PAINTING AND APPROACHES | II | CONTINUATION
Rodrigo Costa
All we know how the communication is important part of our destiny, the reason why the speaking and the hearing also are among our survival tools. It’s such the importance of the communication that, when there is not neither words nor gestures, our eyes and facial expressions become themselves into the messengers — complementary elements, before, face and eyes are, then, the main mean for sending and getting messages. Will it be easy to express our feelings or thoughts if, technically, we aren’t able to make our intentions tangible matter? Obviously, it’s time for render homage to the conscious memory, without which — as priceless file — there aren’t enough elements to give body to the ideas. We could follow the speech of most contemporary who proposes the idea as enough or even the main,
defining it as complete concept. What’s not true, given there isn’t spirit without body — the same for the contrary, unless it is corpse’s body. And it’s even needed to know how the health of both spirit and body depends on the balanced relationship between them — nobody arrives anywhere only by thinking; it’s need to go and to know how to go… so as to arrive and to arrive without big problems, at least. All artistic projects — as all human projects, naturally — have its beginning in the mind, which needs the body as tool to become the dreams into physical matter; as something to be seen and touched; as image from the physical answer to the spiritual wish. Art is no more than the result of cooperation between spirit and body, both working on producing images that reflect the affective involvement... As Da Vinci proclaimed, La pittura è cosa mentale /
Painting is a mental issue, what means doesn’t be possible to paint or to learn to paint — in the deepest sense — if we are not thinking; if we are not seeing from inside. When we don’t feel, we can’t comprehend the profound reason of the things. So an artwork has to reflect the minimum correspondence between what is thought and what is done, once our hands follow our mind, responding as faithfully as they can to the mind’s will — there are not blind hands; there are minds that, as leaders, have not enough conscious memory, instead. So the two first questions should be: — Why to paint and why to paint what we do want to paint? There are no doubts about the genetic influence. Independently of the massive miscegenation, all of us preserve our roots; all of us have our etymology. Our eyes, our hair, our skin color and our expressions, all
this comes from somebody who existed in the past. The same way, our feelings and our wills and passions are genetic heritage too. Actually, we have the human being and the context — the seed and the soil — but, even influenced by the context, the human being keeps his genetic marks such as the seed keeps its etymon, despite on its qualities are also dependent on the nature of the soil but surviving, in any circumstances, the indestructible complicity between the plant and its roots. Thus, when we refer to the artist we must consider the human being captive by his nature and influenced by the nature of the context. The artist and his or her nature as reality, even when working from the imaginary — another part of the whole reality, once, in fact, all is physical matter, despite on our scarce visual acuity:
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