EHYEH ASHER EHYEH

Man. This is tougher than I expected. I had shoulder surgery in September. They clipped and shortened my collar bone. They detached and moved the tendon that holds my bicep. They used a grinder on the ball joint to smooth the damage of the arthritis I never knew I had. They clipped cartilage and joined tears.

Now it's two months and two days since the surgery and my right shoulder still blazes with pain. I have to lift it with my left arm to rest it on a shelf or reach into the cabinet. It's especially bad while I'm doing the physical therapy exercises I've been taught. But usually, for a few hours after PT I have a blissful break from the pain. They say another nine or ten months lie ahead before normalcy may return. 

I can still only raise my hand and arm to chest level without having a device or person lift it higher. Even then it shakes wildly and the pain is of a depth and intensity certain among us pay big bucks for in Vegas. Hell, even breakfast oatmeal is a comic trial. I bend to chase the spoon with my mouth open like a weak-necked chick trying to meet the dripping gruel  between tremors. I look like a borscht belt slapstick chasing the bouncing, wagging spoonful of mush.  Usually I end breakfast spending unhappy time in the bathroom washing the unfortunate decorations of breakfast from my beard.

And so I wait. I cannot paint. I am making finishing touches to a large skyscape that requires such small and irregular marks that for this small but extremely important process the tremors are actually a useful tool. Maybe. But wide sweeping movements and elegant tiny arabesques are lost to me for months. They say they will "probably" come back. After the atrophied muscles of my right lats re-grow, become more than the stringy, fan shaped film that now stretches uselessly over blade and ribs.  They're there to pull against the tendons of the shoulder and arm, they hold the scapula in place, lock it down to give anchorage to my upper arm and shoulder and make a fulcrum upon which my muscles may lever and raise my scrawny arm.

It is an agon, a trial of devotion and will. I am without my primary tool. My arm. I am filled with images, large sweeping images of shredding grey Tuscan sky and wan figures draped in soiled fabrics, dirty faced. The most extraordinarily beautiful man, a rising rock star drummer has consented to be my Lucifer. Not the lost mangled beast of Christian children's nightmares, but he of eastern legend, the Eastern Star, God's most beloved of the all angels. But I cannot move, cannot flit across the huge canvas making the tiny flowing marks and large, florid arabesques that over time and wild process will weave and meld together into a smooth and sensual surface of intense and lurid, beautiful colors. The colors of passion and desire and longing...and loss and pain and of my once shattered heart, colors more fluent than words.

My beautiful first choice for Lucifer, my adored and magically beautiful Arab pearl is likely gone. He who would've been my Lucifer - and my muse, subject of a hundred paintings - he seems lost to me. Haughty with just reason, handsome and fulsome and achingly beautiful with eyes of black pearl set off by stunningly dark, thick lashes. But lesser beauty, it seems, will have to suffice, perhaps even to bring out greater beauty in paints. Beauty is easy to mimic, finding the beauty within the paint and the text is a greater and richer challenge. At least for now I must pretend it to be so.

But for now they are all nothing more than a codex of unattainable images. The year of hell continues. My own little annus horribilis. Another surgery comes next week. Again a doctor says "Now this is a long recovery. And it's going to be painful." Another month of enforced sloth. Another month or two without holding my brushes and sweeping across the fabric with umbers and cobalts and cads. Sloth is deadly hell for a Scot. 

I feel damned. I feel like Lucifer. Lucifer whose hell is the utter and absolute absence of his lover, I my paints. Whose hell is the sound of his lover saying "Be away from me forever." Punished for something I do not know I have done. Tested? Like Job? Am I to bear with equanimity this curse of having my painting ripped from me? Am I to pretend to be blessed while tears stream from my eyes when the therapist pushes me, urging me to drive through the pain and rebuild my recalcitrant shoulder's ability to move? I don't know. I only know I am tired and I cannot paint. The thing that makes me who I am is cut off from me. I am cut off from my lover - my paints, my canvas.

So it is that it is. "Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh" says Yahweh - "I will be that I will be." And so must I. Whether I struggle and wail or go limp and submit to this gentle, brief death I have no choice. I cannot paint as I paint. But I am filled with images and so, later, I will spit them up, vomit them or coax them gently, lovingly up from within me when I am again complete. But now, today, I am tired and I have so much more to come. 

VOTE FOR ME! SORRY...GOD ASKED ME TO SAY THAT

Gad, it's been so long. So much going on. My own strange endocrine malady grinds on - shriveling little nubby bits here and there inside me that would squirt useful juices were they not so thoroughly undone; being chipper, mugging and capering for the Alzheimer's one in my life, being grim and agreeing that "yes, the country HAS gone to hell" with the irascible one, organizing a support group for a couple going through cancer together, gave a museum lecture - that was fun, a few large canvases in a little show, too. Right now I'm organizing and directing a frothy sculpture invitational competition for polyurea based sculptures which will float in our trickling downtown river. Art can certainly bring out the prissy in some. Oh, getting two articles written about me, that's cool. One just for a university publication, but the other is a magazine. It's made of shiny paper and so it is more important.

