So-called procrastination

—Creativity—

We all hear a lot about procrastination. The word literally means "to tomorrow." But that says nothing about why we put off doing X.

I think, for me, it's about motivation. I'm more motivated to do X when I can answer these kinds of questions:

• Why do I believe I should do X?
• How does X fit into my larger credo?
• What long term goals does doing X fit into?

This may sound like all too much pointless philosophizing. Aren't we meant to simply get off the couch and do it?

I don't believe so. I've found that, for me, at the root of "procrastination" is a crisis in meaning.

It's an existential dilemma. I don't do something when I don't know why I should. I avoid X if I can't determine that it will benefit me or make me happy or meet my goals . . . or even work right. Or if I can't figure out how to make it work within the chaos of life. Or if I can't seem to make it my X. Or it seems doomed to be waylaid. Is it really worth it? What heroics are called for to make X happen?

Simply getting started may get me motivated for the moment. But so-called procrastination returns quickly. And it happens when I can't foresee fitting X into a system of activities that arrives at a state of being in the future that matters to me. In itself, completing X isn't a strong enough goal to counter the weight of all of life's burdens challenging X.

For example, I signed up for an online class several weeks ago (wherein they teach about procrastination, as it happens) but for two weeks I couldn't get motivated to start on it.

However, it was only yesterday that I had the opportunity to construct a six-week path through coursework in this and a number of other classes. Now I have a strategy. So I probably won't avoid doing the lessons at this point—I'm motivated by my plan.

Furthermore, I have also been busy for the last few weeks (instead of doing the lessons) constructing a career plan that this class fits into. So now I have some very specific, concrete reasons for taking this class. And I have evidence that there is a logic to what I am doing, because I am doing research about my goals. This gives me enthusiasm about doing something I might have put off. Now I will approach my lessons more directly, more forcefully, more intentionally, more confidently.

Yet if I didn't know why I was taking the class, if I was simply wandering through it, just vaguely feeling like it was a good idea, I might not be so motivated. I'd get through the intro video, but then there would be the unexpected overtime, the funeral, the cat sitting, the turning point in a commission, the vacation planning, the homework for the career coach, the unexpected house guest . . . and I would blow off the class and watch Youtube while drinking a beer and I would put off the second lesson until tomorrow.

Procrastination.  Pro-crastinus.  To tomorrow.

Fortunately, however, I've transferred into a new session of the course that began this week and I've already finished most of the first week's work. So far, so good. This time I'm on track. But at some point in the coming weeks of the course, I will have an existential crisis. I will say, when faced with the next online lesson, "what is the point of this?"

I could follow some "procrastination tips" but many of those are simply immediate solutions. They are designed to help me to avoid putting off the online class. What I really need, however, is to find clarification that I am not crazy and that completing the lesson is a really good idea. It's a good idea because it's an integral part of a larger plan where it compounds with other tasks to construct success and happiness. I can use a little trick to counter so-called procrastination and get me started, but very quickly I'm going to need to place my activity within a larger scope of meaning.

Finding meaning in the next class lesson that relates to long-term goals is important. Also, taking a long term stance helps me determine when I should do something right now, when to strategically stall, and when it would be wiser (and safe) to assign something to a later date. That way, I'm not feeling like a bum for letting tomorrow actually have some tasks.

And also being heroic. Being heroic is important. Because this does appear to be a fight.

Looking Back

—Creativity—

I have a couple articles that I have been planning to publish online, on sites for scholars and university professors. I had been thinking about publishing one of them tonight. But I am here, instead, reading old posts.

But that is a good thing, because the writing on this blog is giving me confidence. I don't know if the latest article is good or not. I just finished it and I can't comprehend it clearly. It's too fresh, and I'm buried too deep in it. But by going back and re-reading the posts here, I get a sense that my writing is where I want it to be. So my new article must measure up to my demands for myself. It is probably just as good as the posts here are.

Well, there's nothing profound about seeing the value in looking at old work. I've always thought it is a good idea to turn canvases to the wall, or squirrel drawings away in portfolios and dresser drawers. Given a month or more, one can see them fresh, almost with the eyes of a brand-new viewer, if only for a few seconds.

My mother has given me an old, framed woodblock print. A week or so ago, I hung something in it's place above her kitchen bins and took the print to hang in my room. My brother-in-law noted something about it and so I started looking at it again. It's all about something different, now. It's not about the process or what I struggled with. In a way, it's more about the subject than ever before. The subject is a little barn for a couple goats. The goats aren't in the picture. Back when I made it, it was more about the print than the barn. But now I remember the barn.

But even when I look at the print, I see everything. It is so easy to look at and everything is readable. I no longer (and this took a long time) feel that there are failures here and there in the piece. Everything is just right. My brother-in-law says there is sophistication that I probably don't even notice. But now I am looking for it--to see if I can tell what it is that he sees.

So, looking over these old posts is good. I see that I was right about some things that, in the time that has passed since writing them, have unfolded before me in the ways that I had predicted they would. I see that I was not unreasonable in my assessments of the world of art. And I see that I do, after all, know how to construct a paragraph and a sentence. Or even a well-placed fragment.

Building a flying machine

—Creativity—

Here's a good analogy for some aspects of the creative process.

Suppose you wanted to make a flying machine. You might start by emulating a bird and you might construct a vehicle with flapping wings. And people might call you a moron and you might feel like an idiot because the thing looks like a bird but doesn't fly at all. Eventually you might get it to work a little, but not much.

Sooner or later, however, you make some adjustments and now the wings are static and the airplane is invented. You started with the idea of the bird, but what you really needed to make was an airplane. Yet, you had no idea what an airplane was in the beginning. So you had to start with the bird, even though you couldn't really make a mechanical bird

The interesting thing is that, in the final product, the bird is there after all. The airplane has wings. People say it looks like a bird. But you had to focus on the lift and the soaring of the bird and find a different way to propel the craft. It had to be kind of like a bird, but its own thing. The flying machine you finally invent does share attributes with birds, but obviously not all of their attributes.

Art is similar. You start with a strong idea, like the idea of the bird. You try hard. You try too hard. The idea is too prevalent, too prominent, too central. You work too literally around the idea. And the result is very weak art. It just doesn't work. It won't fly.

But then, through the process of working out what works and what doesn't, through this process of elimination, you end up somewhere just a little to the left of where you started. You arrive at something you couldn't have predicted, but which, undeniably, satisfies your initial goals. Like the bird in the airplane, the idea is intact, integrated in a way you had not expected, and you could not have foreseen.

Process and product

—Creativity—

How we love to tear reality into two pieces and color these pieces as extreme opposites. In art-education parlance, process is on the good side and product is on the bad side—particularly for teaching the youngest artists. But I don't see it this way.

As an art educator, I've seen this dyad at its extremes, and my feeling is that both process and product are equally important, but at their extremes are pretty useless. That's because process should be the way to get to a product. Without a product, process is aimless noodling. Without a process, product is mindless mimicry.

Now, I should immediately define my terms and differentiate my concept of process and product from the way they are conventionally understood. For me, process in art is a series of actions taken to achieve a finished, public artwork. Product is that artwork. I don't practice or teach art as an isolated personal activity performed entirely for one's own enjoyment. That might be part of it, but in my thinking, art is communication and that involves a work that is finished and then shared through display. This is just one approach, but I believe it works. As a counterexample to my uses of process and product, I offer a couple ways I've seen other teachers focus exclusively on one or the other, to my horror and, I believe, to the disservice of the student. I admit these are extremes, but I was there and I was required to participate.

Picture the creative arts day care that favors process. These teachers see process as experimentation. Children's self-esteem requires that they direct their own activity and the important thing is that we give them room and freedom to explore their materials. For example, we will remove most of their clothing and let them get paint and other materials all over their bodies. They can scramble all over huge sheets of paper together in collaboration. They won't take the result home, but I have them hang it in their class space to share. We let them discover by experience how paint feels, how it sticks, how it smears and mixes. Some of the materials we give them won't make conventional art. We foam them up from head to foot with shaving cream and let them explore tactile qualities knowing that it is impossible to make any product of it. We let them build sculptures and knock them down again and again.

