Essay by Luke Foster
I dressed up as Chewbacca today my favourite character from one of my all-time favourite movies Star Wars. In the title I joked: Who wants to be my Han Solo? As I am looking for a friend to have adventures with. But maybe I have found that in my platonic friend and support work Yannick who is from Berlin but calls Australia home now with his loving family.
However, when I thought of this idea several months ago when I was in Sydney, I realised life isn’t like Star Wars where there is goodies and baddies. Rather the world’s people are more like the singer Regina Spektor whose music I have admired for years and bought most of her albums on CD and recently on vinyl with the album: Begin to Hope and recently I ordered the vinyl album Soviet Kitsch which hasn’t arrived yet.
The rationale behind this is that Regina was born in Moscow but now lives in America, New York I think where I think she has been accepted by the creative community in America and fans all around the world including in Russia and America.
So, her music which ruminates on American and Russian culture which she has experienced and loved both can only do good to create harmony between the two nations. It’s an example of how artists can make peace in the world but not dogmatically but by bringing the realization of peace to the world gently.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about space. It was one of those slow-motion realizations of how little we are, how far we are from everything else in the solar system. This idea of distance started kind of haunting me. How do you go forth and accomplish things but not end up leaving everything you started out with in the dust? “
Regina Spektor
However, I have been in contact with Regina’s record label and waiting to get permission to use one of her songs but haven’t decided which yet to go with the short Chewbacca video on the beach with me reading a book of my original drawings titled: “Heroes, Influencers and Plain All Out Self reflexive diary. I want to put them together on my website and in exhibitions particularly when I visit New York next month at the studio residency open day.
The book I am flicking through is a kind of red herring as I chose it at the last minute but is also about all sorts of creatives I admire and how they influence my creativity.
The director of Star Wars is George Lucas. I love this quote by him.
“The secret is not to give up hope. Its very hard not to because if your, really doing something worthwhile I think you will be pushed to the brink of hopelessness before you come through the other side. “
Another element in this video is me at the edge of the Pacific Ocean that I have grown up with in Australia and there is much nostalgia around this for me as I was a keen surfer. It’s also a liminal zone which means the meeting of ocean and land and that’s something beautiful too.