peter graham: diviner
20.11.24 - 20.12.24
peter Graham : Diviner
‘Diviner’ is a project comprised of figurative studies, that depict an artist as a kind of primal, magical entity inhabiting a workshop within the mind. Sometimes long hours are spent in the studio staring dumbly at blank surfaces so that eventually a lack of inspiration becomes subject for the work itself.
At these times I have made observations of my own artistic practice as if it were some (absurd) ritual, undertaken in order to transcend its own limitations. I have often depicted my surrounding workshop like the interior of a giant head-space, a vault with indication of openings into the external world that exists beyond.
The figurative forms operating in this underworld are like bodily manifestations of an artist’s imaginative intent. I wonder how consciousness might extend its reach beyond the internal regions of a body, as if our physical-self was a slave to the spirit that motivates its actions. That an exhausted artist is like a golem to their inner creative drive: we are thaumaturgic beings, spellbound to motivate beyond the despondency and despair of an imagination in decay.
The paintbrush is like a wand, or antennae- a dark spark, or spore; as well as a hairy stick that seems to stop short of everything. I imagine a type of magical activity beyond its sad failed reach as if it were a lamp illuminating interior spaces on the other side of a picture plane. There the artist ventures like an archaeologist, attempting to steal the shine reflecting off a deeply kept secret located in the bunker of the mind.
