I was recently asked who I am inspired by. To name a specific style or few artists and to be honest I didn't know how to answer that, in order for my answer to have a full impact on the person receiving the message and also for me to have a complete visual I am answering it to the fullest potential of who I am as an artist. I didn't even know where and with who to begin.
I have searched inside myself that question for weeks, yet I knew that the answer I originally given was short and precise. I keep coming up with the same conclusion. I don't have one, two or even few specific people that inspire me. I am truly inspired by so many different genres, styles, textures, elements and artists where not one specific stands out. It would be unfair to name only a handful and neglect to mention all. It's a collage of importance and the unimportant, the brilliant, foul, gray, black & white equally.
My inspirations can come unexpected to me from a simple homeless man on the street that captures the light and the image of this human imprints into my mind forever until the day I attempt to recreate the feeling it has left me with, by painting him/her or capture something similar with photography. Either way I'd work to expose a negative of the image in my memory & bring it forth to make it alive. It could be a feather, floating in the air on a busy jammed pack noisy street... where this feather can literally stop time for few moments as it floats ever so gently back & forth until it reaches it's gravital destination and lands gently on a wet paved sidewalk disappearing in an instance on the bottom of the shoe of one ten-thousandth foot that walked by me in those few seconds.
Inspirations can be as complex as Einstein with his brilliant mind and all his theories to Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci the renaissance men who have left an extraordinary impact on our evolutionary leap, etc.. I am an information hound & in constant awe when I research or discover a new artist I've never heard of. A computer nerd that seeks out the information for no specific purpose other then to learn something new. When I can't sleep I often search the web and find links that lead me onto mini journeys. I'm never bored.
I was once accused of being a copy cat. I found that to be such an insult. However, I now know that it was only an evolutionary leap and acceptance of their own artistry without any merit to their accusations, the person who blamed me for such thing was indeed a full fledged copy cat themselves. And now I look at their accusation as a compliment that they felt threatened by me in any way.
My spectrum has no limits. I was always artistic, even when I didn't know it nor believed it. My focus is always broad and multi-sourced. I am never working on one project but dozens at a time. I don't always use my hands to create things. Things are born in my thoughts and often that is the only place they exist. I have an unlimited archive of art created but nobody has ever seen it. It has never been born. My mind simply never stops, hardly ever even at night during the time to sleep & rest, I am in a constant noise of silent thoughts.
To some maybe my conversations would be boring or totally wacky as to I have the vocabulary to use by means of communicating but my thought process is complex and slower in terms of being able to voice it and construct it appropriately for it to make sense visually to me, before I allow it to come out of my mouth. Does this make sense? To me it does. I am a great conversationalist and often my communications are lengthy and deep. Perhaps it takes a like minded individual to understand me or be willing to lend an ear.
And some days I am totally tongue tied & I cannot even form a sentence even if my life depended on it.
I am an extremist. A very visual person but one who has to have senses fed into the impressions and visions. Nothing without feeling is worth expressing.
When I was a little girl age 4, the circumstances of our life had me in a boarding school and I only came home on the weekends. Not many people know this story. It is a story that most don't understand when I talk about it but it was a way in my country with two parents working to sustain a living with nobody else to watch me. In those fundamental years, something inside me changed. I had to learn a process of being, feeling, suppressing, heightening, loving even as little as a 4 year old girl. Loving myself and believing in myself had to have a priority as I felt unloved & rejected. Protecting my own inner thoughts and not allowing them to be heard by the caretakers, has left imprints of so many emotions I now tap into as an adult, slowly unlocking doors to my past, with the countless keys I discover on my journey of living. Some are fearful but always intriguing even the scary ones. I find discovering and unlocking my past makes me stronger.
Some of my youngest memories go back to being 4-6 months old. I have full details of my clothing, building structures around me, people's faces, tastes, surrounding areas and my memories are vivid and real. I communicated with my invisible friends who I now know were angels and spirit guides. I find it amazing how the process of a child's mind changes over the years of becoming a teen, then adolescent and finally an adult.
Visions of beings as a child are light, awesome and filled with superior amazement. As we age, these same beings can become feared by us all together and many times rejected. As we age, we loose our ability to hear but this is only an illusion. Everything is still all the same, we only have to unlearn all learned.
When I was nearly 5 I was kidnapped and missing for about 30 minutes. A neighbor saw me leaving with a stranger while playing outside and soon I had the neighborhood looking for me and I was found safe by my mother who ripped me out of the tight grip of this stranger. I often wondered if this story was real as it seems so unreal to me to have survived this but the memories are very real to me. It is in fact a real story as confirmed by my mother, as are all the stories I have shared with her of my very early childhood and she confirmed clothing, homes, furniture, people and items that may have been present as I described them to her. I'm not totally nuts & this brings me some comfort.