I've lost another inch since the last time I posted, fortunately it was from my spine and not something I'd be REALLY upset about. I mean, jesus, this makes four and a half inches in five years. Mister Stumpy! So... I've resigned myself to taking the awful, monthly, poison pill my Dr has given me. Lovely stuff to fix crumbling bones. "Often results in extreme bone and muscle pain, also associated with spontaneous hip fractures." ...And there's the starter's gun and he's .....down? Oh, it was just his hip snapping in two as he stood still in from of the easel.

Oh, and how could I forget....my house! Listing ever more seriously to port, it is now being stripped, ripped and beaten into the upright and foursquare. I am interred in the last untouched room, once bright now a crowded barrow, dark and threatening where I'm surrounded by gap mouthed brown boxes in towers and mounds deep and tall. They all glower at me, resentful of me, of the one who brought this burden upon them. These dust laden boxes in heaps stacked and teetering, slouching beneath their loads in clusters all around the great room - the only room left to me - like little, post-apocalyptic shanty towns frightened of others, leaning threateningly at me, staring out blank-faced at me, at that guy who's not one of us. They have me trapped, under siege and they wait. They want my bed. That's it. Yeah, it's here in the last room with me now, too. They want to sully the crisp white sheets of my faithful four-poster bed. They want to consume it, bury it under their ugly papery bottoms. Desecrate the memories resting in my former now lamented and beached Puerto Rican Party Barge. My once raucous battleship of lust and rage where my misspent youth finally somehow ended - limply, softly giving in to it's flaccid doom.

My studio has been closed to me for weeks, now. I have enough space for my students and shoo the workers away while I teach. But, I can't paint with the workmen overhead dropping clouds of dust and firing away furiously with nail guns. Nail guns. I think Dick Cheeeney invented them. They're powered by red, squatting, round air compressors that recharge themselves with thundering motorized farts of volcanic decibel levels not heard since Vesuvius cut the one that pasted Pompey. What's worse - there are two of the infernal things so they recharge at differing times...rudy, foul mechanical toads loudly brrrrrripping at each other across the murky pond of my sanity.

Soon it will all be done, though. I figure eight, 12 weeks at the most and we can start a draw down of the troops. Raising the roof of the garage to 16ft and moving the studio out there will be the end game.

Well.....to those of you safely outside "Fortress USA" give us a thought and a prayer if you practice such crafts. It's election season when all the intelligent people hide and the toothless mobs with pitchforks and blood in their eyes take over the joint on behalf of Jesus and his Pop. Sheesh....what fresh hell are we!?

Later peeps!

SO LONG, FAREWELL, GOODBYE

Why is the son of Satan always named Damien? It's so bloody tiresome.

And speaking of tiresome, this will be the last time I write about this oaf. After a while ragging on a subject over and over is as pointless and dreary as writing about it each time a bird craps on the car.

Damien Hirst, gad. Great Britain's art equivalent to a high school fart joke. Thief and supporter and apologist for the 9-11 terrorists (he offered them his congratulations), he has finally cut loose his 2008 "For Heaven's Sake." No doubt held back these three years while the market rose to restore the comfort level of his fans. (He had to buy his last effort himself.) This next earth shaking "objet d' qu'est-ce que foutre!?" is another sadder version of an earlier sparkly skull. It's one of his queerest (and most disingenuous) pocket-lining decoupage projects. In his own words, "If you get away with bad art it's good art," and "I'm no genius, just lucky." Your lips to God's ear!

He is the grubby hero of rich has-been rock stars fading into pock marked junkies who pass the lazy days blowing guys in public toilets. His coterie seek to recast respectable names for themselves as serious patrons and important collectors. They and those like them buy self aggrandizement by paying any bizarre price for the meaningless and juvenile musings of a former high school smart ass. You remember this guy. We all had one at some point....a free-range grunt whose trademark was to piss into the trash can in the back of the classroom to make the guys laugh.

His pretense, as artist, is to rediscover the "beauty and fragility" of life - and pointing out the gross vulgarity of society. To him that means hiring people to do everything for him, wouldn't want to get tangled up in actually making art, now. His new stroke is farming out the application of beaucoup bucks worth of glitter on a human baby's skull. He picked it up years ago in an estate collection of 19th century medical specimens. In his peculiar reality paving deadbaby with diamonds was just the ticket. A damning commentary by one pure and brave, wise, unflinchingly mirroring society's shallow materialism. Bold and steely eyed honesty from a mechanic's son Moses pointing down from a holy mount of cash. "Woe unto you, for you sin a great sin in your over-spending, vanity and pompous ways!" Damien sucks hard at the teat of the top drawer market of vapid, materialist sycophants. Cleverly hawking his own boorish, vapid and materialist crafts directly to those he curses. Pretty sharp! Elmer Gantry pretends to be artist (while his staff of 150 do any actual work).

