First of all I would like to make a necessary premise. Any word has a different meaning for each person. And this is true for all words… try for example to think of the word lover, what does it evoke in you? Someone will think of their husband or wife, someone instead of the person with whom he has an extramarital affair, someone will see in this word a positive meaning and someone else negative. We all have life experiences and these are evoked when we say a few words.

The word beauty, for example, is one of the most subjective of all! As far as I’m concerned, beauty implies several factors, and often, comparing two people considered beautiful by most people, I find myself in disagreement with their opinions, for me one is more beautiful, for the most part the other is more beautiful. The clear case, the one that first comes to mind is that of Brigitte Bardot and Sofia Loren, two women of the same age…. and I’m not referring to when they were girls, but to their current beauty. For me Brigitte Bardot, who has accepted the passage of time with serenity, is much, much more beautiful and profound than the “unnatural plasticky” Sofia Loren. This is also because, in my case, the concept of beauty is very bound, filtered and defined by inner beauty, which transpires from the eyes, as well as from the actions. So wrinkles, my eyes do not even see them, or rather they see them under a different aspect, the one that is part of the person ‘s spiritual and life path , so it is something more, something that accentuates beauty and not something that it belittles it. To better explain this concept I help myself with a quote from actress Anna Magnani  who said “ Don’t take off even a wrinkle. I paid dearly for them all. ”

Having made this fundamental premise, let’s move on to the concept of art, a word in my opinion very inflated and often used inappropriately … long ago I saw a documentary on the works exhibited in the largest museums in the world, and you know what I’m saying? That if those are artists, art is dead! I know people, both in person, and virtually on facebook, that those sons of dads there, if they eat them for breakfast! Yes, daddy children, because as it happens, all these super-rated “artists” were the children of rich industrialists, famous models, stars of the show and cinema, strange case?

So what is blessed art?

In my opinion this is what you can read by entering my blog, or the quote from Susan Sontang. When you open this blog, I looked for a nice quote to insert (yes, I really like quotes 🙂) and among the many, that of this artist, that I honestly don’t even know, was the one that struck me immediately …

“Art. A way to get in touch with your own madness.” Susan Sontag

When I think of myself for example, I don’t define myself as an artist, I just feel I have a strong artistic spirit and for me they are two distinct and separate things. Artist for me is De Chirico, it’s Tom Yorke, it’s Richard Linklater, it’s William Burroughs and I, I really don’t feel like putting myself by their side … The artistic spirit, on the other hand, is something different, it’s what makes me fly, what makes me move in the face of beauty, even that of nature, which pushes me to create without paranoia about the final result, in a free way, which pushes me to put into practice ideas, often bizarre, for the pure pleasure of doing it! 😉 It’s like with writing, whoever writes his own personal diary is certainly not a writer.

Art for me is a cure for the soul. When I create something I enter a mental state similar to that of meditation or hypnosis, it is another dimension, where physical laws, such as gravity, do not exist, where emotions literally take shape, where they are able to transpose on matter what is not material …

And in my opinion art absolutely needs madness ! All of us, each with their own personality, are dominated by archetypes and, in this regard, I recommend a truly enlightened book, one of the few books that I define as one of my bibles, ” Awakening the Hero Within ” by Carol Pearson. One of the most active archetypes in me is precisely the insane 🙂 and, like all archetypes, if we do not allow him to express himself, he will do it anyway, but in his shadow form, that is the negative one…. So if I’m on the street and I feel like hugging a tree, I do! As I did it the first time in Rome, near the Tiburtina station, at least 20 years ago… I didn’t give a damn about what people thought and I followed my insane interior…. and that tree that I hugged, gave me a great love, managing to totally change my mood, which in a few minutes went from depressed to full of joy and love! Yes, even nature , like art, can work great miracles, try and see! 😉 So now you can better understand the meaning that that quote has for me …

Art is a cure for the soul, and it is a cure for those who make it and also for those who admire it. It serves to rebalance the ugliness that the mass media (weapons of mass distraction) pour out on us every day, ugliness that sometimes make us lose faith in mankind, make us feel powerless and make negative emotions prevail in us, such as fear or despair …

And so let’s balance ourselves more, let’s give ourselves and spread more beauty, let’s make our soul sing for joy, we need it, the whole world needs it, especially now …

And now that’s enough, I close with my river of words and launch my arrow, I aim straight at your heart and I hope you can fall in love, as happened to me last night, with the wonderful works of  Pócs Judit  in my opinion a Great Artist !