Art and Science
"The force of Science lies in its authoritative reason.
The force of Art lies in its immediate influence on human psychology and its active contagiousness.
Being a creation of Man, it re-creates man.
Art has no need of philosophical arguments; it does not follow the signposts of philosophical systems.
Art, like life, dictates systems of philosophy.
It is not concerned with the meditation about what is and how it came to be.
That is a task for knowledge.
Knowledge is born of the desire to know, Art derives from the necessity to communicate and to announce.
The stimulus of science is the deficiency of our knowledge.
The stimulus of Art is the abundance of our emotions and our latent desires.
Science is the vehicle of facts - it is indifferent, or at best tolerant, to the ideas, which lie behind facts.
Art is the vehicle of ideas and its attitude to facts is strictly partial. Science looks and observes,
Art sees and foresees...
Naum Gabo
"
Opposite Studio, Shoreditch, London 2005
Words written by Heathcote Williams,
After seeing a few of Mike Englands paintings at an Exhibition at 'Liscous' Design, Oxford.
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"Mike England’s paintings are elusive. However, if you give them a chance they’ll tease your consciousness into a satisfying sense of harmony.
One picture may look like the outlines of banned items in an airport security X-ray; another may resemble a Welsh landscape, burgeoning with primal spongiform plants that await a dinosaur’s jaws.
In another a series of time-lapse images seem to be describing an inner dreamscape of the painter’s thoughtful psyche.
As you look from subject to subject you don’t quite know what’s what. The pictures move in and out of the figurative. Is another painting a cityscape with TV screens and warnings to jaywalkers? Or is it Mondrian’s ghost picking up his ruler and his brushes again?
“Everything is abstract”, Mike England says, gently throwing down the gauntlet to anyone who might feel challenged by his painting’s non-figurative aspect. Mike England’s paintings penetrate the inner and reflect it in the outer. It’s quantum painting in which the artist is quietly breaking new ground. He proceeds according to his own lights and his paintings reflect that illumination".
Heathcote Williams ... writer/Poet