None of this is without value and some of it is essential. But what is missing is the sense that, ultimately, art is about communicating with other people through display. I don't believe it is harmful to start teaching this early. If a child is old enough for art, he or she is old enough to conceive of process as leading to a conclusion, regardless of how permanent or public it is. An extreme concept of process favors a particularly contemporary attitude of instant gratification and self-indulgence that is not really in tune with art-making. At an extreme, it completely ignores the existence of rules in art, natural or human-made and misses the point of communication. The only argument I can see for this type of process-oriented pedagogy is that it is age-appropriate for very young children. I disagree entirely with that argument, however, and later in the post I will offer an example from my own childhood to argue against a pedagogy that favors process to the exclusion of product.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, however, let's look at the most problematic kind of product-oriented pedagogy I've seen. We've all experienced the activity that starts with a paper plate in front of every chair filled with an array of pieces of construction paper, cotton balls, pipe cleaners, and tongue depressors. Some of the pieces are traced out and cut in advance by the teacher. This is the enemy that process-oriented educators see when we utter the word product. But this is an extreme way of teaching art, however common it is. Look at what we start with: every seat has the exact same array of objects, down to the same colors. The object of this game is for every student to carefully follow the directions that result in a complete object that Mom will love to put on the refrigerator. It is extremely important for every child to write his or her name neatly on the finished project. This is because the child will hardly be able to tell their's from the other children's, or even if they can, the teacher won't be able to.

But what are these kids signing off on when they lay that signature down? Forcing a child to take authorship for something he or she didn't really create is only half an art activity and yet people love to do this. Some people will explain that it's the best way to teach little children, saving more creativity for adult classes. The only argument I can conceive of for this type of product-oriented pedagogy is that it teaches the student to take concrete steps and that there needs to be a process to follow in order to accomplish something. But I disagree entirely with that argument (and I imagine more sinister or at least lazy reasons for the activity, anyway). And now it's time to share an example from my own childhood to argue for a pedagogy of process and product that utilizes a balance of individual creativity, teacher-directed rules, personal preference, and a concrete audience.

When I was a child, we had a holiday tradition in our home that has affected me greatly as an artist. Every year, in those days, we would receive scores of Christmas cards from friends and family and at the end of the season the used cards went in a box for the next year. A month or so before Christmas, we would excavate this box and another box of supplies and tackle the annual ritual of making hand-made Christmas cards for our own recipients out of recycled commercial holiday cards. The trick was to cut out words and pictures from the old cards and rearrange them into our own unique creations. Part of the fun was picking the cards to start with. Looking through the old cards, one was able to imagine possibilities and try them out. We had to share diplomatically since we would all end up with unique material to work with. In the event that there were duplicate cards, two of us could come up with unique responses to the same material. This is another interesting difference between our experience and the extremes I cited above: our experience reinforced group dynamics, while the first two extreme examples I related offer little development in collaborative skills.

Mom had showed us several methods that we all used. First of all, we had a way of folding and gluing a sheet of construction paper into a card. Secondly, we employed a method of gluing glitter. We also had a formula for making an envelope out of more construction paper. I'm sure we had other tricks of the trade that Mom had learned herself or had invented, and the kids probably came up with some tricks of our own. The cutting up of old cards involved pretty universal methods for cutting—although one of us is left-handed—but the way we extracted the images from the cards was all our own. Mom gave us no rules for how we composed our creations, other than that they had to be mailable.

This yearly project was a perfect recipe for teaching creativity. We had a process that was open-ended to an extent, but had the kinds of limitations that help us focus and problem-solve. We had some rules to follow and freedom to imagine our own creations, too. And we returned to this project again and again, through two decades of our collective childhoods. To this day, I am convinced that my creative process is informed by these early experiences every Christmas. From a very early age, I created product with my family and it didn't hurt me one bit.

Product is an essential conclusion to the creative process. When we made these Christmas cards, one of the foremost thoughts in our minds was about how the recipients would view them. Audience was an essential element of the process because, as we created, we played the role of the recipient in our minds as we played the role of the artist with our hands and eyes. Children love to share their art with others. In fact, they hardly have any interest in keeping it for themselves until they are older. This supports the idea that young children are more concerned with process, even as it supports the conclusion that children practice communication through the sharing of meaningful visual objects.

Some teachers will use modern artists as examples of process over product, which simply isn't true. Picasso and Van Gogh were extremely serious about their products and it is a misconception that their art is entirely personal and lacks academic convention. Where would anyone get such an idea if they were really looking at the art by these artists? And yet I just saw a show of Van Gogh's work in which the wall text exclaimed surprise at the careful compositions where a fury of emotional activity was expected! What damage have we've done to our ideas of creativity through our collective conceit of process as wild emotion? We value personal expression. This is fine. But the idea of process as loose emotion that we've shamelessly projected back upon the earlier modernists (let alone the later ones with the moniker Abstract Expressionist) is one that some educators now impose unquestioningly upon our children in the names of freedom and self-expression.

We live in a world in which most people survive, somehow, with little understanding of process. I encounter this all the time. Adults don't understand how most things work, they don't understand the steps required to accomplish things, and they constantly miss the big picture. We aren't doing people favors teaching them that process is a self-absorbed activity that has nothing to do with other people or with a successful product, let alone composition. But we also live in a very conventional society that, for all its emphasis on self-interest, doesn't reward those who leave the path we've beaten down into quagmire. We aren't doing people any favors if we don't teach that personal creativity is part of a social equation.

Depth in meaning cannot come about from pure process. Engaging in process alone won't require that others (or even the artist) understand it. And an uncreative product, devoid of a personal method, also has no depth of meaning because it just reiterates the same tired clichés. Only through a balance of convention and personal expression can deeper meaning be constructed and shared. This is essential, I believe, for the best art education as I practice it just as it is essential for my practice of art making.

Where do I come from? What am I? Where am I going? And where is the good stuff?

—Creativity—

An artist told me yesterday that she's decided to forgo trying to please the art world. Another, a few days ago, told me he feels disconnected from the scene. Their feelings are not uncommon. These artists are the good ones. But the art world is a syndicate that rewards the self-interest of its members and some of us do not share the attitude that membership demands. So it's harder for us to share the spoils. Not all of the art world is this troublesome, but quite a lot of it is.

Earlier this week, I saw the 100th anniversary remounting of works from the famous 1913 Armory Show. I was intrigued by documents of responses to the original exhibition. A number of critics and artists back then pointed to work they felt was falling into extreme individualism—some of it very academic in its own way. And this feeling parallels my criticism of the current scene as too self-absorbed—more so than the critics in 1913 might have predicted. I can see, now, how things went in the twentieth century, when the authorship born of the Renaissance morphed into full-blown narcissism by the end of the millennium, leaving some of us who are more generous out of the equation.

Last year, I requested about fifteen books from the library. These books had one subject in common: they were all about the art world. After reading through these books, I realized that the art scene, as it largely exists, has little to do with me. I realized that my goals need to be focused more on making my art than getting my work into institutions. Somewhere in this mess, there may be a place for me, but I won't find it by seeking approval from the majority of art organizations or art administrators; they just aren't involved in art as I learned it and practice it. And I won't find a place for my work buying chances in the group show lottery. Not when art as I learned it and practice it rarely shows up in many of the shows.

Filling the Art World Void

This is how I am changing my perspective on the art world. But I have a feeling the art world is changing, too. If there is a void, as I have described, then sooner or later people will fill it. Sooner or later the decline will change directions, so I would do well to stay invested in this venture, and bet that the long arc of art history will hold value over the aberration of the last three decades or more. I have identified a half-dozen ways that we might anticipate people will fill this void.

