When I think about Brazil I think about art, I think about music, the people and the feeling of love. Once you have Brazil in you, it will never come out. It’s the art of life in the tropics, and living there to create art, that’s what I miss most about Brazil as a muse. Every culture has it’s own flair and style, often best reflected in the street art but in my experience nothing quite compares to Brazil.
Street art takes a snap shot of a time in a place, evoking feelings of what is happening to the people living there…. are they happy or angry?
I always ride a bicycle wherever I go and riding in the daylight through parts of a city that no man dare traverse at night time, exposes the street art and makes for the the most interesting urban safari, through the city jungle of struggle and angst, reflected in the graffiti and evident everywhere.
When all else fails, we have art is actually a famous quote but I don’t know who it was that coined it. I’m the artist that added “Create Art” to the phrase and it’s meant to message myself. Since the only way to become a professional is to begin as an amateur.
Years ago when I divested myself of my book collection I kept Ralph Waldo Emerson, partly because I hadn’t finished it but also because he was one person who’s ideas really made sense to me and still do. Maybe that was also partly why I abandoned the idea of owning things, like book collections for example. Now everything I own can be easily carted off to a cabin in the woods, if I should so desire.
I am a city dweller, that’s why you won’t find me living on Waldon’s Pond, which was written by his protege Henry David Thoreau but espoused the same ideas as Emerson and also recommended the beauty of nature but more that anything introduced the concept of individual freedom and the power of art.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882)[5] was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay “Nature“. Following this work, he gave a speech entitled “The American Scholar” in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.”[6]
Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), represent the core of his thinking. They include the well-known essays “Self-Reliance“,[7] “The Over-Soul“, “Circles“, “The Poet“, and “Experience.” Together with “Nature“,[8] these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson’s most fertile period. Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for mankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson’s “nature” was more philosophical than naturalistic: “Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul.” Emerson is one of several figures who “took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world.”[9]
He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement,[10] and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that followed him. “In all my lectures,” he wrote, “I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.”[11] Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow transcendentalist.[12]
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