Agnes Martin said “From music people accept pure emotion but from art they demand explanation.”

Beethoven played one of his sonatas for a small gathering and after it was finished someone asked what the piece meant.  After a moment’s though, Beethoven turned back to his piano and played the sonata again.

A reporter asked Alexander Calder - how do you know when a piece is finished?  Calder replied “When they call me down for dinner.”

Why is it that people demand an explanation from art and they don’t from music?  Our society and western culture have become entranced with the fallacy of reason, logical thinking, and left brained activity in determining the worth of objects and even experiences.  Intuition, spacial relations, spiritual connection, higher truth, empathy, emotion, and the ability to participate in the interconnectedness of all things are right brained activities.  If you tried to make a beautiful painting operating in a purely logical and left brained way, it could never work, it would never even happen.  There is no logical reason to create beauty.  Beauty is undeniably connected to all of the positive, uplifting & unifying virtues of humanity, spirituality, and the great order of the universe.  

Japanese aesthetics have informed my work in the layers of human characteristics, emotions, and morals that are infused in its tenants of artistic creation.  Twentieth century artists, designers, and architects also influence my work.  The stripping of classical ornamentation in an attempt to democratize art and creativity and the return to simplicity are appealing to me.  Andre Borderie, Fausto Melotti, Alicia Penalba, Andre Bloc, Elisabeth Joulia, Isamu Noguchi, Valetine Schlegel, Evelyn and Jerome Ackerman, and Vassil Ivanov are just a few of the artists I love.

I work with clay because it brings me back to a child like innocence and fascination with construction.  I think of my sculptures and lamps as fantasy architecture.  A small world in which you can live for moment.  Playing with scale creates a magical moment when I exit logical reality and live in world comprised of the elements of pure abstraction: form, color, line, geometry, harmony, dynamic relationships, and potent empty space.  Like music I can ride on the lyrical flow of these elements.  And like mediation I can sit in the silence that sculpture provides.  Much like my spiritual practice, creating sculpture has been a slow and gradual process of creating ecstatic and harmonious states of mind.  When I look back at artists that I admire it is clear to me that they weren’t just making art because it was their talent or their professional skill, it is because they were deriving a kind of pleasure or ecstasy from the heightened refinement of their art.

Aaron Kllc is an American artist who has spend most of his life in the San Francisco Bay Area and is now transitioning to life in Barcelona Spain.