Last blog for this year, looks like. I am defying the impulse to offer a balance sheet of a difficult year, or prepare a battle plan for the even more difficult one ahead. Instead, I will write about things that made me intensely happy at one point or another during the last 12 months, in hopes to get the transition into 2025 off to the right start.

Let’s begin with the fact that I am embedded in or adjacent to a ton of people who are highly creative. The range runs from (inter)nationally renowned artists, to successful local ones who can devote their life to making art. From published writers, painters, photographers, ceramicists who have shows, to all those people who pursue their urge to create regardless how unacknowledged their efforts will remain.

People who work 60 hour weeks and then come home to teach themselves how to make lace. People who lovingly and inventively design little flower fairy scenarios in their front rock gardens, enchanting the neighborhood with their creativity. People who make a house a home by determinedly finding the right way to paint the walls and hang the art. People who create native plant gardens that weave and flow from a dusty, dry cement desert. People who fabricate the most imaginative porcelain containers, dainty and elegant, with painted details. People who knit to the point of carpal tunnel syndrome, or embroider little creatures onto grandchildren’s crib blankets. People who weave, and those who quilt, adding new ideas to age-old crafts.

One of them is a friend who spends much of her time writing grants and breathing life into the finances of her organization, dealing with PR and recruiting advertisement, organizing membership drives and donor meetings, never mind keeping the books and making sure everyone gets paid.

Laura Grimes needed a retainer wall in front of her house and decided it had to be more than just cinder blocks. It has become a project that is creative on many levels – constructing themed mosaics from shards, remnants, beads, toys, thrift- and dollar store finds as well as generous donations from the community of the local Buy Nothing web site. I can just envision her sitting night after night in a basement experimenting with the right cement glue, the appropriately sized cinder blocks, the arrangement of a thousand trinkets and marbles, the groupings by shape and color and category membership.

It is not Art with a capital A, and I assume was never meant to be that. It is a desire to fashion something representing joy if not beauty from lots of circles and dots, or to tell a story or two, as all creative endeavors end up doing.

Maybe all these creatives convey the history of a craft, maybe they account for the requirements of a climate zone, maybe they refer to fables in their porcelain work, or maybe they speak of birds, or mermaids, or vegetables embedded in imaginary landscapes. Maybe they depict the hard truths of our time.

All of it, however, is directed at an “other,” the viewer, establishing a connection across time and/or space, letting us “read” what they have to say, or just feel gifted by the expressions they had to bestow. Art or craft engenders curiosity, instills pleasure, perhaps even admiration, linking two minds for a moment, a first step toward community. Giving one’s imagination a creative form is an act of reaching forward, outward, the possibility of forming a bond, no matter how playful or artful the base. Nothing more important in times where loneliness and division are dark clouds threatening to engulf so many. I am so happy to be surrounded by creativity offering connectedness in this way.

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Fast forward from dotted mosaics to dotted paintings. I have always admired the defiance of African-American painter Howardena Pindell who set herself the life-long task to decry racial segregation by using dots and circles in her art – originating in her childhood experience of red dots glued to the bottom of glasses and silver ware in public restaurants, to be served Blacks only, keeping the unmarked ones for Whites.

But recently I have been completely taken in, without ever seeing it in real life, by the dot-dominated work of a painter who started in her late 70s and whose visions exploded onto the art world horizon soon thereafter. Emily Kam Kngwarray produced about 3000 paintings during the 8 years she still lived after taking up the craft, about one a day. Those of my readers lucky to live in Great Britain will be able to see a retrospective at the Tate Modern, starting July 10th, 2025. What stirs me is not just the movement and exuberance that makes these canvases come alive, but admittedly also the very notion of “late-blooming.”

Kam Kngwarray’s works on show. Photograph: National Gallery of Australia

Installation view of Kim Kngwarray’s Batiks

Kam Kngwarray grew up in a remote area of Australia, with little contact to the outside world until she was 80 years old. She was as Anmatyerre elder, and a lifelong custodian of the women’s Dreaming sites in her clan Country, Alhalkere.

“Whenever Emily was asked to explain her paintings, regardless of whether the images were a shimmering veil of dots, a field of ‘dump dump’ dots, raw stripes seared across the surface or elegant black lines, her answer was always the same: Whole lot, that’s whole lot, Awelye (my Dreaming), arlatyeye (pencil yam), arkerrthe (mountain devil lizard), ntange (grass seed), tingu (Dreamtime pup), ankerre (emu), intekwe (favourite food of emus, a small plant), atnwerle (green bean), and kame (yam seed). That’s what I paint, whole lot.” ( Interview with Rodney Gooch, translated by Kathleen Petyarre.)”

Emily Kame Kngwarreye Summer Celebration (1991)

Kam Kngwarray Alhalkere – Old Man Emu with Babies (1989) Photograph: Courtesy of D’Lan Contemporary

The connection to place reveals itself even to the likes of me who are totally ignorant about Aborigine art. The abstracted vision, paralleling Modernism or styles found in Japanese calligraphy, grasps something universal, reverberating with many of us, lightyears removed from the artist’s existence. Universal: the concept that you can embrace place, the very part of the natural (or even built) world where you live, that informs and infuses you, providing a sense of belonging. It is there for all of us, even if Western culture during the last century has tried much to dull our sensitivity to its call.

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From dotted paintings to pearly music: Y’Y, the new recording by pianist and jazz composer Amaro Freitas makes me goose-bump happy (here is the link). It, too, encapsulates a tribute to a place, a region, the forest and rivers of Northern Brazil, featuring legends, spirits and rhythms from the Amazon and Pernambuco, where the artist grew up. The piano score is ravishing and the way he manipulates the strings by inserting soft objects like seeds, produces a creative new sound, always echoing the water drops and rivulets of the subtropical environment.

For me the album registers on a different level as well, making it special – a link to personal history. As I have mentioned often before, I am not one to spend much time perusing the past and introspecting about how life unfolded. But occasionally some glorious moments deserve to be remembered, and the album delivers the impetus, with its compositions bearing resemblances to Armenian composer Aram Khatchaturian, and Egberto Gismonti, the Brazilian musical giant.

I swear I survived adolescence only because I could bang out Khatchaturian’s Toccata (here is the music). And I mean bang out, paying no heed to differences in dynamics, just hitting the keys with rage. And one of the best experiences of my life was a backpacking trip along the Rio Negro in Ecuador, first (and, alas, last) visit to the Amazonian rainforest, captured so well in much of Gismonti’s work, and now Freitas’. Art linking to personal history, then, invites to remember the past, which in turn contains the implication of a future, where I intend to spend my energies to help connect the dots, as best I can. Just keep the creative output coming!

Happy New Year!

And speaking of connecting the dots (since this blog is dedicated to art, nature and politics, after all): I thought we might as well end 2024 on a combination of laughing, crying, screaming, and gasping at the theatre of the absurd upon us: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n24/eliot-weinberger/incoming – courtesy of the London Review of Books.)