But, no, not an artist. This is a crafts designer. A fashion designer. A carny. A puffed, doughy leach made flabby from sucking off the limitless vulgarity of his nouveau-riche clientele. But, finally, just a gauche designer sucking cash off a clique within the art collecting community as deep as cellophane and horny for acknowledgement.

His intellectual cowardliness is numbing. His hands are unsullied by his own work. In his silly and pretentious biology class stunt "St Sebastian," a still-born baby bull was decoratively pickered with oh-so-grisly looking and artified jet-black arrows (designed to be thicker than normal arrows for that extra dramatic punch). He hadn't the balls to be part of the society he pretends to accuse and take the animal's life himself. If you're going to be a swine then do it. Be a real bastard. But he's too much bourgeoisie, too squeamish to demonstrate the brutality he accuses the rest of society of by strangling the baby bull. Neither did he murder the animal by tying it down to hammer arrows into the writhing, howling creature. He sent a servant out who bought a limp, silent meat market carcass and carefully had someone else decorate it with faux arrows and then string it up in a tub of pickle juice. At least the otherwise forgettable Adres Serrano actually pissed on the crucifix he accused us of desecrating. So, other than his own shallow greed and his marketing team and collectors...who exactly is he accusing? Only himself, his agents and his own vapid collectors, that's who.

It is not excess displayed by "society," as Damien hypocritically pretends. It's only the manipulative, soulless emptiness and rank hubris of himself and those hollow creatures drawn to him. It's truly a brilliant marketing strategy. Say your work condemns the emptiness of ...anyone crass enough to buy your work.

He proves at most a teenage angst designer, a high-end glue-gun crafts hobbyist taking a child's skull, sending it off to a jeweler with the instruction to pave the thing, and make it pricey dammit! A shiny little tchotchke to go on a coffee table. You know, like you'd buy at any furniture outlet. Except this is for the high-end design mart shopper. Every little diamond numbered, counted by color, and platinum, not that common gold, and loads of the shit! His fumy design born of boredom and avarice cobbled by some nameless schmo in a jewelry workshop. And for what? Faaaabulousness! Thousands of diamonds screwed onto some nobody's dead baby's skull. "Noboddaddy's" child. And so a righteous (hungry) Damien points an accusatory finger at....well, at himself and his brassy, haute groupies who think a showy purchase could make them valid entities in the art world, respectable, cerebral. Sadly, they're right about that.

Ultimately, though, this kind of work will not stand in art history to damningly point an accusing finger at society. It will be seen for what it is - an odd, expensive decoration. It's accusatory digit will always only point directly at the craven, obsequiousness - the shallow avarice of the artist who made it and the tinselly folk who paid his fee.

These over-wrought, grotesque ornaments are not a symbol of the failure of society. They are, however, the essence and emblem of the debasing of fine art by a strictly cash-driven art industry moved by hucksters and art-carnies. It is a new more rigid and brittle, hide bound Academy - the Academy of the cash drawer. Money alone validates work. . . in the short term.

Art, authentic art, has - will always serve to draw society, individuals toward a greater depth of being. We expand emotionally, intellectually, our sense of spirit increases through the seeing, the knowing of art objects of deep, great meaning. And, yes, sometimes hideous, dark in their beauty - and their beauty may only be in their cruelly unflinching truth and intensity of thought and the vibrations left by the artist's touch.

But, these currently fashionable glittery, faux-terrible trifles serve only one purpose in art and its history- to draw the dull and crass kitsch mavens to write ever fatter cheques in a pointless attempt to buy their way out of their own intellectual toilet. Sad. They themselves are the social collapse they bemoan and today's art discourse is the poorer for their wealth of folly.

NON SUM QUALIS ERAM

They die in tiny steps. Some days greater leaps. One lid no longer opens as brightly as the other eye's. The words of still delightful conversation often made thick and slurred by tongues forgetting their skill. She phones five times in ten minutes to ask the same simple question and to say "just thinking of you." When we hug goodbye she always whispers "I love you" as if to help me store the phrase for the coming time when she will no longer remember who I am.

