By RUNA (aka Rute Norte)
The Importance of Arts, Culture & The Creative Process
We cannot celebrate anything in the arts, culture, or human experience without considering the impact of our actions on nature: flora and fauna. Human experience cannot ignore the infamous way we treat the raising of animals for consumption, for instance. Many artists are already addressing this issue in their work, such as in the newly inaugurated Gulbenkian Museum of Contemporary Art in Lisbon, where a painting by the Portuguese artist Rosa Carvalho (b. 1952), dated 2013, is on display, tackling precisely this theme. It would be interesting to see some focus on this matter from "The Creative Process" as well.
What was the inspiration for your creative work?
During my master's degree in Painting, at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon, I presented a written work on this topic: “Thanatos & Eros”. Today I continue to approach it in painting. The God Eros is the god of passion, love and eroticism, in Greek mythology. It represents the “life drive” and probably everyone has heard of it. Perhaps the god Thanatos - god of death - won't be as well-known; and he was, and continues to be, my great interest, so I dedicated most of my study to him. Not to be confused with Hades, the god of the dead. Thanatos inspired Sigmund Freud, who determined that all instincts fall into one of two main classes: the life instincts or the death instincts. The Life Instincts (Eros) are those that deal with basic survival, pleasure, and reproduction. Regarding the Death Instinct (Thanatos), Freud proposed that “the goal of all life is death”. He concluded that people have an unconscious desire to die, but that this desire is largely tempered by life instincts. In Freud's view, self-destructive behaviour is an expression of the energy created by the death instincts. When this energy is directed outward and toward others, it is expressed as aggression and violence.