For one thing, we are already seeing a renewed interest in art education. Art education is returning to K-12 schools with a new understanding of its importance, bolstered by science. Also, I expect we will see a renewed interest in the existing canon of artists who have stood the test of time. Fifteen-dollar museum shows will break records instead of One-hundred-and-fifteen-million-dollar painting sales. After all, very few people are getting anything out of the exploits at Christie's and Sotheby's. It doesn't make for good reality TV. Sooner or later, conspicuous affluence will become immoral, tasteless, or even dangerous. The auction bubble will have to burst.

We very well may see "discoveries" of artists from the past who are under-appreciated or unknown. I saw some great work at the show this week by an artist or two I had never heard of. Having culled the herd for several generations, we will break open the crates at the taxidermists. There will be some young artists doing great art, too. Growing up in the void, there will be only a small percentage whose creativity transcends contemporary culture, or lack of it. After the student-loan gravy train loses its wheels and The MFA pyramid-scheme collapses, these young people will have to find an alternative way to learn art. But if they can, they will stand out.

Here in America, we will once again turn to artists from other cultures and other lands (and many that are not European ones). We will find it worthwhile to learn to say their foreign names and accept that they don't look like American beatniks. And those Americans who have struggled for decades without giving up will finally get their audience, and their audience will finally receive their gifts. Already, we are seeing a major shift away from that brand of self-indulgent symbolism and expressionism that bears no resemblance to the earlier art of those designations. Figurative work, much of it very abstract and interesting, is enjoying a new reception. This is good news for many artists.

"Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows. What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening. At the end of the awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or recovery."—Albert Camus

Like recovering from a thirty-year drug and alcohol stupor, returning to artistic normalcy comes at the cost of collective cultural brain damage. It may take generations to get healthy with art again. But I pray we are on the way. We will have to teach ourselves. Or, we will have to heroically seek out the teachers whose voices we've silenced for decades and beg forgiveness. I pray we find the neural pathways to process their words.

Critics Go Back to Work

I've seen so much fear and foolishness around art in my adulthood. Something has to give. Lately, it seems that critics are coming to their senses. Maybe, now, artists won't be so quick to circle their wagons to defend anything and everything that gets called art. One fine Art Friday, the New York Times may declare that we all know better, even though, maybe, the visionaries among us knew better on Thursday, being ahead of our time.

Part of this "coming to our senses" is just a general mellowing that occurs anywhere. Give people time and they will stop reacting fearfully and will be logical about things—at least those things that sit in the past. A number of years ago, I saw someone write, with the clarity of hindsight, about how a controversial sculpture might actually have been placed badly after all and maybe the public wasn't simply illiterate when they protested it's location. This admission has no bearing at all on the undeniable quality or importance of the artist's art, of course, which should have been obvious: it was the site, not the sculpture that was the problem.

But I suspect there is another source for this sudden shift away from blind allegiance among all American artists, cultural managers, and art administrators. I think that the Young British Artists tried to do what American artists always get away with and they got called on it by the British critics. I think that the British still hold all creativity up to Shakespeare and they won't tolerate very much frivolity or cynicism. Following their lead, I think the American critics have given themselves permission to actually be critical—probably for fear of letting the Brits beat them to the punch and embarrass them.

Yet Some Remain Oblivious

Last year, I walked past a poster on a bus stop for a famous postmodernist's new show and I couldn't help but feel that the excitement it would have stirred decades ago is now waning. It has to. That's probably why he is mounting a number of offensives to promote the work and legitimize it. The truth is, I think, none are more modern than those who call themselves post-modern. They are the tail end of a long era.

Postmodern art of the American contemporary flavor has been around long enough that we've had time for some hindsight. Critics say that only time will tell who is a great artist. Art critics like to refer to this as "the test of time" but it has nothing to do with standing the test of time in any mystical sense--it's just the limits of patience. Saying time will tell would be a cop out if it weren't the case that most critics (and many of the rest of us) really can't tell the cream-of-the-crop from the chaff, now or in the future.

The result of this time-will-tell mentality is the very real belief among critics that no one can predict success. But I think this is either an admission that success in our culture has nothing to do with talent and quality, or an unwitting admission that most critics just aren't the ones who can tell what's good or bad. It's not really what motivates them. If these critics, like so many collectors, fans, and artists themselves, were invested in creativity rather than ideology (or power, prestige, excess—name a vice), this wouldn't be the case. At any rate, critics subconsciously know they are off the hook for what they say today if the truth doesn't come out until tomorrow, buried in the Times, for those of us who didn't see a benefit in knowing it earlier.

The organizers of the 1913 Armory Show felt that art progressed through history and they crafted a narrative of advancement from Ingres to Duchamp. Picasso knew better. Whatever people come up with to make fashionable, the good stuff runs through all of our ups and downs over time, and the good stuff does not need to speak through manifestos. The good stuff shares qualities that most people can't put into words. Always, artists are making the good stuff. But not always do the good artists make it in the art market. In the best of worlds, they can make it somewhere, at some point, during their lives, rewarding them for being the good ones.

On deconstruction

—Creativity—

I've been thinking about this word, deconstruct, because it's coming up in reference to my current paintings. In my art, I divide the human figure into shapes of color and value in a way that artists often have in mosaic, stained glass, batik, collage, and quilting not to mention vorticism, futurism, constructivism, cubism, and orphism. It's nothing new, though I am trying to make it fresh.

And the word deconstruct comes up, sometimes, when people describe the work. Ah, deconstruct, the New York Times word of the year from somewhere in the 90s that will not go away. In the spirit of postmodernism, the word is, itself, a construct (we can call this irony heterological, I discovered). In the spirit of human nature, we forget that, or worse, fixate on it. So I thought that I would clarify my understanding of the term and how I use it.

The key, for me, lies in understanding what a construct is. In our work-obsessed culture, we often focus on the verb, "construct," which means to build. We think of building as "construction." In our scientific-method-based way of thinking, we also think of natural things as constructions of nature. Thus, in a positivist, reductionist way, we like the idea of deconstructing things to find out their inner workings. And in our tradition of dissidence, we like the idea of deconstructing things to dismantle them.

But we should remember that the action to construct can also mean to form a construct, which is a psychological or sociological concept or idea. Regardless of its basis in nature or the human-made world, a construct is conceptual and not physically real. In my paintings, the painted figure is not physically real, it is the idea of the human body. It is a sign or symbol that I divide into swatches of color, which some people take as deconstructing the figure.

Now, if we think like deconstruction workers, we might consider that I am pulling nails and unscrewing screws and taking the sacred, visual language of this figure apart, or we might even think of me as doing demolition. The problem is, when we focus on tearing something apart, at best we are reducing it to its smallest constituent parts to study its pieces and see how it works. At worst, we value destroying it. In these senses, when I am deconstructing the figure, either I am taking someone's sacred language, in the first case, and parsing it out, or I am, in the second, sabotaging it or freeing us from it. Neither is without value, but my way of thinking about deconstruction is different.

I think of deconstruction as revealing the construct. In the best sense of deconstruction, I think, we are asking people to hear their own words and see their own images. We are, in a sense, reconstructing.

The best example I can think of is the way Shakespeare changes the order of words so we hear them for the first time. He also places incongruous words together to give us new perspective on meaning. And he is a master of the pun—a nearly lost art form. He is not simply parsing the language. He is doing the same service as breaking our words into their etymological root parts. But he's using our words. He's reconstructing our language so that it is fresh again. He's putting meaning back into our language after it has become, in Mark Twain's words, petrified custom.

I try to do something similar with the language of the figure. It's called poetry, and there are different ways to do it. Warhol repeats a familiar physiognomy with variations until we see it as strange. It is no longer the sociological and psychological construct that it had been. Similarly, Duchamp, in his Nude Descending a Staircase, reveals the figure in its physical action, its place in space and time, its basic geometry and form, and its mechanics. Again, we see it, like a Cezanne apple, for the first time.

These artists shatter our preconceptions—our lazy, stagnant knowledge—and get to root meaning. They reveal the origin. They are not tearing the model apart for the sake of the pieces. After they do their magic, they leave the construction of the figure evident.