His stoicism and sharpness are eroding to a softer, almost boyish round-edged affability. He dotes on her. Once a gruff and surly husband now become devoted servant, secretary, housekeep. He makes her milkshakes with hidden doses of protein and calories to slow the evaporation of her muscles. He plays a game of grouchily demanding she remember this or that, slyly coaching her to refuse to become resigned to forgetfulness. He demands she continue to fight this already lost war until there's nothing left. They strive to push back against the inevitable for as long as possible. Soon the day will come when even her muscles forget, forget how to walk, how to chew, even to swallow. But for now it's time to fight and keep the bastard back. Even if by millimeters keep back the goddamn thief that will sooner or later steal one of them from the other. Knowing, too, that one of them won't know no matter who is taken first.

They rise with pain, bent, walk with a small, weaving gait that still carries a faint sheen of the polish and pride of coming from two proud ancient lines. Their bodies bend more and more over time, but not their dignity.

Broken skin, numberless spots and causeless wounds now lay siege to her once delicate face. Still, the blemishes of age have not yet fully breached the soft, thin skin above her cheeks. Her eyes can still flash an imperious, scolding glance or earnest, childlike want. When something unwelcome is said they still wound with shocking immediacy. But death's power of imminent domain is always laying claim, marking its increase with the spotty toe prints of infiltrating demise, clawing toward her lids, annexing the once pale, ivory, silken skin around her eyes, eyes that could always soothe or savage with the slightest shift of her mood.

He goes to bed early. He escapes in sleep the grinding endless end that is unfolding. And alone he rises in the darkness before dawn to sip coffee and read the paper while she sleeps later and later each morning. Last month she left a small foot stool in the middle of the floor. No reason. Before she went to bed the stool just came to mind and so needed to be brought out. In the dark the next morning he tripped on it, fell full on his head. Five small gashes, a concussion, maybe a small fracture and bleeder. But, "it is nothing and no I won't go to the goddamn Dr."

So I watch him during each day's visit. Watch behind our chatter for signs of an emergency. He is afraid. Afraid he may have to be hospitalized. Afraid that she will not have him for a day or even two. He knows she will dissolve into panicked terror. We've seen it before during a dawn to midnight hospital stay for his eye surgery. Even though I stayed with her every minute, sat with her at the hospital, would've slept at their house, his absence was horror itself. Her confusion instantaneous. The hours before his surgery, the wait during. She became more and more afraid, even hostile. "Why are we here? Where is this place?" Soothing words, distracting questions about long dead relatives brought quick laughter, but, only distracted for a moment, a moment that shrank more with each passing moment. She clutched my hand and said "You're my good scout" a dozen times. A second later almost wailing, desperate to bolt, and yet even more terrified by not knowing where to run or why.

When she is sick in the ER I hold her head and coo "this is normal, try to relax into it" when the morphine makes her vomit. I slip her boney hand, delicate, transparent skin above blue veins and tendons, under my shirt when the IV solution makes her so cold her hand and arm ache like they're broken. I speak with a calm and cheerful lie of panic when I call the nurse in to control her pulse and plummeting pressure. As if to reassure him I wink at my father who is rubbing her always freezing feet and pressing them against his belly. Though calm and placid to others I see him numb with desperate terror. He is nearly deaf and the isolation adds to his horror. I am there to hear for him. I corner the haughty Dr who ignored her nurse and then my questions. I berate him for his ignorance and sullen, casual disregard. He's upset his Fourth of July has been interrupted. I bully him. I have him barred from the hospital when he asks if I'd "prefer her conscious or knocked out while she's at home."

I think of my secret muse. The goddess faced one. A friend I have only met in notes exchanged. I think of her and her own friend who would've died alone but for the night-long race to reach her before the last breath. She held her friend's hand, hugged her body close while she died. My lovely muse spent herself, drained herself of all she had to spend the last hours of a life in stories and laughter and songs and sadness. She came to her friend whose own ugly children ignored her. Petulant fools made bitter by some meaningless bruise they chose to treasure up and are now made irreparably poor, shabby, odious.

And after it all, and now "it" is every day in one form or another, after it all I paint. I paint and I beg the color to rise and sharpen. I push back to ponder and stare and curse my own illness and pain and fatigue. I plead with the paint to rise to the intensity I want to feel. I am rich with life because I am cursed with the great good fortune to be the one who gets to be here, to see, to help my parents die as well as they deserve. I'll draw on these foul, sweet days of ending for as long as I paint. And I hate it. And I am grateful for it.

BACHELARD AND MALRAUX COME TO FORT WORTH

Here in Fort Worth on the prairie of North Texas stands a unique strand of rare architectural pearls. Three neighboring museums, each of which represents an architectural master's work. The first is Philip Johnson's Amon Carter Museum. Next, across its wide lawn is Louis Kahn's remarkable Kimbell Museum, itself soon to include a uniquely discreet and yet aesthetically audacious addition by Renzo Piano. Then, across a shaded street the third and to my taste most flawless pearl is Tadao Ando's remarkable vision housing The Modern Museum of Art in Fort Worth.

