AUTHENTICITY: the quality of being authentic
• based on facts; accurate or reliable: an authentic depiction of the situation. • (in existentialist philosophy) relating to or denoting an emotionally appropriate, significant, purposive, and responsible mode of human life.
PROVENANCE: (from the French provenir, "to come from"), is the chronology of the ownership, custody or location of a historical object.
• the beginning of something's existence; something's origin: they try to understand the whole universe, its provenance and fate. • a record of ownership of a work of art or an antique, used as a guide to authenticity or quality: the manuscript has a distinguished provenance.
There I was exploring the web… skipping along the Internet, looking for information on a piece of art I have seen, when there it was...
L’ARTISTE CARTE POSTALE - Travel blog by Artist Marti Schmidt.
I lost my breath for a moment !
It was a gift, a jewel box, full of memories, of writings and photographs from eight years of traveling beginning in 2005,
I believed it lost long ago in the belly of the web, never to be seen again. How ironic and how wonderful to find this treasure trove and at such a perfect time on my art journey.
As I reread the entries, living again each post, I remembered how influenced I was. Looking back now, I see how I couldn’t have known how much these places and people would embed in my subconscious and would show up in my artwork in the future.
I became overwhelmed with emotion… this was my creative provenance, showing up in these blog posts ramblings, late at night somewhere off in the world to no one in particular (I had 12 followers) written in the early days of blogging. Telling the stories of my experiences and expectations as I traveled alone or with friends to other places, documenting my artist's life in words and photographs.
Somehow these thoughts and dreams, photos and musings resurrected like finding a long lost artifact in an archaeological dig, gave me a way to follow the flow of my most prolific artistic time. Breadcrumbs from the past.
As I looked back at those influences and now at my completed artworks I see the authenticity of the work and I am proud.
I will share some of my favorite posts along with the artwork that arrived years later from those inspirations, and I will continue now to add new posts from time to time to "LACP Blog" when I travel again, to tell my story once more and see where it takes me and my art.
“That inner voice has both gentleness and clarity. So to get to authenticity, you really keep going down to the bone, to the honesty, and the inevitability of something. - Meredith Monk ”