Jacques Derrida tried to replace the word deconstruction with the word desedimentation. But the first word had already gone the way of language and become part of the sediment of our social minds. You can see the word in use all through our collective chatter and we take it for granted that we all know and agree upon what we are talking about. I wonder, however, when I hear it used in reference to my work, how accurate it is. How accurate is our understanding of the process when we label it with a fifty-cent buzzword that, heterologically, is probably in sore need itself of being deconstructed?

AbEx v. Pop, 2013

—Creativity—

Working on one of my paintings this evening, it strikes me that my work is not primarily about balancing abstraction with realism. My work is now, and always has been, about melding my subjective reality with an objective reality that we all, more or less, share. It's the old dichotomy between Abstract Expressionism and Pop. The language of Abstract Expressionism was personal and subjective. Pop presented a communal language. Pop tried to be even more objective than our shared values by removing the familiar color from our flag, for instance. Or making a taken-for-granted object so large we have to consider it for the first time. Or repeating a representation of an icon so many times it becomes as strange and new as Hobbes' mantra of the word "smock."

The best Abstract Expression has always utilized universal qualities in shape, color, and rhythm. And the best Pop art has always relied upon the artist's stylistic choices. In my work, I reconfigure a dead-pan representation of people and places using techniques that make them new and strange. In this way, I accept the job the poet is licensed to perform, taking the liberty of imposing my own colors and textures onto the renderings, rearranging them as I see fit. In doing so, I believe my work is trending with changes in the art world that seek to bring some consensus to the AbEx versus Pop dichotomy.

The day job

—Creativity—

In Europe, centuries ago, an artist may have spent free time on his or her own projects and a lot more time building sets for Easter pageants or altars for churches. Back then, as it may still be in some cultures, art was a trade like any other profession. But we now live in a world where artists often have two separate occupations: a day job and their craft.

This is the norm, though we often feel badly about it. Day jobs, we tell ourselves, are necessary evils while we are getting started but real artists don't have day jobs. And yet, a quick internet search reveals many, many famous artists who worked non-art jobs their entire careers. Most of the dual-profession creatives I learned about are writers, only because they tend to write about themselves. But visual artists also have to work side jobs. Sometimes we work jobs that simply help us survive. Paul Gauguin claimed to have emptied bed pans in an insane asylum to support his art. Been there, done that. Jobs like this are only short-term solutions to desperate situations. But there are advantages to getting a good, permanent day job.

A secure, sustainable, livable salary can only make it easier to be an artist. When one has enough money (and that doesn't have to be a fortune for the starving artist), free time is unencumbered by the stresses of survival. These stresses can seem to dominate every hour of every day when we are in survival mode. But when the bills are paid and the refrigerator stocked, we can come home and get a couple hours of good, solid work accomplished. Most artists create better when they are able to get into a healthy flow with the work. Time helps but money, in many ways, helps more.

When your time for art is limited by your day job (time is always limited), you will hopefully find yourself using your time more aggressively for your art. This is where a good day job and a bad day job differ. Coming home from a job that doesn't even pay the bills does not inspire hard work at home. After all, you just worked your tail off for not very much at the office. But when the hard work at the office pays dividends, then you will want to keep reaping benefits at the easel as the day dissolves. Having limited time to make art forces us to focus more, cut straight to the essentials, and get our work done. Having money in the bank gives us permission to indulge in our craft instead of poring over bills and making emergency runs to recycle bottles and move cash around from one ATM to another.

Having financial security means that it is easier to carve out regular time for the art without interruptions. But there are other ways that a good day job can introduce routine to an artist's life. The regularity and responsibility of a day job means that your routines are set. Most successful artists structure their studio time in the same way as a regular job. Roy Lichtenstein went to work in his studio every day as though it were a nine-to-five job so that his family got used to the idea that his time there was essential. Having a regular job forces you to have a routine and hopefully teaches you how to maintain a routine after making it big and quitting the day job. Until then, your studio routine follows your day job routine.

We might see the day job as a distraction—and if it pays less than we need to live, it really is, as it would be for anyone. But a good day job gives us security and makes it easier to maintain discipline in our craft. A meaningful, healthy day job provides social interaction outside the studio. It gives us skills we can use in our art business: bookkeeping, marketing, construction, Web design, billing, accounting, and more. The seeming incongruity of some day jobs and art making also offers perspective that we otherwise wouldn't get if we saturated ourselves with non-stop creativity. Anyway, there's only so many hours a day we can create. I find that I can work a day job more hours than I can paint, because making art takes more energy than most other occupations. And art requires contemplation or at least stepping away.

Having a day job means something else that Oscar Wilde acknowledged when he wrote, "the best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread." Financial independence from the art world means that one doesn't have to compromise vision for salability. Often, our best work has financial value only later. Financial independence from art trends means one can challenge the trends and do something different, something that doesn't yet have currency.

"Make some sacrifice for your art and you will be repaid but ask of art to sacrifice herself for you and a bitter disappointment may come to you."—Oscar Wilde

These days, however, everything takes more energy and time and money than it did a century or even decades ago. Most professions demand 110% from employees (a mathematical impossibility). Most professions demand that instead of going home and writing the novel at the kitchen table, we go home and continue working on the laptop, doing research and professional development, or catching up on unfinished office work. Many famous creatives admit to stealing time at the day job and working on their art on the sly if they had to. One way or the other, there's no room for both the day job and the art career to occupy ALL of our time.

But the two occupations are not inherently incompatible.  Being an artist is more of a cultural and social role than a financial occupation. This is not to say that artists should not make money or want to be compensated. We know that the calling to be an artist is outside our economy—just as a minister's or doctor's calling is outside our economy. But that doesn't mean that it is wrong to make money off the art. The art economy is largely distinct from our regular economy. So we don't need to experience conflict between a day job and a profession as an artist. They are two separate things. One  provides a secure cash flow to invest in the other, but that investment is intended to pay off at some point, to some degree. Selling art in the art economy is more like receiving patronage, even in today's art marketplace. When we let art slip into the regular marketplace, we risk corrupting it more.

So getting that day job and using it well is a challenge. But if we can use it as a financial resource, it can benefit our art making, as long as we can safeguard the time we have left after the work day is done.

Persistence and perseverance

—Creativity—

Early one Manhattan morning, I saw several men drag a big food cart from the parking space where it was hitched behind their vehicle. They pushed it into the intersection, stopped it from rolling, turned it around, and pushed it back onto the sidewalk at the crosswalk. This took some time; the cart was very heavy and I could see they were struggling at every step. They seemed to be fighting against the nature of the thing, and the physics of the planet that the wheels and the weight wanted to obey. But once the process had started, it had to be completed. Trying to put it in place, they knocked down the pedestrian crossing light, but they got the cart onto the sidewalk where they could sell food for the rest of the day.

"This is the highest wisdom that I own: freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew."
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Every morning, these men do the same thing, with the same struggle. All over the city, in the summer heat, they push these miniature restaurants through the streets, some of them with hot coals already smoking. And it's not easy. To begin with, they must find two legal parking spaces beside each other to pull the vehicle and the trailer into. Then they have to unhitch the cart and push it where it needs to go. Sometimes they park close to that location. Sometimes, they can't.

The streets in Manhattan are not level. Particularly running east and west, there are hills that you barely notice until you are inside a building and have to take stairs between avenues. Pushing a food cart, or pushing anything, is work.

When I saw these men struggling, so physically, to make a living, I thought, this is what an artist must do. An artist has to persevere in the same way. We have to work extraordinarily hard like the vendors. For someone living in the suburbs or in the country, this might seem crazy. Why work so hard? In the city, however, this is life. Someone living like this might very well think, this is unbearable and I'm a fool for doing it. But this is what we do. In the suburbs and the country, we have different ordeals.

"I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen."
— Frank Lloyd Wright

Not long after watching the food vendors, I saw a woman load her children, baby carriage, and luggage onto the bus. She required the driver and a half-dozen passengers to help her and all her charges. Everyone seemed invested in her mission. She made several trips back and forth between six bus seats and the sidewalk getting everything in and out.

