Samuel Lightwing

 

• Prints now available to buy from Fine Art America!
• 

I'm not a writer. I mean, I'm really not very eloquent. I'm a painter- a young, autistic painter- and my communication skills are distinctly subnormal. So please bear with me as I try to explain what I'm all about...

I paint from imagination. It's a drive in me, the urge to create, make something new and strange and wonderful, something unreal. The unreal, that's the key here, I think. That which does not exist in nature. To recreate what already exists doesn't interest me much, and doesn't seem to have much value. I mean, I'm not a camera. I'd rather be God's epigone than his plagiarist. And besides, why restrict myself to the cramped palette of the real and present, when my imagination provides me with the limitless diversity of the fictive to draw upon?

I can do so much more with the bizarre than I ever could with the mundane. Suppose I were to paint, for example, a white horse running through a field, to a most meticulous standard of detail. It would be beautiful enough, but there would be nothing to hold the observer's attention for very long, or challenge the intellect. One of my pieces, on the other hand, might depict a butterflycityglowbrokensandcastleshapeofanautumnleafslantofafrowninshadowcatseyebatcavefallsidewayshandundertheskymanyfeet, upon a landscape which looks like the smell of hyacinths, under a sky which is indescribable. My way is at least as beautiful, if you have the stomach for it, and can provide expressive analogues for a thought about the future, or the blindness of the mob, or the nature and potential of technology, or the conflicting impulses of the creative psyche.

That is as good an explanation as I can manage of the mechanics, as it were, of how I respond to inspiration. The inspiration itself, of course, derives from the spirit of God, and so defies explanation...