Mitch
Barrett
A
PASSION.
“But
to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination
itself. As a man is so he sees.” ( William
Blake)
As
a child I was curious as to what I could create from my imagination,
relishing every possible moment that I could escape from the
humdrum world of school and daily existence and enter the
make-believe world of fantasy and adventure.
I loved the stories from mythology and at an
early age of twelve years was presented to HRH Princess Margaret
and photographed in the local newspaper as one of the young
talents for a sculpture which I had completed of a Centaur
grappling with a man.
I then discovered that my interpretation of what was
real and also unconscious could be translated
onto canvas.
I have combined four styles of art in my paintings which
are Visionary, Symbolic, Mythological and Surrealistic.
To
the unaware my work covers a wide variety of what would be
interpreted as different types of art, which have been rather
misunderstood.
This was how my feelings and thoughts came together onto
the canvas, expressing visually my thoughts from my own experiences
of life, I began to be recognised as being different from the
normal.
I eventually discovered that there was a term, which
when all these types of art are amalgamated it is known as
Fantastic Realism. To quote Andre Breton,
“The wonderful thing about the fantastic is that fantastic does not exist and everything is real.”
To
clarify real this
means a true interpretation of how the artist sees his life,
fantasies and reality. If you have a taste for this type of
art, it will be as real to you, for you will
be able to interpret the reasons behind what you see in each
painting and make of them as you will.
As
an artist I respond to everything that is around me, which
opens a door to an inner world where past, present and future
intertwine, where the soul is revealed and to quote Joseph
Campbell,
“The
role of the artist I now understand as that of revealing through
the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul…..”
Between
visions of the artist and the interpretations of an onlooker,
stories are told, ‘myths’ and it is an ongoing journey to
expand horizons of consciousness. An Art that does not have
to justify its existence only through assisting man in his
pursuit of a more humane self-realization, not just as a mirror,
a projection or a sort of composed imitative response and
neither as an alternative, but rather as a suggestion for
critical self-realization.
As these images flow through me that wish to be interpreted
and reflected on in a meaningful way, a struggle begins. Two
different worlds are caught in conflict and begin to merge,
the ego of the artist, the (clown-like) mask that we all wear
in our desire for recognition and that of a child-like inquisitiveness
as I step into a personal landscape, as a pilgrim devoted
to reaching the source of this True Creation.
I then endeavour to remember as if recalling a dream,
images begin to emerge onto the canvas and I am reminded that
we are all connected after looking behind the masks that we
all wear in this domain of the Collective Imagination.