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Cecil Collins: The Greeting 1943
Cecil Collins: The Sleeping Fool 1943
We don't understand in order to create
we create in order to understand.
~ Cecil Collins
 
The Vision of the Fool
and other writings
Cecil Collins
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cecil collins
1908 - 1989
the vision of the fool
The fool does not see the world with the
disillusioned knowingness of the scientist;
rather he marvels;
he
looks with the eyes of a child.
In the early 1940s, Collins
described his way of seeing the world in words. In a short book
called The Vision of the Fool, written in the early 1940s and
first published in 1947, he affirmed his belief in that which is
‘universal and eternal’, above and beyond the world of the intellect
and the senses, ‘but not beyond the reach of the humility and hunger
of the human heart’.
Collins’s paintings do not contain
representations of objects seen in the visible world: indeed, he
often reverses those rules of drawing and perspective through which
artists attempt to transcribe appearances. And yet, despite his
rejection of surrealism, or, come to that, of conventional religious
belief, he insists that there is no meaning in life or art
‘excepting that which springs from the immortal surreality of that
Eternal Person’.
The fool - whom he identifies with the artist
and the poet – embodies ‘the eternal virginity of spirit, which in
the dark winter of the world, continually proclaims the existence of
a new life, gives faithful promise of the spring of an invisible
Kingdom, and the coming of light’.
There was a time, of course, when Collins’s
ideas sounded anachronistic, but he has always insisted that they
are ‘modern’, in the sense that he is concerned as much with the
present and the future as with the past. He has often said that he
is more interested in the beginnings of a new civilization than in
the passing of the old.
Indeed, it is part of his argument that our
culture has itself become moribund and stale. ‘The only future I
can see for it’, he once said, ‘is to make a new covenant with
divine reality… And for art to return to its normal function, which
is to reflect that covenant’. In other words, he is seeking a
radical rejection of much contemporary aesthetics; he wants to
re-instate that old idea of art as a channel of grace providing a
link between the visible and invisible realities.
© Peter Fuller Memorial Foundation 2008
(This article was originally published in Modern Painters magazine,
Vol 2, no 2, 1989)
Source:
www.artinfluence.com
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