This is nothing unusual. You might see her determinedly leading her pack down the sidewalk with parcels on the roof of the carriage. She will take the children forty blocks, their little feet traveling twice as many steps as hers. When they arrive at their walk-up, it's just another episode in their daily adventure. On and off the subway, one sees people like her on an epic quest to get things from here to there and get things done.

This spirit of struggle, of perseverance, of persistence, of can-do-no-matter-what—this is the spirit of the artist. It's not workaholism or idle occupation. We are not bored. We are surviving.

The last I saw, the city still hadn't put up a new crossing light. The one the vendors damaged is gone. I would have felt very bad about breaking city property, and I would have been very uncomfortable parking my business under the damage. Maybe they felt this way, too. But in New York City, maybe not! The woman on the bus didn't express any discomfort at inconveniencing all the other passengers. She was assertive about the seats she wanted for her kids. She didn't try to carry too much at one time. Without any apparent damage to her pride, she let the others help her. She may have said I'm sorry and thank you, but she was in no hurry. She took her time and did what she needed to do.

And this is another part of the deal, I suppose.  We must accept that we are going to be a little nuisance from time to time, and that's part of being the artist too.

The power of suggestion or wishful thinking

—Creativity—

I have a new day job and they've been streaming music off the internet over our speakers. So we've been hearing some overplayed and popular rock songs that someone or some computer thinks we want to hear, or ought to hear. Today, on a lazy Sunday when I should be finishing my paintings, I got to thinking about one of these tunes from the early 70s. I Googled it and I found discussion about the supposed backwards message in the recorded lyrics.

So I watched a video that plays the music backwards and spells out the supposed Satanic lyrics. And I heard in the recording exactly what was printed in the video frame: 666 and Satan and such. I found this remarkable because, looking at the actual lyrics, I couldn't see how they would phonetically sound like 666 and Satan when reversed, particularly since the vocals are hard to hear clearly forwards. After a number of times through the process, I decided to copy the recording and examine it in a sound editing program.

What I discovered is that I was responding to the completely incomprehensible backwards sounds by projecting what was written in the video onto the sounds. When I examined the word Satan, I found it was "if" backwards. But the video said to hear Satan and I did. As is common, the singer gave the word "if" two musical tones in his singing, which sounds like two syllables to the ears—particularly when made strange through reversal. The "-an" in Satan has the same sound as the "i-" in "if." And an 'f' sounds like an "s".

I should note that the singer is from England and I am from America—our languages are different. I should address, also, the fact that a backwards sound is very different from a natural sound. It is possible, of course, that reversing the recording makes some sung words sound more like some spoken words since we might sing in a direction opposite of how we speak a word. Nonetheless, after I had identified the word Satan as "if" backwards, I heard something much more like "fay-i'." At that point, I remembered that I often hear the wrong words in a song forwards, but after repeated listening and thinking about it, I can hear the right words plain as day, eventually. The 666? It was the punctuated words "it's just a" slurred into a fourth word starting with an "s." It came out like "sat suj sti" not "six six six." Once I examined it closer, that is.

Neurologically, this is quite interesting and was a great experiment for me.

We make sense of sounds by using neurons that were created in the brain specifically to hear those sounds. If we haven't heard them before, we may hear in our minds (and seemingly in our ears) something completely different from actuality.

When making sense of what we are hearing in this backward track, we have some assistance in context. A song is composed of lines that are essentially sentences. In the proper, forward version, the writer of this supposedly Satanic song used grammatically correct sentences, even if they didn't make complete sense. Interestingly, the Satan hunters do the same with the recording reversed. Even if they have to make up nonsensical sentences that happen to contain the word Satan, they do so. And this is one of the reasons we hear the words we hear even when they aren't there phonetically. If you understand the preceding word, then the following word is easier to make out. So if, for example, Satan is darning his socks, then you really think you heard the word Satan. But did you?

The backwards sounds I listened to are sounds that I have not trained my brain to understand. Therefore, I can't really hear them. And when I am able to hear them, it will only be because I trained my brain to hear them. This is a slippery slope that can lead from hearing nonsense to reinforcing nonsense, or from hearing nonsense to climbing up the mud and overcoming the nonsense and learning to hear what's actually there.

As a musician, I am very aware of how this works. I play guitar, and have for over thirty years. When I tune my guitar, non-musicians sometimes tell me they can't tell the difference between the sound of a string before and after I've adjusted it slightly. I can tell because I've trained my brain to hear the difference. However, when I try to sing, which I rarely do, I have a hard time hearing what I am doing. Now that I am also playing a fretless guitar (I played fretless bass in the 90s), I am starting to hear something of what a violinist or cellist must hear in playing an unfretted stringed instrument. I'm not sure exactly what I am hearing—it's just an inkling now, but I will hear more as I develop. A music professor once told me he was stunned that his students can't tell a trombone from a trumpet. But it is only because they haven't trained their brains to actually hear it.

Have you noticed that speakers of a foreign language, when they learn English (for example), have trouble confusing certain sounds? A non-native speaker of English might get an "r" and an "l" confused (like I got the "f" and "s" confused, but more so). The reverse, of course, is true, as well. After four years of French, I still have trouble hearing the language. Why is this? Because at the critical time of our early-childhood development, we learn a native language that differentiates between some sounds but not others. It doesn't differentiate between the sounds that are distinctly separate in some other languages. For some, the distinction between an "r" and an "l" is clear, but for others it may not exist at all; literally, those sounds are the same sound to their brains and ears.

Here's another analogy using the eyes instead of the ears. Once, as a child, some older kids found something under a bush that a child ought not to know about. I didn't know the word, I didn't know the function, and I didn't know what one looks like. In short, I knew nothing about this thing. And I tried to see what they were looking at and they were laughing about and I couldn't see anything. I looked and looked until they other boys moved me along. I probably was disturbing them, but I really saw nothing at all. I was totally lost. The word stuck in my head and now I know what it was. But I have no memory of seeing anything under the bush. I couldn't see it because I didn't know it. Even after they gave me a name for it, I was lost because I had made no prior connections with which to see it and name it myself. I didn't have the neurons.

So, getting back to the music, here is complete gibberish that I have no connection to and someone is suggesting I hear the word "Satan." And I do, because I am listening for it. One online commentator said he gave the backwards soundfile, unidentified, to a friend. After hearing it, the friend asked if it was something Satanic. But even here, the recipient probably had expectations. He had to have had experience associating a backwards recording with Satanism simply from our culture. Probably, most people who hear the words Satan and 666 in this backwards track hear what someone told them to hear. They heard what they went looking for. What the first person who heard it went looking for.

The song I was examining represents a lot of scary things. Freedom, indulgence, experimentation, exoticism, poetry, imagination, fantasy, unexplainable appeal, and the magic of creativity. The lyrics were mystical and incomprehensible forwards. And it had the word "heaven" in the title and in the lyrics. It's exactly the sort of record one would look for Satan in.

Some time ago, now, someone went looking for disturbing words in the Bible. They translated it from Greek into modern English. They squished the words together and they decided upon their own chosen words to look for in the now nonsensical array of letters. They chose short words like Stalin and Hitler that would be perfect Scrabble words if they weren't proper names (proper names the leaders or their families invented for themselves because they were easy to say and spell). The Satan hunters set up a computer to find the letters in sequence at every possible interval. So they might find an "h" then 30 letters along an "i" then thirty more letters, and so on. Then they put a return at the same interval of letters so as to stack the Devilish words in a wordsearch puzzle manner and cropped into the word they "found." Put more accurately, they found what they went looking for and arranged for themselves to see.

The world is like that. And, as artists, we've always known this, but now we have neuroscience to explain it to us. When a rock group paints an abstract picture of the human experience—or when a Biblical writer does so—and we see something dark in it, perhaps we aren't being very generous to the creators, but then again, they gave us something open to broad interpretation. We're always going to bring something of ourselves to our interpretation of a work of art.

But when we play the music backwards and hear a word that isn't even there, this experience tears us completely away from the normal dynamic of the creator and the audience. It shows, for a moment, how the brain makes sense out of anything, from rock and roll to a sound outside the window to a trombone or a trumpet or the Gospel of Mark, for that matter.

