Essays and Images

Garry Kennard is an artist well informed by recent advances in neuroscience, which he uses to understand more about the creative process. This book contains a number of essays as well as plates of some striking paintings and descriptions of some of his experiences as a mountaineer. He also organised a Festival of Art and Mind for a number of years in Winchester. His basic position is that science shines a light on the material world and is the only reliable source of information about it; artists can then look on and ponder this understanding and its implications. He disagrees with the idea that explorations of the brain are limited in what they can tell us about human condition and considers religions as complex systems that are projected erroneously onto the world. Readers will find his reflections somewhat bleak in places – much is consigned to wishful thinking - but his appreciation of the light that neuroscience can shed on art and life raises profound questions about our place in the universe. The combination of words and images makes this all the more arresting.