conscious with the unconscious in spiritual focus on unity.  I focus on significance of the last two series “Childhood Spaces” and “Stations of the Cross” and seek the connection of childhood memories, the message of suffering, sacrifice and death experienced in Catholic upbringing with universal forms that express archetypal wholeness.  In looking back at the work it lacks unity and clarity and feels ambiguous and unclear to me. So the concept of birth and death emerge to captivate me and give me courage to continue into the new
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A renewed energy surfaced within me last winter in waiting for my daughter to give birth to a girl. In anticipation to be with her and her husband in Spain I was drawing what appeared symbolic of wombs, caves or nests and channels. These abstract forms also suggestive of childlike human and animal forms gave birth to reworking a 5’x 5’ painting (I had given them as a wedding gift) later while in Spain. The painting mirrored my experience of love and magic I saw in my daughter transformed by her creation and cycle of motherhood and family. This work was the onset to seek in my visual forms depth and symbolic meaning in the universal message behind the paradox: birth and death. In looking back to a series called “Transparent Connections,” exhibited in 2002, the paradox of this cycle of life present then, now resurface with renewed simplification and meaning.