I thank the fact I could read a books as young as 6 years old, I was able to read to myself visualizing and fantasizing the story itself as I was literally in it. My imagination and my prayers and love for God has always been my saving grace. In the art of a child'd mind everything is real just as life. I was a young child who feared her father the most but I feared, respected and loved God more. He was the only one who saved me on daily basis. He is the only one who saves me still. Over time my fear of God grew to absolute unconditional love, until there isn't bigger love to feel then the love for God, equally loving for your children and people you'd die for.
My abilities were always suppressed and hidden however, I sometimes used it as child's play to entertain myself. I knew things that would frighten a kid and things I shouldn't know or see. There were so many other forces at work and now when I look back on my life, it is to me often unfathomable how I am able to still be here surviving all I have and not be locked up in a padded room over-medicated. But then I think about other people's hardships and I understand everyone lives a different story and endures their own share of hard times, sufferings and even horror.
Escaping my country into Austria, was an extra-ordinary developmental step for me. I was 12. Being in a refugee camp is a memory so frightening yet so dear to me. It was at this time I became a real kid and exposed so raw to other nationality, culture, and various different types of people who influenced me so deeply. I think living in fear from my bio father for 12 years has kept me from expanding fully my thought process and my journey ultimately transitioned into a heightened and enlightened path I didn't know yet. It is at this age I cocooned unknowingly & began growing my secret butterfly wings, that were invisible for so long even to me.
Finally away from my abusive father (who I have learned to forgive and accept as a somewhat brilliant mind) my entire life changed. My wings grew over the course of few hard years learning a new language and re-learning how to walk the new soil across the ocean. Loosing all my friends wasn't easy but wasn't as hard I thought it would be. People's faces literally changed and the way I learned to understand English was reading lips and the language unheard from behind the eyes. It's amazing how much you can learn about a person from silence just by listening to the untold story of their eyes and what life lives behind them.
I always look into people's eyes but my eyes always travel to the lips too where I find comfort in the visual of watching them speak so I clearly understand each word. I often wonder how the mind processes those words. Do I hear them in English and transfer them into Slovak my native tongue only to transfer them back into English to comprehend?
To this day all my childhood friend are all alive and they are all 12 years old. They will always be 12, it's such a perfect innocent age to be. It brings me comfort to go back to being 12 a time of when I saw them last, and revisiting that chapter I left behind so long ago. Without goodbyes, I love and miss them all so much. To them individually, I must have just died disappearing into this country, but to me collectively they all live and are remembered. Even to this day, I try to recollect their names at least their first names but my mind and memories are slowly showing their age.
My challenges are deeply rooted in the acceptance of myself as a great artist even though I am told very positive things about my art and talents on a regular basis. I don't think it is fully about confidence and acceptance. I have that modesty that humbles me and knowing that I am only a grain in the endless sands makes me feel small in the artistic field. I think it is about never ever settling to accept myself as a great artist because I am constantly changing, learning, expanding and altering my styles and talents. The word great is related to a size and or dimension. To accept I am great would be limiting myself to a certain size or dimension, large or small and I am neither. I am multi-dimensional, well at least my thought process is anyways. My decisions, your decisions and every second alters the results of life and I think about that daily and in the choices I make.
I do have a beautiful mind, my thoughts always travel into the depths of existence and I seek the knowledge and truth that which is not seen nor felt. I am equally dark and have my deep dark moments that allow me to feel profound sorrow and pain. My soul always quivers to be anything but human even though I know it is a gift to be human and exist on this plain at this very present. I try every day to accept and appreciate my human abilities and gifts. I am very grateful. I have an ability to sense fully the physical, yet feel so limited in this unlimited universe to be in flesh. I wish I would have full control of what my mind is capable of - and do it in flesh. It is constantly wavering and seeking to pinpoint yet it is hindered by the only thing it can be. Me. Until I find a way to unlearn all that I have learned, I am influenced by all that is humanly related.
So what makes an artist?
We are all artists. Every single soul on this planet is an artist just as he/she is beautiful. Some are just more in the highlight and/or are able to express themselves in a way that influences the objector on some level. Weather you are the creator or the viewer of art, you are equally creative. It takes a process to internalize art and let the mind communicate it to the soul. It takes a beautiful mind to appreciate an artist.
Love,
Janette
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