Written language is fascinating, and the Satan hunters can find hidden messages anywhere in text. But music is closer to spoken language, which is more primal than the written word. And more abstract. When we sing, we change the rhythm and the tonality of familiar words. We invite interpretation and challenge our prior understanding of language. Spoken words have a sing-song quality, too, but we speak very formally. This formality develops more as we move past the language acquisition stage. Listen to a child speak. They voice their words in half-steps, often. Mom-my. Mom-my. Up or down by just one sharp or flat. We adults (of my generation and culture) seem to do it in larger, more conventional intervals.

And a vocalist will, too, but a vocalist has a lot of play in the syllabication and intonation of words that he or she sings. And this is one way of disrupting our neurological connection with words and causing us to be enamored with a piece of music. The song I examined was largely improvised and has open meaning to begin with (like a number of very popular tunes by various musicians, most of which get misinterpreted). Given the mannered singing, the stream-of-consciousness writing, and the reversal of the clip, we have a very, very unfamiliar set of language sounds to make sense of.

And we make sense of those language sounds by using neurons that we wire specifically to hear those sounds. Which means that we approach this backward recording the same way we approach music: with a trained ear, an open ear, an ignorant ear, or a prejudiced ear. Or two of the above.

1985 C.E.

In a journal article about a month before I started art school, the art critic Hilton Kramer lamented that, viewed from 1985, American art after 1945 was suddenly looking very different. In the 80s, critics and art historians were accusing the New York School artists of "aiding and abetting the influence of the American political system." Their attempt to embrace universals and reject social realism was being challenged. Their art had now become Cold War propaganda.

These were the group of artists I saw on my first field trip just a couple weeks into my first term. These were the artists I would cut my teeth on. At the very moment I was inheriting their aesthetic, their aesthetic was suddenly being disregarded. From this point on, artists would run scared. We could be accused of anything.

If we'd ever worried about being grossly mislabeled as political activists—or unwitting political gears—we might have thought that it was working with recognizable imagery that would get us into trouble. When you make pictures, chances are excellent that people will misinterpret what the artist means. Someone will take offense, calling the work patriarchal, sexist, colonialist, imperialist, racist, ethnocentric or otherwise othering. It's been a long time since we had a reliable store of stock narratives and shared symbols to work with, so any use of recognizable imagery will be open to interpretation. But if the minimalists and pure abstractionists could be accused of politics, any artist, no matter what he or she makes, is suspect.

I think this futile situation may be one of the sources of our current ills. It's not the plurality of art that's the problem, it's the plurality of ignorant responses to it. I imagine that artists have conjured a few ways to deal with this dilemma. Here are a few imaginary strategies I came up with to avoid being called a Communist, or, equally bad, an Imperialist.

Strategy 1: Try hard to say nothing at all. This would certainly suit any collectors whose goal has been a shameless extravagance that can't be served by any depth. And corporations that collect certainly long for art that is safely vacant of specific narratives and symbols that might offend. So make something so weird or so literal that it can't really mean anything.

Strategy 2: Retreat into a vision that is so personal, no one could ever fool themselves into believing that they know what the artist means. This is the exact same thing as Strategy 1 except the artist serves the purpose of giving value to self-indulgence instead of callous indifference.

Strategy 3: Directly appropriate popular culture, not as a critique, and not to cause us to look deeper, but simply as a reproduction of what we already ogle all day. The meaning is vacuous to begin with, so that's safe. And the desire we feel for popular imagery is so widely shared that most viewers would take it for granted that these popular references are shared narratives and symbols.

I don't really believe that any of these strategies would work; someone's always going to give you a hard time. But the strategies I invented (or did I?) illustrate how an artist might shut down in fear of being labeled.

At Tri-C and OU, we had critiques. Through these critiques, I came to understand that what we are working with is a communal vocabulary of meaningful signs, symbols, shapes, forms, colors, and conventions. As artists, our job is to nudge culture further and shake up meaning and language to keep it alive. You can't say something new if everything you say is new. You can't have total meaninglessness, either. And you can't have a completely personal vocabulary. Nor can you simply mimic what everyone already says.

If you want to say something new, you have to place it in the context of something old. Perspective comes at the intersection of the known and the unknown. We, as artists, have to dive into the unknown and take our viewers on the adventure with us, using what we already do know as a lifeline. If we are bold enough, what we come up with in our explorations will be so strong that it will stand up to accusations of politics and ideology.

Melding two schools of art II

The best modern artists of the late 19th and early 20th century broke with academic drawing and painting to invent a new visual vocabulary. Mondrian, Delauney, Klee, Miro, and Kandinsky all come to mind. But probably all of them studied realism. When they taught their students, however, it was this new vocabulary of abstraction that they taught. As a result, we have lost a lineage back to someone like Chardin, as modern as he was. You can see, even as late as Picasso, a very strong sense of realist integrity. But for many students who took up where Picasso left off, and for the students of those students, that trace of academic training is not present in their work.

At some point, we lost not only the realism but some of the fundamentals, too. When texture and symmetry and all the other fundamentals come closer to being ends in themselves, students probably don't learn them as well. Picasso did not lose the fundamentals, but some artists who came a couple generations after him did as they absorbed the new qualities of modern art. At some point, it became about the activity of moving paint around on canvas. Meanwhile, many of those who wish to get back to representation have gravitated toward the technical in realism.

In my mind, Picasso and Chardin are doing the same thing. But maybe we've lost sight of that. In terms of design fundamentals, Pollock is closer to a Medieval illuminated manuscript, hundreds of years earlier, than Pollock is to Koons, only decades later. Meanwhile, by constructing a historical narrative of progression from Modernism to Postmodernism, we've thrown out thousands of years of art fundamentals and five hundred years of modernity with the bath water.

More specifically, what we seem to have thrown out, in these last few decades, is everything I learned those first two years of art school. Nowhere is this disregard for the fundamentals and principles of art and design more obvious to me than in the art magazines on the newsstand at my local bookstore. Here on this newsstand is the reality I had to look forward to after art school, and what has intimidated me and made me feel so alienated and unwelcome in the art world. Here we have art magazines to the left and to the right. Ironically or otherwise, the progressive magazines are on the left and the conservative ones on the right.

And what do we find? On the left is every conceivable deviation from traditional art. Anything goes. Some of it seems inhumanly tedious. Some seems mockingly sparse (but not beautifully minimalist). Little of it rewards closer inspection or repeated viewing. Most seems to function more as a signifier for a lifestyle or attitude than as something deeply poetic and transcendent. Then, over to the right, we have boats and lighthouses and horses and barns and, on a particularly depressing day, clowns or flowers. These artists, like their counterparts to the left, show a shocking disregard for color, composition, and subtlety. They couldn't design their way out of a rectangular room, obviously, and they seem to have no taste for content. Both sides appear to have thrown away the fundamentals of art for a near-religious fundamentalism that negates what I was taught to positively and actively embrace. They have also thrown away the strong conceptual and theoretical background that I enjoyed, replacing it with some pretty dubious ideas on both sides.

This is the art world I have been stressing about getting invited into. I used to think I was missing out on something. But I probably had a better strategy during my years at Tri-C and OU when I was oblivious to the art world. I am no longer oblivious to the art world. But I am no longer desirous of it, either. I am not afraid of it. I'm not worried about it. I'll put my work where people can see my work. And eventually the best people and I will connect.

Melding two schools of art

Today, I was reading a catalog of the art in the Empire State Plaza Art Collection. One of the things that interests me is the number of artists who created pictorial or figurative work before turning to pure abstraction. Many of these abstract artists were trained in realism despite the fact that some abstraction had been on the market for decades. Nonetheless, many of them studied art with teachers who were representational artists, maybe because the curriculum was still focused on realism, and many of the early abstractionists taught foundation design and color theory in industrial design schools like at the Bauhaus. At any rate, a lot of the artists in the Empire State Plaza Collection made representational work before becoming completely abstract. It's possible that they weren't immediately exposed to art other than representational art. They may have been the last generation to follow this particular formula of representational art into pure abstraction. Even a generation later, some Abstract Expressionist and Pop artists studied with realists before going the more expressive or graphic route.

