OF SCYLLA & CHARYBDIS & SYCOPHANTS & SOCIOPATHS

I once knew an older artist in Virginia to whom I would go whenever I felt particularly pleased with some piece. Invariably he chortled as he peered down through half lidded eyes and said something derisive and belittling. At first I thought he must be trying to toughen me up and help me by thickening my skin. It only took a few visits to realize that what he was offering was not, in fact, useful critique. Instead he simply enjoyed the feeling of poisoning the well and trimming someone else down to size. It made him feel better to harrumph and push his little fears about his own work onto mine.

I found better. I met a noted artist, a strong woman whose words were sometimes harsh and even heated, but stated in such a way that I left sometimes feeling humbled, but always feeling respected and that flaws observed were noted by a leader. She left me eager and excited, sure that I was capable of better than the effort I had made. When her critiques were complimentary and affirming I felt I had been met by a peer who freely and coherently described how she found my judgements and choices engaging and stimulating. Both kinds of feedback left me feeling worthy and anxious to move forward.

Hard criticism is necessary. The market of art ideas is a harsh and cannibalistic place. It's good to be prepared to defend your work. It's also good to be capable of acknowledging legitimate flaws when recognized and described by another. The healthy development of a sturdy and flexible ego is critical to successful self assessment as well as simple basic survival in what is all too often an intellectual eugenics laboratory/abattoir liberally staffed by the eagerly sarcastic.

So, never allow yourself to mistake snarky, small cruelty for useful feedback. At best it is an unnecessary exercise in developing numb scar tissue and at worst can turn your work down blind paths of pointless experimentation the outcome of which simply leads to confusion and additional sessions of abuse masquerading as critique. Trust your instincts. If you feel wounded, but invigorated by a difficult critique it is probably a trustworthy and useful assessment. If, however, you are left with the feeling that you have been made the brunt of a private joke, or that your critic has been talking more about their own insecurities and weaknesses than your work then run! find a new, sound source of feedback.

Look, anyone who claims to be "brutal and honest" is always the prior and never the later. There is a balance to critique. There may well be harsh points raised about a work, after all sometimes a work just is not good and is too flawed by, perhaps, bad technique or over self-indulgence. But even then there should still be a sense of respect, sound reason and insightful direction for you to use in refining your voice.

Conversely, the well meaning "supporter," always eager to blow pink, flowery smoke up your bumm is just as useless, though less painful, as the one who slices you up and smiles as he fingers the wound. Compliments hard won and presented as meaningful and fully formed arguments in favor of your work are deeply pleasing and are as useful in developing your sense of whether you are communicating what you wish in the manner you wish as is well stated negative commentary. Excessive compliments are satisfying fluff. One should accept them graciously...and with a bit of salt. Sycophants haunt artists like sweet sirens who draw the hapless to be crushed by Scylla or drowned by Charybdis. Its a sweet song, but you're still dead in the water.

Art is best not created in a vacuum. Work without any critique, without allowing any debate is merely soothing therapy or closeted self-adoration. On the other hand, art wholly dependent on the input of others is a wan cry for approval at any price. Seek a balance between trusting your own judgement and methods and inviting others to force you to defend and consider other approaches.

Art feeds on conversation, discourse rich and gloriously varied from which great things can arise. Don't waste it on sycophants and sociopaths.

ART IN THE DARK AGES

Four months. More sick each day with no answers. Weight dropping daily faster. Four months without being able to sit let alone stand at the easel. Old friends even sicker than I dying with only brief shared goodbyes. So many farewell kisses from an old man's dark lips to my weak hand. Four months of having only an "interior studio," forced to imagine painting the images that appeared to me as rapidly as my fear and lassitude grew.

And then like a switch the lights go back on. The body ceases what seemed an inexorable spiral down. My hands steady and wellness slowly begins to repair the weakness and soothe the terror.

