I believe Education is a moral responsibility - not a political or geographical right or privilege.
Crosseyed and Painless
Self-ignorant
If a self-taught artist who got an MFA and then went forward working intuitively could be called ‘self-ignorant’, then that’s what I am.
Whoa
“Not only is it a piece of consummate craftsmanship, but it likewise possesses that mysterious force, that hold upon the hidden soul, which distinguishes important communication from the casual reports of the eye…”
- Lewis Mumford on Georgia O’Keefe’s ‘Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock, Hills’ in the New Yorker, January 18, 1936
Existential pacifier
As long as I have been painting I have questioned the authority of the art object as authored by my self. Though part of this Doubt is inherent to the medium and the process of its creation, there has always been another quiet echo. I am not the painter I should be, perhaps.
The question stems from the experience of metaphor in poetry and literature. There is the reality of a well painted vase of flowers and there is the well painted vase of flowers sketched at the bottom of a large canvas not painted due to budget cut-backs.
Matisse and many others have explored this self-awareness within the confines of the four edges of the picture for many years. The degrees of displacement available to (or unwittingly inculcated in) the present day individual warrant a broader handling in the artwork of our time.
There is a game I play to calm my mind. It is an early ipod abstract deal called VORTEX. The object of the game is destroy blocks with a bouncing white ball without letting the sphere get past you and out of the tunneling vortex below. It recently occurred to me that this existential pacifier - or exi-paci - is the perfect metaphor for the creative process, or life for that matter. As the game is un-winable so far as I can tell, the object is simply to keep playing.
