Monday, May 11, 2009

ORIGINATING STATEMENT



Art is not a bargain! Art is available to 5% of our human race at any time. Leonardo da Vinci said it. Communists tried to make art public! Did not work. Andy Warhola even named his art POP art! Did not work either. Art belongs to the ones who deserve it, to the ones who are seeking it.
—Andrey Bogoslowsky, 2009


I SHALL NOT check my generalizations at the door, but am eager to embrace exceptions to those rules of thumb or fluctuating stereotypes which, despite obvious extenuating circumstances, comport with the same reality we expose when we come in out of the rain or choose to enjoy its wetness across our brow.

To paint images without the questioning the tools of meaning is to declare that painting is dead as a medium worth serious consideration in today's terse political climate for the simple reason we find it is historically self-evident that the exertion of all important art is political in nature and in nuture.

That painting is not dead as a medium for communicating the insights and travails peculiar to our own times while admitting that it may very well be classified as undead is a declaration of independence the revolutionary artist must express then sever from the petty crimes committed by those who prefer the spacious cult of idols and pedestrianism. This doesn't mean that happy and beautiful, simple or whimsical pictures cannot or should not be acclaimed in some measure, but to note that one plus one equals two is not quite the same as submitting that negative b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus 4ac over 2a is a solution less formisable.

Thus "painting" as "generalized propaganda" or "cultural artifact" should by definition reflect the "conflicting" forms of representation doing battle for supremacy in order to aptly address the social fissures of today's art pool, and that the painter must strive and push diligently into the breech of whatever fuller truth hides within a depicted situation in historically, as well as contemporary terms, while avoiding the ease of sustained pause at the reflection of fundamentals informed by the strong positivism of the herd instinct, or conversely, the ever hip and trendy faux negationism of more recent movements in the field of artist expression.

I admit, I have not reached a point in my own work where I can say I have mastered my stated objective. But the struggle continues and is as reflexive as expressing wonder that it even rains at all anymore.

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