And I am full of paintings to be made. I am more aware than ever of the reasons I am compelled to be a painter. The intensity of life, the sharp helplessness of final partings, the terror of the grave, the shared strength of honest, selfless friends, the insistence to "gut it up" and get well from the best among them. I paint of my faith. I paint of my disdain for the faithful. Without community all are meaningless wraiths. Within society too many are cursed by the righteous. Poverty is a sin. Wealth is the annunciation of holy attribute. Perversion is the hallmark of our era - perversion of God, perversion of good. Hatred defines love. And beauty lives even in the corruption of humanity. Through the passion of death and horror rises the solace of tenderness. This is art.

These are the things I paint about. A vase is not a vase. It is a trusting old woman stashing tiny treasures to be taken out of hiding when the war is past and the "protective custody" of Nazis is no longer necessary. A whorl of tulips in a landscape of fire and smoke is us, a people turning through an age of trial frail, green stems tracing a structure sprung from a common source that supports the larger whole.

My paintings' meaning to me is for no-one but me. See nothing in them or see everything in them. It is for the viewer to decide and beyond my control. But in the act of painting, for me, a thing must be grounded and guided by, weighed against some passionate thought that directs my choice of color, mass, composition. I paint text only as a threshold to the more important subtext of my passions, longings, hurts and delights. When I load an image of a thing or place or person with my view of the world and life I imbue it with the truest purpose of art. To witness. To chronicle. To stand as a small truth in the face of the dishonesty and the intellectual sloth in which we all indulge.

Genetic evolution is an immutable imperative. Social evolution, however, is a choice and we find it too frightening, too taxing and difficult to allow. Mankind today is growing taller than ever in physical form and devolving ever smaller and more feral in spirit. There are more humans in slavery today than ever before in the existence of mankind. Religion is a stinking mire of superstition, theft, brutality and refuge for the corrupt and evil. More hunger and diseases of poverty rage amidst greater wealth and abundance than ever in history.

And yet, the humanity and kindness of individuals continues to counter the ugliness of the masses. Generosity and the deepest compassion of friends and strangers pierces the darkness of fear and loathing. And whispered goodbyes with kisses and tender touches affirm lives that will not be forgotten. All of this is what art, what painting is about.

ARS LONGA, BABY

Each civilization has always believed that the current way of things will go on forever. No people, no state thinks itself temporary. But they always are. Time, circumstance, folly or catastrophe intervene and what "is" shortly becomes what was. Chance and the dimming light of time invariably leave all obscured and unknown.

The Dynastic Egyptians knew absolutely their culture could never come to an end. Still, without the coincidence of The Rosetta Stone we would know their remarkable spirit by their great art but for us their "eternal" culture would be nothing but beautiful, mute monuments to ponder. Read three books on Rome's 1200 year history and you'll start repeating information by the second page of the second book. Until recently the British said "the sun never sets" on their empire. Well, these days the sun sets on Great Britain every evening at around 6:45 Greenwich. Things change.

Each culture is quite sure that the technology to which they consign their history is utterly impervious to the grinding erasures of time. How can neatly boxed clay tablets be lost? How could the scrolls, bronze plates, hewn stone, books - or our magic hard-drives and memory sticks fail to carry safely into forever all of who we are?

Because.

Thats why.

Time, she is cold and tricksy on us.

We have serious minded folks dressed in khaki shorts and floppy canvas hats who intently sift buried debris unearthing the loose teeth and bits of bone of the brief forevers of others who also once thought themselves eternal.

If records are found that they're lucky enough to understand we can learn bits about their commerce, conquests, their favorite fish sauce and, invariably, how they preferred to go potty. (Which suggests if you REALLY want a time capsule to last through the eons hide it in the septic tank.) But, the only way we can know their souls, their spirit and inner passions is by seeing them through their art.

The deeper marvels and miracles of any people, good and bad, are not found in their inventories, or recounted in histories left on scrolls - or Blackberries. That's just the drab accounting, the bureaucratic drone of their humdrum or the lies of their history they wish were true. They are truly knowable only by their art.