Recently I spent a wonderful afternoon in Ando's brilliantly conceived space that houses the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art. The Modern holds a somewhat dark, but extraordinary collection of top tier art. I had been invited by a dear friend, she of multi-layered and complex spirit with a deep love of art, to lead a tour through their collection and comment for her and several friends and then to visit three easel paintings across the street at The Kimbell; a Picasso, a Braque (both from 1911 that seem to affirm Arne Glimcher and Bernice Rose's delightful theory of cinema's influence on Picasso and Braque's simultaneous break from Cezanne's spacial reality to a full cubist expression of actual movement and light) and the remarkable "Torment of St Jerome" by a pubescent Michelangelo.

Tadao Ando is an admirer of Louis Kahn the fiery, tragic genius. Fitting in that Ando, a boxer, truck driver and self trained architect is so passionate about every aspect of his work that he would pummel a laborer for tossing a cigarette butt into a concrete-pour at one of his building sites.

For my part I see his conception of The Modern as the physical expression of the nexus of two remarkable literary works - one of history; Andre Malraux's "Voices of Silence" and the other a rich, complex homage to philosophy and the poetry of the expreince of space; Gaston Bachelard's "Poetics of Space."

Malraux gained fame as a French Resistence fighter and, later as brilliant first Minister of Cultural Affairs under de Gaulle. His writings in the 1950's on the founding and nature of committed "museums of art," then a history of scarcely 200 years, discuss the concrete and abstract influences museums have had from their inception on our perceptions of and the very appearance and development of art itself. Prior to the founding of the Louvre pieces in private collections, curiosity cabinets, scattered works in the church or civic art holdings represented independent, semi-solitary evolution of form and style beyond the reach of simultaneous influences. Word of new works and styles, usually far flung and difficult to reach, spread with glacial torpidity through spoken word, sketches, etching reproductions and tour diary descriptions.

To Malraux the most basic role of museums is of simple storehousing. However, museums are also academic politico-aesthetic machines managed and driven by committee, group-think, collective approbation. From their inception they simultaneously gathered together and isolated under-roof otherwise disparate works from varied regions, dates and movements. Thus is created, by virtue of sophistry and spacial association an implied, often non-existent evolutionary continuum. They draw artificial, imaginary connections between commingled works and movements plunked side by side in a tortuous timeline often without actual connections or contemporaneous artists' direct knowledge of each others' work. And further, collection criteria often involving direct manipulation of the style of currently working artists seeking acquisition. A notable example is the once absolute requisite Italianate drama topped with a slathered goop of mastic to make it shine....."not glassy, not classy," was once a strict rule held in long standing at the Louvre, manipulating from the earlest days what "counted" as art.

In "The Voices of Silence" Malraux expands the concept of fixed-structure museums as unnaturally limiting constructs to include a further unnatural expansion into what he calls "museums without walls." These museums without walls exist as a result of the explosion in personal mobility and rapid post-WWII explosion of inexpensive, mass market photo media. That combination's low cost and high production has exposed vast numbers of works, most previously alone, isolated and virtually unknown to the multitudes. It also absolutely alters them by presenting them in print, each of a relatively like-size and scale whether a Babylonian cylinder seal or massive tapestry, fresco, rosary window, canvas or sculpture, all are printed as neat, similar snapshots, usually several to a page. Again, as in the museum WITH walls, suggesting a false association between them within an artificial, limiting construct - flat pages of a book or portfolio. These multiple alterations and miss-associations reinforce the falacious perception of art as an unbroken "genetic," self-aware continuum and, so, further alter and warp the very evolution of intra-museum era and post 18th-21st century art itself. Further mal-association between works and movements is exacerbated by the current turbulent marketing through slick mags, taste-hucksters and turbid, trend-ravening galleries. "What's not sassy's not classy" the art-snob elitists' slogan today. I digress. (No apology)

Now, from Malraux to Gaston Bachelard's elegant, dense "Poetics of Space," a four dimensional exploration of the nature of our personal relationship to places and space itself taking the form of a repeating word-gyre. Similar to The Mahabharata in structure his composition is stated again and again in repeating, expanding word-thought-spirals. Starting again and again from the same point the gyre widens with each retelling adding more depth - space - expanding from the singularity to which each of us gives form and consciousness out to the endless cosmos. Then "Poetics of Space" upon closing, finally, remarkably does so not as book but as literal space of thought.

Bachelard begins his spiral literally from the cradle, the first space our consciousness embraces and from which we first begin to gauge comfort, place and our expanding sense of self, space, home, world, universe. He describes the first childhood house, revisited after decades and upon climbing the stairs again for the first time a particular stair still creaks as ever and immediately evokes a spontaneous wash of instant, intimate familiarity beyond words. These subliminal auto-responses, what he refers to as the daydreams of perception we walk in, are those from which poetry itself arises prior to conscious thought. These endless, interweaving and expanding daydreams are the turning resonances we carry of places, secret spaces, favorite cubby-holes, safety from the storm, of stairs that seem only to climb up to the attic or of those only down to the cellar. The intimate spaces made so by the enclosure they offer holding us safely from the vastness of "beyond." Bachelard posits that we constantly measure ourselves and our place in an ever widening spiral, we live our lives in endlessly turning, richening poetry defined by the daydreams spun by earlier turns of the gyre.

