| Things are always frustrating and are
never easy when you are producing work alone in studio.
Sometimes it takes a while to appreciate what you are doing. I
notice right before shows I set up my work outside my studio space
and step back from it for the first time outside the place it was
made. Usually with a beer in hand, I start to look at all the
work, and it never ceases to shock me that I made all that stuff.
Not that it seems distant or outside me, most everything I paint
means something to me on quite a few levels, but its just odd how
many images and thoughts are locked away in my head and how
they choose to come out and manifest themselves. Yet I don't
paint in a vacuum, and the news, prevailing moods, and outside world
plays a big part in my work. Sometimes bitter, most
observations are rewritten for maximum affect. The world's a
wonderful place, filled with more stuff than I can ever imagine
absorbing.
I sent out a link this summer to some friends and family about
Tom Wilson's
paintings, he's the guy who played 'Biff' in Back to the Future.
Some of his work is really, really bad, other paintings are funny.
My mother chastised me for laughing at his work, saying, "art like
his is fun and people (even me) like to look at it. Art inspires
all emotion and it doesn't always have to be trouble, turmoil. or
make a statement." I was more pissed off Biff was selling for
three times my prices.
But I was reminded of this the other day when I came across a
lousy painter's work, whose artist statement consisted of phrases of
what his work is not about - politics, social issues, the Iraq War,
saying there is too much of that to spoil the beauty of art.
Instead he painted hideous representations of galaxies with fairies
and uteruses. So it goes. |
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