These days, pure abstraction and representational art are often divided into two exclusive schools, and students tend to pick one or the other. In the 80s, when I was at Tri-C and later at Ohio University, my teachers very comfortably bridged the gap between representation and abstraction. But in the late 90s and into the next century, when I was at Kent State and the Academy of Art, the faculty were divided into two groups: very traditional realists and pure abstractionists.

When you go to art school, no matter where you go, you get some academic realism in the first year or two. At a private art school, it will be more rigorous. At a state university, the student gets into theory much more quickly. At Tri-C, I got into abstraction on day one, but I also got immediately into life drawing. Tri-C had a little flavor of both the art schools and the universities in our county. Yet the realist classes at Tri-C, and again at Ohio U, felt more like foundation requirements than solid foundations. Unlike art students a couple generations prior to us, we were deluged with abstract art as soon as we walked in the door. As a result, we spent more time on composition and design, the fundamentals that form the basis of modern abstraction, than we did on realism.

I am grateful for the conceptual training I got early on. I feel like this training in theory and design was essential to making me the artist I am today. These fundamentals that are so obvious in modern art were the secret ingredients for great figurative work in past centuries. The principles of art and design not only give us the tools to evaluate modern art, they help us understand Michelangelo and Rembrandt. But though I am grateful for this, I knew early on that I hadn't completed my training in realism. In fact, in terms of proficiency in life drawing, one teacher told me, "you're almost there Brian." I wasn't there. I knew I didn't have my chops. I felt that there was a gap in my education. So I went to a private art school for my MFA and spent two solid years studying academic realism. Mike always tells his students, if you plan to get both a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in art, do one degree at a private art school and the other degree at a liberal arts university. That's what Mike did. And that's what I've done, now, too.

At the Academy of Art, I discovered a focus on the technical. The fundamentals I hold sacred are absent at this art school—at least in the figurative painting sequence. But I have the design, composition, and theory I learned at Tri-C and Ohio University in the 80s. While the Academy of Art focused on realist conventions, Ohio U and Kent State focused more on the theoretical and conceptual. All this makes me a well-rounded artist with a skill set that might reflect a seasoned abstractionist who'd been reared on realism. I think that gives me quite an advantage. My work is finally at a place where I feel in complete control and totally competent.

Why is it that I can't have received this full skill set at one school? We may have reached a point where there is too much to teach, just like in other disciplines. We want to teach the foundations, but we want to teach all the new developments, too. The artists represented in the Empire State Plaza Collection were the teachers of my teachers, and they taught what they knew. My teachers were taught Modernism, but were not taught as much of the traditional realism that Modernists had learned and then broke away from. With my teachers, the breakaway becomes complete—it's the starting point. This is a significant difference that I'll write about in depth in a later post.

Listening

In this short period of self-reflection that I have been posting throughout, I have thought a lot about how aggressive and how confident I am and how much more I should be. We have two choices with confidence. We can simply decide to be confident. Or we can develop confidence through experience and growth. As I get older, I think maybe a combination of the two is the secret.

But if I can grant myself confidence, it seems to me I should earn it from myself. Faulkner said, "[a]lways dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself." I am always growing. This involves self-reflection as well as observation of the world. I don't take it for granted that I am right or know what I know. I am always analyzing the situation. But when I observe, I often see very clear solutions and preventions. I see the possibilities because I open my eyes and ears. I open my mind. This is the difference between working and creating. This distinction may explain my difficulties relating to those who are more impulsive.

We boast of American ingenuity, but the truth is, not all of us like to invent things. We like to pound the hammer. The drummer in the bar band across the street interfering so obliviously with the rhythm of my writing is like this. He's just thumping that bass drum like it is a coconut he's hungry to get open. It makes me picture this guy in other rhythmic applications of his daily life: at work at the factory, at home in bed with his wife. He's not creating, because he's not listening. He's swinging the hammer like a novice blacksmith, forced to resort to an artistic vocation by the death of craft trades. He cannot make a beautiful pot or a pan, so he makes ugly music instead. I suppose he has the spirit of the American pioneer.

I work with some arts organizations with this pioneering spirit. They decide to start up an art center, they blunder ahead, they make assumptions, they break the law, they beat common sense into submission to enthusiasm, and they "make things happen."  This pioneering attitude is completely different from the way art is made, or used to be made. Van Gogh said that we make our lives the way we paint a painting. If that is true, then the way to make a life or a career, and the way to do business or politics, is to pay attention to what all the elements of the project are asking for. What does the paint want to do? What does the foreground want to do? What does the green triangle want to do? What works? What will not work? When one project is finished, we start another and proceed in the same way, building a series, and then a body of work.

"We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it."—William Faulkner

But my world doesn't like to live this way, and that's one of the reasons I struggle. I do not live in a world that appreciates living life in a creative way. I do not live in a world that appreciates observing the situation. I live in a world that grants short term rewards to people who blunder ahead without much reflection. 

This bumptious spirit is built on a kind of blind optimism and ignorant confidence that whatever we want to do, we can do it because we have freedom and God said it's our right. Of course, we put those words in God's mouth as surely as we forge his name to the words we write on the billboards we construct. Nonetheless, we feel very much rightfully in control as we blunder over swamps and mountains, cursing the Indians, making our way westward, staking our claims. There is no apprenticeship in America. One does not go on a quest or a pilgrimage or retire to nature to contemplate life before opening shop. You just hang the shingle over your door, tell the world you are open for business, thank God for your willfulness, and learn as you go. You just, as the athletic shoes tell us, do it. We worship this spirit.

Shakespeare wrote, "If my slight muse do please these curious days, the pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise." In the playwright's view, the artist puts in the work, but the job is done by the muse, not the artist. The artist listens. Listens.

We might try to equate the muse to the hand of Providence, but it doesn't equate in the American narrative. If we listened to God, we'd hear Him telling us that there are consequences to our arrogance and that's why He is changing the weather. But that's not part of the equation. We just blunder ahead. We just do it. How many times have I heard a manager say it? "I don't want to hear about problems. I just want to hear you tell me you will get this done!"

Contemporary issues II

It's been over a week now since I started this series of posts looking back on the last ten thousand days of art making. It's been a week of self-reflection, not only because of these posts. While struggling to get them written, I've also been working very hard on preparing for position applications and interviews. As I finish my MFA, I'll be looking for professional opportunities. So, I've been compiling a comprehensive database of all the jobs I've had and the skills and expertise I've gained. I've also been going over my whole CV of studies and professional activity. I'm getting a portfolio together. Need I say that I've been having some crazy dreams when I find time to sleep?

This exercise in putting together a complete history of my professional and artistic adulthood helps me describe what I have accomplished. But it's also asking me to try harder to define who I am as an artist. It is telling me that I get to say who I am. And I have to do it. As the fates keep reminding me. Last night, I attended a talk by an internationally-renowned artist. Sitting not far from the stage in a small auditorium, we listened to her describe her creative path. She said not to wait for anyone to ask us to share our art because no one will—we have to ask the world to receive it. We have to take action and make our way. She said not to let the art police tell us what our role is. She said to define ourselves.

So let's delve deeper into what it means for me to be a contemporary artist. I have a number of concerns with the present state of art, and I anticipate a number of solutions. Normally, I leave my feelings about the art world to guide my work without railing about my disappointments to the public. However, on this occasion, I think it may be helpful for me to sort out my ideas. I can boil down my dissatisfaction with recent art to several points that I will address individually in future posts. Then I'll post what I think are the solutions. I'll pull no punches with this.

Every failure of art, right now, mirrors a failure of American society. Art, for example, has become separated into the same progressive and conservative divisions that polarize other areas of American culture, economics, and politics. Riding along on the growing divide between the super rich and the rest of us, art has also been polarized into extremely expensive art and art that sells cheaper than socks. When paintings sell for hundreds of millions of dollars, it doesn't raise the value of art, it demeans it.