And so the two works - Malruax's and Bachelard's - come together in the vaulting, brilliant, moody intensity of Tada Ando's Modern. Alternately vast, cold and imperious and as small, warm and welcoming as childhood - Bachelard - the museum first stands as warehouse and safekeep to art the very essence of traditional museum with walls - Malraux. Space for work, a somewhat linear presentation of styles, movements and eras. The Modern's collection, rarely playful, slightly grim connected by the umbilicus of Malraux's "here becomes there, thus, this begat that" associations.

The architecture itself is very much in keeping with the pronounced affection the board feels for the wonderful, corrupted, Loki-esque work of Anselm Kiefer, held in multiple pieces by the collection. An exterior almost completely of ground to roof glass and water upon which the whole building seems to drift. Inside, vaulting spaces, a glowing round-walled apse, darkened tiny, dead-end bits of stair disappearing into titanic walls in a grand hall processional staircase of the gods that ascends to the "palace of the blessed art." The only disappointment was the abandonment of the originally planned solid glass roof over all, a sad, but sensible choice in a place where hail like grapefruit can thunder down from an unmannerly sky.

In keeping with my irascibility and iconoclasm I never go up this stairway. I prefer the more beautiful and somewhat threatening "cellar stairs" at the building's north side. There, much narrower stairs. Concrete walls on my left are cool, silken smooth - they, like the entire building were cast in massive moulds of buffed mahogany. On the right is a slender handrail between me and a deep void joining a soaring glass wall, Bachelard's fragile film of thought that seperates me from the danger of the world beyond and the daydream of comfort offered by the high wall I climb beside. The stairs land at the exit - my entrance - to a beautiful little gallery, a holy-of-holies. A vaulted, smallish room of incredible warmth and intimacy, childhoods sanctuary. For all the concrete's cool, hard mass and sharp angularity it is to me a place of happy ascent, a deeply comforting space worthy of solo display of the smallest, most important jewel of art conceivable.

Moving through the next galleries of varied size and configuration - some windowless, some jutting out in the vault of space facing those endless glass walls that overlook the water that the building floats upon, past the somewhat overly somber, mostly joyless and self-serious examples of all the best names of the 20th and 21st centuries we come to my second favorite place. My exit...."down the up staircase."

The stairs are glorious. Wide, grand, tiny niches undercut the walls causing the stairs to disappear, uselessly swallowed by the massive, angled walls above. And, just like the grand hall of the Wizard, there, at the top of the stairs gazing vapidly down on us all is a huge, emerald-city-green self portrait by Andy Warhall. The Wizard of Odd, himself. I always delight in turning my back on his pocked, gaunt, lamb-fleshed face and slowly descend, erasing him from my thoughts with the delicious touch, lust, of the perfect skin of Ando's walls. Finally, passing the glowing apse enclosing Kiefers tender leaden wings, re-entering the blazing, naturally lit great hall I face, far across the hall another Kiefer, his sardonic, taunting "Pope Alexander VI, the Golden Bull.

Fort Worth, as is any city, is often embroiled in the pathetic day to day nit-picking innate to modern city function. However, in the realm of art and its collection, housing and safekeeping for the ages Fort Worth on the prairie is a remarkable, enlightened and rarely equaled nonpareil of foresight, devotion and great worthiness. Go figure, Cowtown the nexus of Bachelard and Malreaux.

PICKLED BULLSHIT

Precisely five centuries ago this year, 1511ce, Michelangelo illuminated the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with the "Creation of Adam." Also that year brought Raphael's "The School of Athens," Durer's "Small Passion," Titian's "Salome'," the publication of the first illustrated edition of Vitruvius' "De Architectura;" working were da Vinci, Fra Bartolomeo, Bellini, Grunewald, and on ad gloriam.

Almost five hundred years ago, as I've mentioned here before, Veronese painted - and so risked excommunication - a wry, delightfully witty and deeply meaningful "Last Supper." Polemical, intended to stretch the envelope, to comment intelligently on the shabby state of then-modern life and the pathetic shallowness of rich, contemporary aesthetes and fashion-whore bounders he used them to populate the composition presenting a vulgar, contemporary banquet. Too great to reject out of hand he was, nonetheless , placed under Vatican threat of literal damnation and thus compelled to soften the edge of his critique by the semantic slight of hand of changing it's title to "Feast in the House of Levi."

