B Alan Heisler
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Biography
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What Inspires Me to Create Art is all About Philosophy
There are as many reasons to create art as there are artists to express it. Each of us has our inspiration that compels the need to draw, paint, or sculpt. My inspiration has always been driven by forces unconventional.
For as long as I remember I've had the desire to create. As a child, I never knew or questioned the reason, except that I received great gratification from it, and it made me feel good. The early studies flirted with illustration - comic book art, storyboarding, advertising lay-outs - but I was never satisfied with the constraints required by illustration for hire. I possessed a compulsion to express through the fine arts.
Studying early 20th Century art led me to believe I was indeed a cubist, but later discovered myself a surrealist at heart. The strangest part of the realization is that nearly all my inspiration comes from the cubists. Only a few surrealists, as innovative as many have been, have inspired me to create. I'm within the surrealistic realm, but my applications support the elements of cubistic construction. "Cubistic-Surrealism" is what I call it; and it's the visual principle on which my creative approach is founded.
I have no idea if any of us are born to be what we become; I've never believed in fate, and my non-belief of myths and superstitions (our creations to explain the unknown) have kept traditional theologies beyond my embrace. It is my passion for creativity that has molded a meaning of purpose. For many, the creative process is about aesthetics and beauty. But art has never been about beauty. It's the expression of inner self and visions manifested within the psyche. Not about the creation of pictures, it's about what compels the process to reach a higher plane of thinking beyond reality, myth, theology, or science. It is the thing that binds existence; driving humankind to expand knowledge and move forward with optimistic purpose. It is the path to truth and positive innovation. The pictorial processes of painting - construction, symmetry, shading, hue and so on - are the principles by which we build imagery upon a canvas or other support, but it's the meaning behind the image that makes a painting so.
I deal with many subjects in art, although much centers around depicting people and faces. But it's rarely about the people or the faces. It's the study of emotions and the psychology of human nature. What is thought and felt within; idiosyncratic, passive, fearful, joyful, cynical, ugly or beautiful, is felt by all. And the faces or masks we wear define the center of self-awareness, deceit, or denial. It's a main subject of my study, to which I submit humankind, myself included, to examination.
I'm a self-taught artist that shied away from the structured academics surrounding the craft, but did so for an important reason that took me years to realize. To learn the craft from the ground upward became repugnant and stifling to my purpose. I had to learn art from the inside out, for I had already gone inside before I ever realized there was anything outside to learn. From the beginning, art has been the passion that drives my inspiration to do it. To learn it any other way would have made it all about the means and nothing about the meaning.
Art will always be about philosophy, the need to define existence within the universe, and the desire to touch the divine spirit.
balanheisler@gmail.com
www.artpal.com/gheisler04/
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Statement
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Art is not what you see, what you see are pictures.
Art is not how you feel about the pictures, what you feel is already inside you.
Art is not the skill or talent applied in picture making; craftsmanship can only be a vehicle in the making.
Conflict between psyche and spirit compels subjective expression.
Art is the moment of that expression.
Nothing else matters.
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Exhibitions
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Many of my works are currently in private collections in the U.S., Europe, China and the Philippines. My work "Self Portrait 2016" has been currently awarded an honorable mention by juror Pat Gougler in the Bauhaus Prairie Art Gallery's Online Abstraction Show, Feb. 2017.
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