Daniel Kaufman

Artist Statement

In my art and in my life I have sought to cast a bridge between outside and inside, between the finite and the infinite.  I have struggled as an artist and as a man with ego, with rebelliousness, with compulsiveness and with fear. I no longer feel that art is separate from life.  My life now is an attempt to probe and to test the boundaries between life and art.  My limitations as a man are the same limitations I have as an artist. I want my life to be a continuous and infinitely varied repetition of the question “What is Art?”

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I seek only freedom in art and in life. I do not seek a style. Style, like imagination and technique, exists only on the surface limiting the artist to one vision.  My great wish as an artist is to find pure faith in my own subtlest impulses, without the intrusion of my ego which I know to be “suspicious at least and vicious at worst”  (A course In Miracles).  I want to find an intuitive faith which will create transcendent, beautiful objects, objects with rhythm, movement, depth, balance, objects with a mysterious quality that inspires the viewer to an inner experience, to what Richard Pousette-Dart calls “an esthetic emotion”.  That is my ideal.  My tools are colors, the “children of light”, and forms fleeting yet visible to the innocent eye. 

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I want to go beyond style in my work, to become an honest channel for the pure stream of Creative Intelligence as it manifests through me.  Let Higher Conscious Dynamism be my style, resplendent with endless change and variety.  Let me be true to the impulse of Higher Self, and let fall the albatross of mind and ego. 

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The novelist Emile Zola wrote:

“A work of Art is a bit of creation seen through a temperament”.

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If I have a style, that style is my temperament.  It is not a gimmick; it is not a product of imagination or technique.  Style can never be copied, for it is the absolutely unique rhythm of the individual artist.  That uniqueness, manifesting the spark of Absolute, is the Miracle of Art. 

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My only fascination with technique is in the courtship of the Beautiful.  What paint or pigment, what tip or edge, what surface serves best to render Beauty as I see it.  In the macrocosm and in the microcosm of creation I find great joy.  God is in the details!  He is in the depths when the surface plays upon Him.  He is on the surface when there is distance, and close, and Here! 

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“Two things inspire me to awe”, wrote Albert Einstein,  “the starry heavens above and the moral universe within.”

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https://www.danielkaufmanartist.com/