Yes, I know. Artists have not always been, let's say, well-behaved or loved in their own times. In ancient Greece, noble cradle of democracy, deep thought and some crackin' good art, the artists themselves were the only group low enough that even slaves could hurl, umm, compost at them. In 1573 Veronese was hauled before The Inquisition for including drunks, cats, dogs and locally famous midget jesters in his monumental "Last Supper" canvas. He barely finessed a heresy charge by changing its name to "Feast in the House of Levi."

I think society's marginalization, even distrust of us is partly due to two things. First, artists are hard-wired to record the raw human truths, good and bad, of their era. And second, art's remarkable ability to slip past our defenses and plant its messages deep into our innermost psyche. Those two things alone make us a threat to some.

That can be so messy, you know. Propaganda and popular myths of cultural identity are much easier to promote and so much less embarrassing if no-one is trotting around making inconvenient images about government sanctioned torture or making distasteful photos that point up how we market the diety with all the crass vulgarity of a novelty shop bobble-head doll.

"Agape Emergency Plumbing. Mark 3-4. We work Sundays, too!" - yes, I've actually seen that slogan on the side of a muddy plumbing truck, pipes, hoses and sewer snakes clattering with blessed assurance down the street.

We make things, images, objects that transcend the language of words. Much wonderful art is lost to chance and time, much shitty art should be. But what art does survive can say more about who we were than tomes as massive as The Mahabharata.

The dark past is not always distant. Take out a few family photos that haven't been marked and see if everybody still knows who's who. Forevers fade so quickly, don't they.

So, when the disc drives no longer exist, when the Kindles and the Blackberries have long since fizzled and our permanence has become as vague as 'some guy' in a flaking family photo some serious folk with khaki shorts and canvas hats will sift our dust and ashes and if we're lucky our art will help them know who we really were back when it was our turn to think it was forever.

Swallows at Dusk in Rome

I don't much care for the concept of art therapy. I mean, c'mon - dominant operative word THERAPY, subordinate art, eh!? It's okay, though, twiddling with paint is cool if that's what calms you down and tells your secrets. And, true enough, when I paint I do feel a deep sense of quiet, even when I am fighting with a passage and I can't quite torque the color or manipulate the mass in just the way I want.

When I paint I feel a delicious, pristine emptiness as my conscious and unconscious mind meet and give control over to my eye.

My eye makes the choices, directs the movements of my fingers, all of my muscles to accommodate the development of the canvas. My eye wants a particle of cad, a fading pressure short-stroke from a corner loaded brush with a slight drop of the wrist and a minute roll of the index finger turning the brush slightly over my thumb as my elbow rises - all in 3/8 of an inch, all without conscious thought. That kind of emptiness and freedom from thought and judgement is a marvel. It is bliss.

It leaves me with the same feeling of total detachment from the mundane one experiences when silently watching the mystery of the swallows swarm and roil at dusk over Rome. So, I guess in that sense the act of painting does serve as a fine and elegant, not therapy, but re-ordering of the mind. In those marvelous, empty moments concepts grander than I break the conscious mind's churlish grip on the petty habit of shabby selfish absorption.

Lately it's been harder, though, to get to that quiet, parasensuality of mindful, active emptiness. I'm wasting from something that's not yet defined. Tremors and great weakness, weight falling off like spoiled, unpicked fruit. And worst, the fear of trusting disinterested strangers whose vocabularies are limited to things like- 'too early to panic', this or that test, scans and scopes and 'soon' and 'patience' and 'can't until at least November.'

When I paint I am clear. I am simultaneously abstraction in form and concretion in act - a wonderful conundrum. Dichotomy is all of art - no bright without dull, no light without dark, no mass without void, order to madness, beauty expressing the most hideous aspects of humanity, ugliness that overwhelms with beauty of statement. And right now that is mostly denied me. I am exhausted and worn.

