There is a formality to this piece as well as Cabaret of a Dophin both of which I did for the Massey Christmas Small Works 2014. It is satisfying to arrange colours/textures/images with cut papers and there is a spontaneity in the creation that is perhaps not apparent because of the formality of the layout and medium. Solitude and concentration in the moment and an appreciation of beauty, complexity, and openess - to create images that no matter what the size or format give room for thought and contemplation. It is one thing to have an idea or follow an idea, and then a completely different thing to offer that idea with room for alternate interpretation and unique individual voice. The viewer is necessary to complete the experience of what has been created.
Taken from Wiki: Art as Experience (1934) is John Dewey's major writing on aesthetics....
Dewey's theory, here, is an attempt to shift the understandings of what is important and characteristic about the art process from its physical manifestations in the ‘expressive object’ to the process in its entirety, a process whose fundamental element is no longer the material ‘work of art’ but rather the development of an ‘experience’. An experience is something that personally affects your life. That is why these theories are so important to our social and educational life.
Such a change in emphasis does not imply, though, that the individual art object has lost significance; far from it, its primacy is clarified: the object is recognized as the primary site for the dialectical processes of experience, as the unifying occasion for these experiences. Through the expressive object, the artist and the active observer encounter each other, their material and mental environments, and their culture at large.....