Notes from My Studio 15 April 2025

"Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story." -John Berger

I want to give you this

in a time when so many of us feel like this.

“I was, in a way, alone in the world. I don’t say that very pathetically. I just took it as a fact of life. But being like that means you listen to others, because you are seeking landmarks to orient yourself in relation to—and, unlike what most people think, storytelling does not begin with inventing, it begins with listening.” -John Berger

I just posted in “Notes” that I’m reading the great John Berger.

I’m also reading EH Gombrich’s The Story of Art.

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I am always turning to other artists: painters, writers, filmmakers, musicians.

Artists remind us of our humanity.

Artists remind us of our collective history.

It’s not to escape. I don’t want to escape. I want to remember, to learn, to feel, to think. I want to act. I want to feel less alone. I want to find, to create, hope and truth.

All the same reasons why I make art in the first place.

“A people or a class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or class than one that has been able to situate itself in history.” -John Berger, Ways of Seeing 

Kelly Kilmer, Plant Your Seeds, Acrylic on paper, 2025

“To try to understand the experience of another it is necessary to dismantle the world as seen from one’s own place within it, and to reassemble it as seen from his.” -John Berger

We need to somehow figure out (we are, supposedly, artists and creative individuals) how to collectively build what we want to see in the world.

We need to remember that everything (including art) is indeed political.

“I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honour.” -John Berger, Keeping a Rendezvous

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Finally, I am a working artist… Thank you for reading this and being a part of my journey.

"Hope is not a form of guarantee; it’s a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark.” -John Berger