Without my paints I'm a dark French comedy. A weak guy, lately stooped, shuffling through the market for something bland and high calorie .

When I am at the easel I'm me, I am expanded and resonant, I disappear into the whole of things.

Making art isn't therapy....it's being.

DAMN YOU MARCEL DUCHAMP

The development of Fusion Cuisine did not negate the worth and value of uni-cultural cuisine. The existence of Molecular Gastronomy does not ipso facto make a perfect demi-glace irrelevant (Thanks God!). The outre is entertaining, intriguing, inspiring - but finally it is always only a transitory amusement. Again and again midst waves of fashion a warm and homely cassoulet is still sought out and admirable. The message being love what you love, explore as you can and, even, loathe what you loathe ...but always - caveat emptor!

So, too, it is in fine art. In truth each new movement does nothing to invalidate any of the previous movements. Some who make art, some who market it and some who buy it base all their major decisions on what's trending up in the art mags no matter how silly and meaningless.

From the Venus of Willendorf right through Modernism, Post-colonialism, non-aestheticism, internationalism - art is right there alongside prostitution, Jesus and "I Love Lucy" in cheap tricks and resurrections. Art is the penultimate phoenix. Endlessly proclaimed dead only to be immediately regenerated and rebranded by the market for fresh sales a-plenty.

I blame all this "(insert prior movement) is dead!" on Duchamp. Damn that dilettante Duchamp. Dissolute sod couldn't play chess well enough so, bored, he piddled briefly with art and presto-pissoir! suddenly we're saddled with R Mutt's theoretical art.

The conceit of theory and trifling experimentation proffered as fully realized art is quite droll, really very clever. "Art for arts' sake" - sheer marketing genius. It is the functional equivalent of writing a book for another book to read. It is as if one jotted down on a slip of paper the formulae for explosive nuclear fission and dropped the piece of paper on Nagasake. (Admittedly preferrable to the fully realized product they did drop, but you get the idea.) It is as if upon being seated at elBulli Ferran Adria sent out a brief note describing what you won't be eating and how mystically good it would've been.

I love art. I love the idea of it, the theory of it, the tingle in the back of the skull when something new and genuinely extraordinary comes along. But, there is also what simple folk in the Appalachians refer to as "buying a blivet" - a blivet being 10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag. This kind of art fashion-idiocracy derives from Duchampian dolts pouring over the most current issue of some edgy art mag guessing what the next big thing will be. And so we have galleries full of sliced meat, paintings in menstrual blood, elephant dung, trinkets submerged in a jug of piss and (TRUE, I swear) some fool who would masturbate beneath the floor of an empty church each time a hapless guest walked across the floor of the empty church to read a sign that said some fool would masturbate beneath the floor each time a hapless guest walked across the empty church to read a sign that said....oh forget it. What utter rot.

Look, I love edge art. I was thrilled to meet and spend some time with John Cage. I sat behind him during "Suite for Toy Piano," "Feedback" and two hours of some of his other compositions at a celebration of his random-process "New River Paintings." I turned purple trying not to laugh my ass off during the performance that night of "4'33." A guy from the symphony orchestra in a crisp tux sat at a Bosendorfer piano utterly motionless for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. The audience full of hostile, squirming guys afraid they were being made fools of, dragged there by their baffled wives all furious at having to sit through 4 whole minutes and 33 bloody seconds of silent agony while nothing (but us) happened. It was rich, infectious, intellectual bliss.

I get it. I get outre art as the nexus of the interaction of pure theory and material object/space/time. For what it's worth I even accept the validity in art's evolution of stuff like "Piss Christ," though I also think it's mostly just the result of poor toilet training and bad-boy pique. Just as in evolution there are numberless remains of pointless, forgotten experiments that span the eons between pond muck and Mozart, so it is true in art. No-one should be blind to the vicissitudes of frail fashion. Art is, indeed, limitless ...and that includes lots of space for the vapid and meaningless.

