Pens with tips of differing sizes for writing on birch bark (Sanskrit)
Artists are all about history: recording it for their times, dealing with for their understanding if the human condition; making it as they create culture. Some time they understand how important this is and yet at others they do not give themselves enough significance. Possibly because writers have had the supreme philosophical vantage point and indeed, political influence, in a way artists have never enjoyed while always knowing the influence of the image is far greater than all but the few master-works of literature.
I don’t include poets in that observation because they have always been above and beyond all other artists.
However there are many ways of dealing with history from mere biography, to subtle clues in paintings, to monumental sculptures, to the small items of the everyday casually littered around centuries of work all of which needed time and skill to make and remember in paint. And it is in what is chosen that passion fills the artist to show and reveal by showing what is not always seen. To walk past a flower is not to see the flower, but just to know it is there. Like a truth no one voices like a breath that is taken without thought but without which there are no thoughts.
In a very real way without artists there is no history, there is just that which no one discusses and which comes and goes without leaving a mark on a page or a canvas. Without these marks all we have is memory and that devolves into stories and traditions. The play things of the imagination.
Artists give focus; they bring light to the possibility f eternal darkness by insisting we think. Rethink. Think again. And after a lifetime they sometime manage to resolve upon the limitless conclusion that we are all limited, all ruled by rules we could not even describe when we are three but shadow our entire lives from the moment the synapses lock onto them in the growing brain. And we can see that the thousands of histories across the world, through thousands of artists down the centuries assemble another kind of history that has no country only colours and we can dance and think with these minds as if they were right by our sides and they can paint and sculpt our minds into refashioned, thinking beings beyond our childhoods and our genders.
This is why playing with art for money is so dangerous and inevitably corrupt. It debases the entire society for being able to think and deal with history is worth more than all the money in the world.
Volume 40 no 4 March – April 2026
