When people are ordered to stay at home and all the economy is shattered, there are new thoughts about what is really important in our lives. Fear is a great buffer but a great motivator as well, people will react out of fear very differently than in normal life, it can freeze some people but others could emerge out of a severe situation shinning. This is what happens in those Corona days as well. I find a lot of resemblance between those days and the essence of the FLY method. I’ll try to elaborate that by using the three key elements of FLY: flow, merge and layers.
Flow — on the canvas, we pour colors and move them by sticks, the pour and the movement express a natural inner momentarily passion. Pouring the colors is a vertical movement, spreading them on the canvas is a horizontal movement, we can choose the colors and the general idea we would like to express but we can’t be accurate or ‘stay in the lines’, this method calls for letting go, shattering our unseen borders and going out of the lines. I use to say in the workshops I deliver that it is forbidden to stay in the lines.
Flow resembles life, if our blood won’t flow, we will die physically, if our thoughts won’t flow, we will die mentally, if we will block our love. feelings, we will die emotionally.
The Corona days are the perfect times to practice our fluidity, it is not only time that flies it is our lives that hangs around other lives in a constant correlation seen and unseen, to practice social distance not to be affected by the virus is against human nature, to be forced to depart from our family and loved ones is a great punishment, I wrote in a different essay that I think more people would die out of loneliness than from the virus. Flow is an essential key element in our lives and with it, the understanding that what exists now will vanish tomorrow, what frightens us today can be our alley next year and what stops us is a clue for a detour in our minds.
Merge — on the canvases we use a combination of contradicting ingredients like: oil colors, acrylics, and cold tar, the mélange between those ingredients result in very surprising shapes and colors on the canvas. The oil is diluted by turpentine so as the tar but the acrylic by water and those elements interacts and form like thin threads that can be manipulated by the chopsticks we use, sometimes there are real shapes there that I would like to bring out, there are cases I use brushes for a more subtle work. There is no way to plan in advance the exact reaction between those ingredients, as there is no way to envision the forms of clouds in a storm. The FLY approach to life embraces those strange shapes, as the understanding that life is not a straight line and there are many threads, thorns and unexpected happenings on our road, more than that it is the understanding that we need those thorns to develop, we can’t climb on a smooth wall.
Layers — in my paintings there are 7 to 15 layers, by layer I mean all the ingredients I use, oil, acrylic, and tar, I wait till the first layer would dry and I start a second layer and so on, this is the reason I work in my studio simultaneously on 4 tables. Layers give a depth sensation and create space for shadows and light, sometimes I plan transparency effects, I use it especially in my Deep Space series. Layers are part of our lives, we are built from different times and experiences in our lives each one is a layer corresponding with the layer beneath marking and enabling the next layer. Those Corona days are but another layer the question is what we will take out of this experience and how would it affect our next layer.
FLY speaks about Free the Life within You meaning letting ourselves being freed from what stops us, from our unseen borders that reside only in our brains, I will always be right if I say, I can’t make it. FLY enables people to express themselves freely with the notion that there is no bad or good in our art but just a natural passion to create, this creativity empowers whoever experienced it. It is worth to dare and spend some time in a studio or create your own studio, it is a liberating process and a lot of fun as well. This is what keeps me in the Corona days, creating art and writing, sharing it with all my friends and contacts worldwide that experience the same feelings as me. Above all to grasp the fact that we are but temporary visitors on this planet and this virus is here to stay long after we will live our bodies, so we will learn to live with it smiling, it won’t block our life and creative force.