Trust your eye. New movements will come along as frequently as passing water. When they do I'm sure somebody will hand us a slip of paper so we'll know it has arrived ... maybe the next one will have chrome fins. I like chrome fins. Nothing say new like chrome fins.

The Month After I'm Compost

I'm not really feeling the "fluffy" today. Can't offer you any "go out there and love and paint and be happy with the result no matter what." Today I'm thinking of the reality of the profession, not the pleasure of the act.

I'm thinking of the grungy tagger scooped up in sudden success because some hawk-eyed dealer found a gritty, lean, raw talent they knew they could market well. Presto, some schmoe is no longer struggling, suddenly has cash and legions of fawning, flakey fans. The exposed nerves of his past can't stand the sudden shock of the cool air of fame on a cheese-grater raw psyche. And he melts down. A few months later he's dead. He kills the pain of lost autonomy and vacuous sycophancy by self immolating in a drugged flame-out. Like a crisping Saigon monk. But, oh, a perfect art marketing legend of found and lost genius. So brilliant. So tragic. So lucrative. But finally to the market so yesterday.

And "child artists," some just precocious nymphs with sly parents, some perhaps potentially brilliant - or might have been someday - whose development becomes fossilized, frozen in an amber of preternatural, endless childhood. Promoted in a bizarre spectacle of smarmy opportunists and studio parents marketing their work as "mature and masterful" at the age of eight or ten or twelve. Whatever depth of soul and spirit their precociousness may have matured into trapped forever in pubescent superficiality. Their true potential shrink-wrapped beneath their "look," their "style" and spit out as $25,000.00 copier machine prints (prices for original works available on request post approval).

Michaelangelo's adolescent knock off of "The Torment of St Anthony" was not a marvel because he painted it when he was twelve or so, "The Torment of St Anthony" is a marvel because of what he painted and sculpted later throughout his adult life. He was made truly brilliant by the grinding and polishing effect of torment, of politics and fear, guilt, remorse, passion, rich delight, hopeless love, months issolated and hidden from assasination in a single room basement chamber after a failed rebellion. "The most massive characters are seared with scars" said Gibran. The floods of his adulthood inundated the cleverness of his boyhood laying down deep, rich loam out of which grew expressions of universality and glory. His richness and density of spirit as a mature artist is what makes his boyishly clever knock-off so important, not the reverse.

When I was a young man I drank and drugged myself with everything there was to use. I was afraid I couldn't be the artist I needed myself to be, to live doing what I knew I loved. To risk being rejected by your deepest, truest love and passion is a terrifying thing to confront. For a long time I was more willing to live in oblivion and poison myself to death than risk the possibility I couldn't be the artist I wanted to be. I guess one day I grew the balls to realize that I'd rather find myself at the end of my life an honestly rejected suitor than to piss my life away in fear of even trying.

I'll never have children. I'll never spin the genetic thread that I can pretend will make some thing of me live past my death. After I'm gone nothing will be left of me but my paintings. I have no legacy but them. Like anyone with children I want them to be safe and go on after I'm dead. And, like children I fret and dread their future and I hope. But, like most artists - I can't know, can't know if both I and my work will be forgotten a month after I'm compost.

Somedays I think I am the luckiest man alive. Other days I'm drowning, afraid again. But, I'm an artist, for better or worse, I am an artist. Whatever gatekeeper I hid from drunk and wasted didn't turn me back. Maybe art, the lover I was afraid would reject me, will never embrace me with the same aching passion I have I have for her, but I haven't been sent away either.

All I can do is paint. All I have is being an artist.

HOT DAMN! A CHALLENGE!

There's virtually an absolute quid pro quo in making "good" paintings. If you paint from a place of confidence and easy trust in yourself your painting will speak with that voice. If you paint from a place of fear you will surely get what you fear most and want least. If you paint like you're afraid of looking foolish or like you don't know what you're doing you are actively affirming those thoughts throughout your painting sessions.

