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Thursday, June 29, 2017

confessions -- contented discontent

I realize these days how my life has been shaped by early experiences. Just out of school, along with many young unemployeds, the war lurking just around the corner, I wound up in a crew selling encyclopedias door to door. The pitch we used promised the books were free on a promotional basis, and some lucky couple in the neighborhood would only have to show enough commitment to maintain the updating services for a nominal fee -- oddly enough the price of the books. Only people who wanted something for nothing believed it, but there I was a poor college student driving a red Austin Healey. My job every evening was to help people delude themselves, to believe something they knew to be false in the name of simple greed. That experience made me very skeptical of cultivated enthusiasms, everywhere, and may have led to an overblown sense of righteousness. I’ve been very obstinate.

Also, I’ve always wanted to do things the hardest way possible, don’t know why. In some professions there’s a premium for that. Dunking the basketball on a ten foot rim isn’t particularly difficult for those six foot six and above, so they have an annual contest to see just how difficult they can make it, and the one who does it the hardest way wins. Like that. Oh, I’d like the acknowledgement of my peers, an award or a grant now and then, and a market for my art among young urbanites wouldn’t be so bad, but to me those aren’t the hardest things in art. The hardest thing is to paint a cow, a truck, a tree, something that the viewer has seen before and knows already. In the first place, representation leaves the artist much more vulnerable to the judgement of others, since they can see right off how much it looks like a cow, a truck, or a tree for themselves. I might add that this ability to judge is meant to empower the viewer, to broaden accessibility and level the exchange. All that, and it totally bypasses the post-modern contemporary maze of exclusion woven by the literati with credentials and degrees, so sad.

The question then becomes, does it look sorta like the subject, say a cow, exactly like the subject as in a photograph, or does it somehow look more real than the actual fact -- a highly subjective notion. I’ve seen paintings that were definitely more interesting, somehow even more tangible, than the scene in real life would have been, and as a fact, a lot of them do that. For a long time that’s what artists thought they were doing, and when the camera came along they just got better, for a while. Fashion sort of slipped away from them, and new styles of painting became more reflective of personality, of sheer bursts of audacity bordering on genius, and finally brand-name celebrityhood, their art, piece by piece, mere artifacts, more like relics, of their famous, fabulous careers. Really sad.

Like my namesake, I’ve chosen the less popular road, couldn’t help it really, and I’ve seen some sights along the way, factories and conference rooms, along with deserts and mountains, painting the whole time. All around me the world is changing, sea-sick sailors row home, Judy hits Punch, and a new demographic is beginning to realize that long-term survival requires wakefulness, self-awareness, and the autonomy to make personal decisions. Art could turn out to be a part of that, to augment that, to become its expression. I’m guessing that means pictures of things.

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