In my ongoing reading of Marcel Proust I came across this assessment of artistic genius from the penultimate chapter of the Fugitive as interpreted by writer David Ellison. ‘The narrator hypothesises that all artists owe allegiance to a moral contract to which they were bound in a former life before entering this one. It is only the existence for the artist of these prior ethical obligations that can explain the extraordinary efforts he or she expends on individual works of art which might or might not be passed on to posterity.’ [ Ellison p 149] If there is such thing as a soul then it is the repository of these moral convictions and defining parameters of a different ‘world’. It is in this world that art exists and where artists intuitively ground their work . The theory that Proust was propounding was that artists and their genius belong to an entirely different place as well as the world in which everyone else lives.

I cannot claim to be a genius in any sense, but the idea of a different world glimpsed occasionally and soon lost has plagued me all of my artistic career. Some might call it inspiration but why it occurs and what triggers are the troubling questions. How often have you heard someone say ‘ I was inspired’ to do this? Proust would suggest that the inspiration already exists and simply awaits a trigger from either an external revelation or an internal juxtaposition of memory.

A second thought comes from the examination of the work of any number of artists who pursued an artistic idea all of their lives hoping to tap into that inspiration. I recently read a book about the British artist Peter Joseph who, in his nineties, is still seeking that perfect combination of abstracted elements that has seemingly eluded him. In fact, there are a number of British abstract artists who have gone down the same path seeking the same revelatory moment; Gillian Ayres, Patrick Heron, Frank Bowling, William Scott. If all of these artists inherited these ‘moral convictions’ based upon ‘conscientousness and sacrifice’ then their ‘individual voices’ derived from a common ‘homeworld’.

This suggestion of a ‘race memory’ applicable to artists and not to everyone else is interesting. Artists are born, not made, it seems. All of those school art classes would also seem to be redundant in that regard in that making silk purses out of sow’s ears is a fruitless task. Those students with this inbuilt legacy will shine no matter what and while a teacher may shape the product and the thinking, the students in every class who essentially ignore the teacher because they already know what they are doing [while the teacher deals with all of the sows] are essentially a lucky addition.

Interestingly though, Art schools should be the pinnacle of collective inspiration, gathering together all of those ethereally attached to Proust’s homeworld, but ultimately turn out not to be so as many drop out for lack of inspiration or conscientiousness or simply stop creating once the degree is achieved.

Ellison. D A reader’s guide to Proust. Cambridge 2010.