Your canvases might not yet speak with the directness and genius of a Braque, so compelling that even Picasso lifted from him; or the brio, clarity and depth of Sargent. But, neither will they be poorly dressed in pitiful marks that speak only of a painter's trepidation and fear of failure.

Conversely, if you paint with confidence and faith in your unique ability to say what only you can say your paintings will have, at the very least honesty and a strong voice. If you cannot yet paint - things, places, people, abstract ideas - in the way you wish - that's ok. You are not entitled to soar effortlessly the first time you spread your wings. Even an eagle is going to bust his tail-feathers the first few times it ventures to the edge of the nest. The choice you DO have control over is whether you find the learning process you must go through to be a delightful challenge or a curse. Treat your time practicing as if it were a scavenger hunt in the dark for jewels of new learning rather than a frustrating, self-defeating slog through a swamp of blind ignorance. Either way (and for as many years as you put brush to canvas!) you will often find yourself saying "I don't know what to do!" Then it's simply a matter of whether you say "Hot damn! A challenge!" or "What's wrong with me? I'm just no good." Either answer will display itself in your painting.

Pause for a moment now. Think of the harshness and shreddy appearance of deKooning's marks - he did that intentionally. Consider the shattered and scattered fragments of recognizable things and places in Hoffmann's Provincetown series - he consciously sought to make those floating, seemingly disjointed and simple statements. Consider the deceptively sparse thinness of a Gorky, the rough, tiled color stacking of Cezanne or the quaint flatness of Grandma Moses. One could make arguments against any of them from the position of an opposing era or school of work or simply personal preference. But those arguments could only stand on stylistic differences of opinion. No argument against those artists' clarity of intent or authority of statement can stand. If you paint with confidence and delight in your own desires it will show in your marks and strokes.

After a painting is finished you can debate, cogitate, grouse or grumble with yourself (and the many, many, MANY others who will freely, eagerly and aggressively critique your work!) about whether or not a particular painting is good or strong or properly composed, but those are debates that can last for centuries. Your time at the easel is limited. Let it be time spent with challenges eagerly met. Wrestle your demons with delight. Your paintings will be better for it.

An email arrived this morning with the breathless heading "These are actually paintings not photographs - INCREDIBLE!" Attached I saw that some Eastern European photographer had digitized her photos of pretty places and run them through what is deceptively called a "painting program software" and then had them giclee-printed onto canvas.

It's popular these days among a certain class of photographers. Often they have priced themselves so far into the stratosphere that they can justify no further increase in price in a saturated market so they try to re-brand their product with the cachet of the word "painting." Painting is often perceived, albiet wrongly, by the gross market to be more important than a mere photograph. That is the intellectual equivalent of claiming nitrogen far superior to beryllium. There is no correlative value relationship.

With apologies to real artists of photography everywhere, these things some are calling paintings are no more paintings than a kleenex with holes in it is a piece of Belgian lace. There is a reason the work of an Adams or Leibovitz has real and tangible, intrensic value and worth as art. A photographer here in Fort Worth, Luther Smith, makes images that are simultaneously uniquely American and universal. Some capture the complexity of urban living and the monolythic mass of a city while isolating and surrounding it in a context of open spaces, fields and rivers. The juxtaposition implies an active struggle, a battle for primacy between the creeping hulk of urban mass versus the relentless grinding down and swallowing up by nature of all things structured. His works are rich, varied and complex, dense and vibrant with thought, wit and intricate subtext. They need no justification by semantic association with anything other than what they are - important works of art in photography by a highly gifted and articulate artist.

Like any true master, any brilliant artist in any media, artist-photographers at their best transcend their medium and create works of intricate intellectual density and importance. Photography, like all art forms, is moved from its petty mechanics, composition, scale and execution into the realm of brilliance and sometimes genius because of an artist's mastery and vision. As surely as a weak crayon scribble or a thoughtless daub of paint is meaningless when compared to an authentic work of art by a Picasso, de Kooning or daVinci, a simple photo is an easy nothing compared to its potential in the hands of a master.

