I have a strong spiritual life. I had been looking for years for a way to express spirituality, or at least some aspects of it, in a visual work of art. Finally I developped a technique I call focusing, which allows me to express in my art an aspect of life which I find very important and very spiritual in nature. It's the idea of being grounded in life, a feeling that we experience when we go deep inside ourselves and take the time to listen to what is there. When we are focused, we are strongly connected to our own feelings and needs, but at the same time more receptive to the world around us.
I explain this state of mind as taking our consciousness to the very center of our inner self, and I have carried out this idea visually by symbolically forcing people to go to the center of my work in order to look at it. A grounding work is constructed so that the person looking at it must be located at its very center in order to see it entirely and without any distortion. Although a rather simple idea (or maybe because of that), I find this technique gives results that are both interesting and convincing. I feel the concept behind focusing is strongly related to Mark Rothko's artistic vision, while adding a dynamic aspect to it in terms of space. This is also interesting in the sense that when the work is seen from the side it's distorted, but this point of view can be nice nonetheless. It gives us the idea of looking at an event with different perspective to allow for a better understanding of it.
© 2009 Stéphan Pelletier
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