It is remarkably easy to channel other artists, in the visual arts, the music arts and literary arts.  In all the arts. Though imitation may be the highest form of flattery, every successful artist has had to find his or her own unique voice.  As far as I  know the only road to your voice is to lock yourself up in your studio and work.  Work as much as you can, as often as you can and for as long as you can.  Work without a plan so your creative juices have somewhere to go.  Try something new and try something new again.  Toss what doesn’t work, toss what is your “old stuff” repeating itself, toss what you hate.  Keep only that which carries the spark of originality.  Attend art critiques to show your work and  exercise your critical eye.  Study other artists.  Study other styles of work but always fight the urge to copy it.

Trust yourself and, after 500 hours or 10,000 hours of studio work, your voice will surely emerge.

I now consider myself “asleep” during the first half of my life, a self willed innocent,  and now that I am no longer innocent I sometimes wish I hadn’t “awakened.”  All that spiritual guru stuff now co-opted by mass media sounds so temptingly refined….. so escapist.

I wake up some mornings and the day starts and ends gloriously. Other mornings, not so glorious. Nothing’s changed; absolutely nothing. Once in  a while, however, something does change and the moodiness ends up making sense.  I recently went to the wedding of the firstborn of a very dear friend of mine, accompanied by my black dog, Emma.   Winston Churchill’s black dog (his phrase for his depression) accompanied  Emma and me back to the hotel room. The whooshing of Emma’s tail did nothing to disturb it, and after a restless night’s sleep, a long drive home and a neighbor rescuing me with an invite to walk two miles to see a movie, I started to get perspective- to get conscious- to awaken.

Mary Karr  captures exactly what I was conscious of, “When you’ve been hurt enough, as a kid (maybe at any age), it’s like you have a trick knee.  Most of your life you can function like an adult, but add in the right portions of sleeplessness, and stress and grief, and the hurt, defeated self can bloom into place.”
I wonder if more of us know this to be true, to be always true, would we strive to lose our self willed innocence?

I am curating a mailart opportunity related to an eco art conference to be held in Berkeley, CA on June 25, 2010.  If you are interested, please check out ecoartactivism.wordpress.com/mail-art-a-worldwide-call-for-participation/.  Your participation is most welcomed.

Earth Heating Up, 2010

Acrylic & Watercolor on Paper

Martin Rees, professor of cosmology and astrophysics at Cambridge University made the following statement at a lecture later reprinted as “Dark Matter”:

     “Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination.  Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now.  Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria and amoebae.”

I have always maintained that however much we know, we still know almost nothing. The universe is far more complex than we humans are yet capable of understanding. 1000 years from now we will seem as archaic as we think of those who lived in what we call the Dark Ages.   Professor Rees merely states, better than I, our meager significance in the greater context of time and space.  Exploring this concept would take a lifetime and even then we would barely scratch the surface of what it means to be human in the vastness of the universe.

Its been way too long since I really looked at something, I mean looking for so long that a whole new understanding arises out of my consciousness. Imagine looking at a diamond for so long that   you no longer see the gem. The light within is all you see;  that’s the kind of looking I am talking about.  

This way of seeing is a luxury  I’ve denied myself for awhile now.  Time to make a change in the way I see.

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.