A recent study of consumer attitudes towards art found that the majority perceives art as entertainment.  Since art is considered as entertainment art should not and need not be supported by the likes of the National Endowment for the Arts and other grantmaking organizations whose mission it is to keep artists working at making art. Instead, the majority believes all art should be subject to the same economic criteria for success as any business is.  I imagine this shift in thinking has come about largely by museums promoting themselves as an alternative to the movies and by a whole lot of conceptual (and by design temporary) art being shown in these museums.  

However, artists, throughout history, have been able to do their art  because they were supported by the society in which they lived.  Perhaps they were born into a wealthy family or were supported by the church, or temple or a wealthy patron.  No doubt the organization or individual had a personal gratifying interest in giving his money to the arts but art history shows us how we all have benefitted and still benefit from art that has been created throughout time.

What makes art different than entertainment is that art making is something done outside of the economic mainstream. It is not about mass production of words or images but about the individual expression of what it means to be alive – something we all grasp at understanding. For that reason alone artists deserve support for the value their work brings to the society at large.

Hilarious! I spotted my stereotype, will you?

Exquisite Corpse

 I’ve been struggling with a “new” series of paintings that are intended to express our complicated and ambiguous relationship to home.  On the one hand, home is a safe haven we feel the instant we turn the key in the door and step across the threshold. Our shoulders drop, our jaw loosens. Ahhhhhhh, we made it through another day.  

 Home is also the keeper of our skeletons in the closet and without a home I imagine we would be forced to carry them around with us for all to see.

 Here is one attempt to visually express these thoughts of mine.  

Richard  Eyre says art keeps the light of our  hope alive- of other worlds and of other lives.  For him, art reaches for the ecstatic and when it fails, he knows what art is not. I, on the other hand, rarely feel ecstatic looking at visual art though I very often feel ecstatic when doing art.  This is not to say, as a consumer, art does not affect me, it does.  Art’s power is at its zenith when it evokes more complicated feelings than ecstasy, when it  teaches me  something about how complicated it is to be human. It is not art when all it does is make me feel blissed out.

We don’t say thank you enough but today I thank each and every one of you.

I haven’t drawn in several months as I have focused my attention on painting and on marketing. I spent more time and energy marketing my art than I have painting.  Finally, I thought I had done enough and could turn my attention back to art making. This past Saturday I picked up a pencil and lay down a clean sheet of paper. Even more so than painting, drawing is a love story between me and the object of my attention.

When I set out to create I don’t know where I start nor do I know where I end. The more I make art the more it becomes about failure and mistakes than about success and yet, I tell myself,  the journey is something much greater than the imagined destination.

I think I would cease  to exist if I reached my destination.  Our work is born out of a quest to explore that which remains stubbornly unknown to us.  For all of us, artists and otherwise, we consider ourselves accomplished if, in course of our work, we advance our knowledge even a little bit.  I seem to be going in a reverse direction because I know less as I go along rather than more.  It takes courage to take up the brush day after day to pursue an open ended inquiry and I must repeatedly teach myself that the process of making art, ie, watching, recording, discovering, assimilating is what making art is all about and the original destination I had in mind when I first embarked on this journey is nothing but a fleeting memory of youthful exuberance.