ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Bill Prosser finds in the fourteenth-century text, The Cloud of Unknowing, three prerequisites for achieving a state of grace: ignorance, contemplation and humility. For Prosser, the Cloud-Author proves a congenial partner in a dialogue which elucidates Prosser’s own practice. Prosser explores a number of his past and recent projects to argue that art is not, at its most honest, an intellectual activity. For Prosser, at the heart of his drawings stands an attentiveness that embraces this ignorance with a humility that recognises art as essentially learning to be at peace with being pointlessly absorbed. Referring to the Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, Prosser argues that we need to accept that creativity comes from a place quite distinct from logic. Art is ‘serious play’ as the old saw says. For Prosser, it is only in the playfulness of doing art for art’s sake, in taking the time to muck about attentively, that one sets off on the path of humility and contemplation of which The Cloud-Author speaks; doing so in a spirit of playfulness that realises how little one has really achieved.
