Celebrating Avatars art by Francine story by Ken

Avatar of Grace

Celebrating Avatars

In the dim recesses of human history an avatar was a deity descended to earth taking physical form.  In the digital domain an avatar is merely an image selected to represent a person on the internet.

Choosing the place, time and circumstances of our lives we begin our adventure of experience and perception.  Stardust, emerging again from before the cosmos was, we choose the tension, drama, adventure, and joy of this time-bound space.

We pretend that light and dark are opposites.  We pretend that good and evil oppose each other.  We pretend that life and death are the ultimate contrast.  Thus we set the stage for living out the themes of our lives.

What joyous play this is.  As avatars of Creation our imagination tethers us safely to the infinite while we explore the universe of sensory experience.  The ability to depict feeling through form is our gift.

The mystic, the warrior, and the artist are the archetypal forms whose role it is to extend the cultural boundaries.  The mystic transcends time and place and boundaries through a spiritual quest.  The warrior reaches a transcendent place through the direct encounter with the physical at its most vulnerable – human flesh.  The artist transcends cultural boundaries through the vehicle of emotion.

The art of the mundane replicates stereotypical images.  This is the well trodden path.  It is the space of the nervously twittering normal, safely ensconced within the accepted cultural mode.  The art of the transcendent is not visible from within the confines of the cultural cells we inhabit.

When all the walls of our cell are finally covered with the mundane we look about and feel profound boredom.  An utter lack of meaning pervades our relationship with our art, to the forms we have given life, to our feelings of ourselves as artists.

It is precisely here, in this moment of our encounter with meaninglessness, that the way is open.  The true adventure waits.  Here is where the quest for meaning begins.  As artists we now undertake to question, endure and create.  We cast aside, as incomplete and worthless, our transient expressions to convey this cauldron of perception.  Yet, that which we jettison creates a trail by which others may know us as we are – vulnerable, aware, growing – humans being.  It is through this encounter with ourselves that we are truly artists, and through us avatars are given form.