Artist Journal by Ilyas Kassam
Ilyas Kassam is a London based artist and poet. His work centres around the notion of infinity and the relationship between seemingly opposing dualities. We invited him to share his journal with us to investigate into art that is informed by spiritual consciousness.
25.05.2008: The sky holds all the answers — Always
I read the other day that children instinctively draw stars, they draw five point stars. Why does a child, out of nowhere, draw a star? Why do pentagrams oscillate every altar? Why do we look up and cry and howl and beg the moon for a glass of milk? I think as children we know that we are made of stardust, we know in our bones that we belong to the stars. We know without ever trying to know – we know because we know.
So it’s Tuesday/ and I roll out a canvas /and I search for a brush that has the same light as the light shining through the window/ and I stare deep into the fabric/ and I see each thread/ and I see tiny specks of dust glide off it/ and I think what am I doing here? What is this canvas telling me? Why must it be stained? What lunacy compels me to such a pointless task? /and I think of the child and what the child knows/ and I see the child in front of me in blue shorts, standing on the canvas/ and he is eating ice cream/ it is bubblegum ice cream/ and it is dripping all over the canvas and making it all sticky/ and I want to stop him/ I want to stop him making my canvas sticky/ but I know he is trying to tell me something/ he is telling me how to not exist/ how to evaporate and belong to the stars/ he’s telling me with his sticky bubblegum ice cream, that I am not here, and that I don't need to paint, but that the only way to not paint is to paint/ he is telling me to paint so that we can go home.
So I paint
And I become a star
I paint
And I see Neptune I paint
And I know I am not
I paint to taste the ice cream And I see the child all sticky
And I pray that God will keep him close to me. And I paint
And I paint
And I know I am Love
And I watch
As the waves crash beneath my feet
17.03.2008: I am reading The Waves. I feel grand. I feel small. I hear my ego wither beneath my feet. Bruised and irrelevant. I thought I could write. But I cannot. Those are words and these are not. These are attempts that fall short of all they intend to be. Only in a vacuum may I remain great. Only in the absence of all art may I be an artist.
The hermetic life suits the artist, not because solitude is poetic, romantic, or incandescent, but because in solitude there is no relativity, only the delusion of grandeur. I must renounce art, I must renounce others, if I am ever to write again. To see the self in relation to others is not truth. It is too caught up in self-judgement and insecurity. To be alone is to be absolute but non-existent. Truth lies somewhere in the space between solitude and togetherness; a space that eludes all mankind. Only as a ghost can I truly be human; Unfettered by form or formlessness - One foot
in the sea - Two feet in oblivion. But the abyss is unlived - Wordless. Artless - The only state of artistic absolution. The Bartleby makes sense; only the artist that makes no art can really be an artist. But only through creation can wedestroy the creative endeavour that loves to love itself. Art is not to love. It is love. It is not painting. It is paint. It is not writing. It is words. I am a word that is yet to come. And once I feel the feel I feel it within, I will cease to write, not out of insecurity, but out of love, and in that moment, I will become a writer. I will become the word. I will be love —As I am — And always have been — A ghost of Cupid — Dissolved by the wings out of his infinite bosom.
I am reading my old journals and lamenting the passion and delusion that once engulfed my teenage years. But I think it remains true, art is love. It's a sort of cliché thing to say. But oh such a juicy cliché. Love is one of those wonderful words, like God – overused, misused, careless, joyous, and so miraculously singular. I think art is another one of those glittering demons. It is what you think it is, but it also isn’t, and it is also love, and it is also God, but most importantly it is not art. For something to be considered art it can’t exist, it must almost exist, but never truly cross the threshold. What does it mean to splatter liquid blood across a tired canvas? What program is playing in the background when God dreams of her next vacation?
Every time I pick up a brush, I ask it what animal died. Every time I see the ink drip, my mother is close by. It is this knowing, that lives between two hairs; that spits, and drafts an altar for us to sacrifice our favourite beast. The question then becomes, what colour do we paint the altar in, and how do we ensure it never exists?
06.04.2008: Sometimes I believe I am the only one who has felt the sensation of existence. It is too intense to live within anyone else, and I don't know what they would do with it.
People seem far too well composed to know they exist. Art speaks in a vacuum. It has the strange ability to dissolve all living matter and convince you that you are God; the most fragile, timid, emotionally unbalanced God, but the creator of all nonetheless. You feel like the universe and the tiny pebble beneath your feet.
Overcome by the most elegantly humble form of narcissism.
My old teacher once told me if you wish to be great, don't follow greatness. I guess in many ways he was saying look away. As an artist you have to trick yourself. You have to believe you are an artist, but you have to believe that the ‘you’ that is an artist does not exist. You, like art, must remain concealed; never crossing the threshold. The question then becomes, how does one not exist? The answer, inevitably, is Art. Art above all is the pursuit to not exist, to dissolve the self and adorn the particles that evaporate, as they are returned to the stars.