By way of comparison, about 1,500 years earlier the wealthiest of the wealthy, Nero, was sold a single crystal wine glass for what is considered to be the equivalent of one million dollars-US today. The vaporous and vapid who float, stratospheric above we lesser grubby earthbound souls have changed little since either Nero or Veronese. Though all those of wealth are by no means shallow more than ever enjoy inflating their egos with the feted gas of vulgar excess in the art market. Silly piddlings of thought, weak exercises not of art, but art theory are made to seem important only by the outrageousness of their price tags.

Nero's wineglass no longer exists. If it does it is either earthbound or sitting, ignored and unrecognized in some backwater museum on a shelf labeled "glass, Roman, c 100ce" for which the museum likely paid in the range of two or three thousand dollars. It's prior value based solely on a fool with endless means, his absolute belief in his own genius - and a crafty salesman.

Today's art-world Neros are still fiddling - and themselves being well played - while worthy thought burns. Financially tubby intellectually anorexic these art market gasbags float blissfully self-satisfied in the rarified outermost stratosphere of cutting edge "art." These happy, vapid few are constantly on the lookout for something - anything - that can make them appear to have the prominence and intellectual mettle they are absolutely convinced they possess. Petite Neros, they mistake great wealth for great worth and great hucksters for great advisors.

Clambering against each other to occupy the cutting edge, the needle's tip of Kandinsky's metaphoric inexorably rising triangle of spiritual and aesthetic evolution they fail to attend to his caveat that periods of spiritual deadness in art are marked by the overwhelming desire to possess an object of value rather than to experience a work of art's spiritual depth. And so they make smut of art and art of folly.

Imagine now, if you will, the year 2511, five hundred years opposite our current place relative the monumental thought, the humanist genius of the Renaissance. Assuming any of the current crop of art mag fodder survives our society, our common intellect could actually be gauged by crumpled auto bumpers, a single florescent light bulb (then having been changed 1,214 times) glowing numbly at a carefully placed 45 degree angle 3.5" off the floor, the astonishing buffoonery of self portraits in frozen blood and floors painted in vaginal effluent with the artist's head of hair as brush.

There, too, baffling or worse boring our descendants is the utter, cynical folly of a dead baby bull bristling with ever so sinister black painted arrows strategically malleted into it's still-born carcass (the queasy artist would never sully his own karma by actually killing it himself, I mean get real!) and hung from the neck by a wire in a fishtank of formaldehyde. Get it? Why, yes, of course! It's St Sebastian! How frightfully droll ....and only 5.6 million dollars plus 50,000.00 every time it's hauled out for a showing. Fabulous!

I can see it on the museum shelf there in 2511 - half of it precipitated to the bottom of its murky little tank, a card under it "American, c 2011pce, preserved animal specimen, unknown ritual."

Pickled bullshit.

TO HARVEY AND THE OTHERS

Lately I been talking to a young man who was referred to me for mentoring. He is determined to be an artist. We exchange e-mails and chat about the nature of art, about the business of art, online critiques and such. And like so many young and hopeful souls he thinks being an artist must be such a cool lifestyle. He has romantic fantasies of a life without alarm clocks and deadlines, lounging around thinking cool, arty thoughts with cool arty people while waiting for some magical cloud of inspiration to envelope him, like Zeus embracing a new lover disguised as a fog of bliss.

Well, like they say in the musical "That aint it kid, that aint it!"

Inspiration of that sort is a myth. Art is a job. It's a wonderful job, but a job. You get up, you get to the studio and you make art. Dealers push for faster production, galleries ask for enough work for a solo exhibition with six weeks notice, commission deadlines press, charities "hate to ask, but can we have something next week." And the only fog that envelops artists is the same blizzard of envelopes full of bills that everyone everywhere has to plow their way through every month.

I find inspiration, it doesn't find me. I find it in the work-lives of other artists and other masters of their craft and plain folk I've known or see each day. I find it in the old, bent Vietnamese woman who never rides, but daily pushes her ancient bicycle through my neighborhood once west, once east. I take it from a dear friend whose politics, I tease, are sometimes woefully in error but whose goodness and devotion are boundless, who works herself to sickness on behalf of strangers. I take inspiration from a brilliant writer and actor who showed so much of himself, exposed so much of his truth and life that there was finally no possibility of hiding. He was either going to be recognized as an embarrassing fool or embraced as a speaker of depth and honesty, as a genius capering on the razor's edge of human folly and glory. Naturally his work earned the later response. I say it is natural that he was lauded because I believe absolutely in the urgent desire, the insistent hunger of men and women of thought to invariably embrace truth. Whether a truth of thorns and knife-edged broken mirror or of joy and bliss or of silent contemplation, truth in the arts is the hallmark of great work. And sometimes sooner, sometimes later it will always, finally be recognized.

