Some objects, works of literature, music, painting, or simply moments in time can be charged with life and significance. I associate these with the arena of feeling. The best art, irrespective of discipline or medium, is felt first and reasoned later. This belief is my creative bedrock. It springs from a child-like curiosity and relish of the stuff of earth, an evolving well of experience and a love of mystery. Beauty has many guises. I value the voluptuous and the visceral in equal measure. Art is at its most potent when it exposes something of the artist's humanity. The Spanish know this and call it Duende but this phenomenon has a pan-cultural blood line. Thus, a personal act of risk and disclosure can be both gift and revelation, if we are alive to it.

 

Gareth Mason