And so comes the sly marketeering of mediocrity. A modestly attractive photograph of portrait or place or thing can be magically made "high art" - and higher priced - by running it through a digital program. Email the file to the giclee printer and it will efficiently spit a dot matrix of oil-based pigments onto a strip of genuine canvas. Less than 20.00 dollars worth of effort and materials and you've begun to stock up an inventory of actual stretched canvases. How lovely. The process is virtually identical to any common color copier. The primary differences being that the basic color copier on your computer or at the store creates a dot matrix of polymer based pigments sprayed onto a piece of paper and the giclee "painting" printer sprays a dot matrix of color onto a piece of canvas.

They can certainly be pretty, some can even be beautiful. But they are not paintings. To call them paintings cheapens both painting and serious photographic art. It degrades the integrity of the artist. It misleads and abuses the trust of the uninformed buyer. Give it a clever name, "Matrix Art" or something snazzy like that for the market to embrace. But calling a digitized, computer manipulated photo a painting is simply a means to mislead, manipulate and milk a trusting market.

Incredible, indeed.

Hmmmmmmm...me and a blog. What fresh hell is this!?

I'm going to muse a bit, answer any questions if I can. Talk about the nature of art, of seeing. Share ideas. You know....blog-type stuff.

It's just a scribble here at the start. Like any painting - just some initial thoughts jotted down onto a blank, flat nothing that slowly develops into a dense, rich field of idea, movement and color. Words and bits of color are so much the same. Words, colors, sounds, scents, spices and herbs - they all serve to enliven the blank spaces and color the canvas of desire and longing. We are all artists in one way or another. At its very least it can be seen in the dark ugliness of a wandering man who paints and sculpts himself in grime and filth that speaks with all the harsh cruelty of "Guernica." Another primps and plumps, applies scents and frills and fills their life with pretty things in all the fuss and florid puffery of a Frangonard. Still another cooks, dances, one sings, some think and some of us sculpt and paint and draw.

Art is the result of the urge to make tangible the evanescence of thought and longing, to make a thing come from the invisible energy of thinking and feeling. The firing of neurons is followed by the gravitational pull of energy to itself, organizing itself, gaining in strength then mass and heft and finally moving from the invisiblity of sparks between nerves to a thing of substance, meaning and spirit. And so we get to play at the universe's game when we make art. Stars and planets, steel and leaves and flesh are virtually identical in their most elementary aspect and all derive from the innate longing of energy to find its expression. No "thing" truly exists other than as bits of energy floating close together in a void. Things, the universe, us, art - all are the result of the urge of energy to organize itself into a thing and so to be whole in expression.

The value and meaning of art is wholly and exclusively one's own province. Art, by nature is the objectification of the purely subjective. So, these are my opinions, my thoughts and ideas and are offered only as fodder for thought, never statements of absolute truth - at least not for anyone other than for me. You know what they say about an opinion and the south end of the digestive tract - everybody's got one! So, if you disagree you are correct, if you find something you agree with you are no more or less right than the other guy. The freedom to organize a belief system about the nature of what you think of art, what you like and what you hate and for some, how you go about making art derived from that belief system is what I hope to encourage, support and perhaps facilitate with essays and practical suggestions, techniques and information from my experience as a working artist.

So get in touch. Help fuel the discussion. My e-mail address is here. jtgrantstcc@gmail.com If you have a question feel free to ask whatever you will and if I can answer I will here or in a return e-mail. If I don't know the answer I'll let you know. Become a member and please freely pass along the site address to others who might be interested or find it useful.

Like any new canvas I'm looking forward to this blog thing. And just like a new painting the first marks, though always the most intimidating are the one's I always miss most sweetly when the painting is done.