Inspiration is not a drifting cloud or an arbitrary gift. Contrary to Hesiod's devotion it is not a visit from a muse that inspires and fires. Inspiration is searched out, gathered, it is single seeds gleaned from barren stubble fields of experience. Inspiration is the act of bearing witness to the spine and guts of other's who have gone before. It is the willingness to struggle, pleading with paints, or bronze or clay or words and chords until they are coaxed to their highest expression.

I keep a list of people - some famous, some not. I want to show them my work before I die. Not because my work is too wonderful for them to miss seeing, but because their work, their lives and their effect upon me has given me stores of inspiration that continually fuel my days and fire my passion. They inspire me to learn be as boldly honest as they are.

My studio walls are covered with beautiful twigs, sage bundles, strings, interesting crumpled wrappers and threading among them all are scribbled bits of Joni Mitchell's piercingly brilliant turns of phrase. "Now the janitors of Shadowland flick their brooms at me." "Evil is sweet in the mouth."

I love reading and re-reading Chiam Potok's "My Name is Asher Lev." It is a stunningly authentic work by an artist of words about the nature of a young man becoming an artist of imagery. But, what is most impressive to me is the clean, liquid translucency of Potok's prose. There is not a single line that should've been more or less than it is. The flow of the book is maintained by an absolute invisibility of language. Nothing Potok writes gets in the way of the story of Asher Lev. It is without ego and there is nothing of Potok to stumble over. It seems to have been so effortlessly written which suggests to me endless hours of work, of a painful, constant tearing apart and rebuilding of sentences and passages over and over until, finally, there was nothing left of Potok, only the story of Asher Lev remained. It is not the story of Asher that is inspiring to me. The huge struggle of Potok to remove himself from the story is epically inspiring.

Believing a magical cloud of inspiration must first fall upon one to make art is no different than thinking elves can fill the studio in midnight darkness to weave gold into your art. Gather it.

OSTRAKONS AND IMBECILES

Ostrakon is the Greek word for a shard of broken pottery. The Athenians would write on them the name of someone who had become unacceptable - sometimes by simply being too full of themselves (museums are chock-a-block with ostraka bearing the name "Pericles") but most often for individuals advocating actions that threatened the well-being of the state. If their name was scratched into a majority of the ostraka they were summarily expelled from Athens for a period of years. They were ostracized. Rejected.

Today short of murder, rape - or, of course being dark-skinned - we find few acts of sedition, treason, few incitements of attacks on humanity so singularly unacceptable as to justify ostracism. We have dressed ourselves in a mangy "who among us has not sinned" relativism that allows for virtually any degree of incitement to brutality. We even find droll amusement in watching dull-witted publicity whores broadcast pictures of political foes with sniper crosshairs imposed upon them. We roll our eyes as they wink and smile shouting "Hey, you becha. Don't retreat, reload!" to salivating mobs at public gatherings that are just half a-step from lynching parties. Some of them pretend thoughtful moderation by furrowing their brows and using phrases like "may require 2nd Amendment solutions" to negate legal election outcomes they find unacceptable.

Quite simply they advocate armed insurrection. They actually, absolutely suggest the slaughtering of philosophical or political opponents and the violent overthrow of a justly elected government or aspect thereof. And from the rest of us - hardly a murmur of dismay, let alone broad, flat condemnation and a vehement demand that these subhuman goons be rejected, labeled seditious, made outcasts.

Alaskan imbeciles, clowns, lunatics and borderline sociopaths are treated as if they may, gosh darn it, have a valid point. Or that they at least deserve a "respectful hearing" without the undue intrusion of being "refudiated'"(sic) by harsh questioning by some subversive, elitist, ivy-league media pawn.

And, so, this afternoon a decent young woman, a congresswoman serving her country, Gabrielle Giffords, listening to the needs and hurts of her constituents in difficult days, has been shot in the head. One of her staff members was killed. A nine year old little girl is dead. Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court is dead. Three other people are dead and with them 12 more people shot.

She wasn't conservative enough. The others were just in the way.

This is not an isolated incident. Nor can it be dismissed as the random act of a lone loon. This is the natural outcome of the nexus between frequently published, persistent insistence that violence against those who differ politically or socially is now a righteous act and of otherwise conscious, decent people's mewling failure to reject and ostracize the feral, noisome vermin who advocate such madness - in society at large OR in your own circle of friends.

For artists, the chroniclers of and witnesses to their times, it is imperative that we include, in text or subtext, as an aspect of at least some of our work an unequivocal rejection of this era's slovenly devolution of human social intercourse and commerce. If we can not ostracize them and actually remove them from among us we can certainly ostracize them for all of art history.

Artists, first and last, cannot fail to scratch the names of the brutish and seditious into the ostraka of our record of the age.

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.