I already addressed the growing nationalism in the U.S. One of the problems with our national self-love affair is the blind patriotism our critics have demonstrated toward our art ever since the CIA dropped planeloads of Pollock postcards on the Soviet Union (or something like that). The Wikipedia entry for 21st century art, for example, romanticizes the "crisis" and "syndrome" of post-modern ambiguity and claims that we have "every lane on the artistic superhighway filled to capacity. Consequently magnificent and important works of art continue to be made in the United States." In true liberal economic fashion, the writer leaves it to the marketplace to judge the merit of postmodern art. It's a very American attitude. In contrast, the best critics, I think, are English—they call it as they see it and don't care whom they offend.

Much of today's art, like our culture in general, lacks poetry and humanity. Before World War Two, you can find more poetry just about anywhere, from supermarket ads to political speeches. Immediately following the war, abstract expressionism, pop art, and minimalism flourished. Since the late seventies, though, things have changed. Since I started college, language has deteriorated at a rapid rate. Art, a form of language, has deteriorated, too. And this deterioration has gained momentum. Ten thousand days ago, when I was a young artist, I was taught differently. We were deeply affected by the poetry and the psychological depth of the modern art we studied. We were taught to respect the work—to be bold but to be diligent. We were taught not to place our self-worth in the art, but to step away from it and be as objective as possible. We had respect for the muse.

But the Art Department at Tri-C East was a little building in a big world. I earned my undergraduate degree in the dying days of the Cold War, studying in the shadows of demolished missile silos across Harvard Road from the art buildings. By 1991, we are told, the Cold War had ended. In 1992, I headed to Seattle in the hopes of making some art in that city. It may have been the worst time to try to forge a career. A current museum show posits that the early 90s, twenty years ago in particular, were a pivotal time for art. My feeling is that this art was a new framework for our orphaned Cold War fears. Art quickly gravitated to worries about AIDS, for example, which was the new atom bomb when I was an undergraduate. Now, licentious children scoff at it, but in other aspects of our lives, then and now, we find fear. Fear, self-advancement, and short-term solutions dominate our politics. And our politics seep into our art. And when we do not indulge in fear, then we indulge in superficial gratification. Along with our courage, we have lost our modesty. We do not celebrate the muse like we should. Too much art is now about self-indulgence and ego.

In Ancient Greek mythology, the wind deities often punished the heroes for their boastfulness or disregard of the gods. Perhaps my generation, like our teachers' generation, was fated to continue to be blown off course by the 600mph winds of the summer of 1945, when America, in arrogance and jealous fear of it's best ally, abused nature and humanity to our own detriment. Maybe it's just a case of getting worse before it gets better. Placing my feeble ten thousand days in this context, I can see that I will do well to stay my own course, to continue my quest, to realize that my public success is a culmination of my personal successes, and that I have only to courageously hold out for the winds to change.

Contemporary issues

We are creeping up to the anniversary of the 1913 Armory Show that launched Modernism in America, as I mentioned in the previous post. My teachers inherited this Modern art and they shared the fundamentals of Modernism with us. The fundamentals of Modernism are really the same fundamentals that underlie all art through history—it's just that, with Modernism, these principles don't stay underneath, they rise to the surface. For example, while Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks is triangular in composition, a modern painting may simply be a triangle.

I made this painting when I was taking fine art classes as a foundation for the commercial art classes in my second year. My buddy Terry remained in the commercial art sequence and finished with an associate's degree, but the teachers in the Commercial Art department sent me back to Fine Art. They told me I was a fine artist, not a graphic artist. They told me I was one of "Bruce's Kids" and in a hip 1980s way, they said, "go throw paint at canvases." And, of course, I did.

My teachers at Tri-C grew up with Late Modernism, the "stage" of art "history" in which there are lots of visual and material possibilities. When there are a lot of possibilities, it is with design and composition that we can make and evaluate art. This is what we were taught—color, symmetry, variation, focal point, etc. I remember when Terry handed in a collage, Margaret got scissors and cut it all apart into pieces to show us how many possibilities we have, and she explained every possibility as a complex of dozens of design fundamentals. This is what we learned, and I can't have asked for a better foundation in art. When I look back at my experience at Tri-C, I am grateful that I went there first, before studying anywhere else.

A friend recently told me he thinks of his work as "continuing Modernism." When he said that, I thought, "this is gutsy," even though I'm doing the same thing, without saying as much. By the time I started art school, the art world was publishing a litany of obituaries. Painting died early on. And then, one-by-one, the usual suspects were gunned down until art as we knew it was dead. Then the inky-fingered voyeurs of death notices observed that all of art history was dead. Everything was dead. And, of course, Modernism was dead. The field was so littered with corpses it looked like a Spencer Tunick photograph. So even for me, the idea of "extending Modernism" conjures visions of laboratories, lightning bolts, and reanimation experiments.

With Modernity gone, Postmodernity tried to move in, but lately the word on the street is, simply, contemporary. This is a word I do not like any more than the word modern. Rising from the ashes of the old connotation of contemporary is the new one which is a name for a style and a movement instead of a time frame. The word has changed. The old meaning is dead like everything else. When we say contemporary, we're no longer talking about a living artist producing work today. When we say contemporary artist, we mean someone who makes art with a particular style. If an artist is deemed contemporary, it's for his attitude, not his corporeality.

Now we are talking about a philosophical orientation and a cultural or political lifestyle. A contemporary art piece is not a painting that a living artist made at some point in his or her career. Contemporary art signifies a particular attitude: one that is new, avante garde, hip, and trendy. And it really needs to have been made in the last twenty minutes, because today's audience hasn't an attention span longer than five minutes.

A week ago marked 10,000 days since I started art school. My original plan was to mark this event with an online interview. That didn't materialize, so I felt compelled to bring the idea here to my blog. Over the next few days, and probably all year and beyond, I'll continue with the theme, tackling more difficult aspects of this saga, making some sense of myself as a contemporary artist raised on modernism. It seems to be unavoidable that this bloodletting will pool into a number of subsequent posts.

Young Francophile

On September 23, 1985, I began art school at Cuyahoga Community College. It's now, by my reckoning, ten thousand days later. When I'm thinking about this numerically even anniversary, another commemoration in tens comes to mind: the one hundredth anniversary of the armory show in New York City, which falls a few days from today.

The armory show brought modern art to America's popular consciousness in 1913. Among the artists in the show were the notorious Europeans reminding us, too, of the influence of another continent. But soon, New York became the center of the art universe and an American flavor of modern art was born. Soon, the European-influenced art of America grew into its own. We rode that wave of enthusiasm for quite some time. In 1985, Modern Art was still taught in the classrooms I painted in. And, we still paid a lot of attention to Europe. The one art film we saw over and over in classes was a film about Karel Appel.

But the decades since I started school have been dominated, it seems to me, by a rise in popular American culture and a rising nationalism in general. My loves are probably, now, split between American arts and arts overseas. For a long time, however, having been starved in public school of any encounters with foreign creativity other than British literature, I devoured anything I could get from overseas, and from throughout time, too. When I was a kid, my friends and I were reading Doestoevsky and Proust. I wonder if kids who were reading comic books have fared better as contemporary creators. On the screen, we were watching Bergman and Fellini. If we wanted bad movies or horror flicks, we went for the worst, not the most popular. But, I think some of our current successful filmmakers are more likely the kids fed the popular Hollywood diet, nourishing their body of work on kitsch and blood. As for music, we were listening to Stockhausen and Schoenberg, not Kiss. And for art, we turned to the modern art of Europe and a New York school that was influenced, at least through their teachers, by those Europeans that the American populace first discovered in 1913: Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne.

An art critic I sometimes follow wrote a review of a Matisse show a couple weeks ago in a popular magazine. Filled with ecstatic descriptions of his experiences viewing the work, this article was completely different from his apology for Postmodernism in the following week's issue. Writing about art since the early 90s, he used considerably less poetry and emotion to say that art had shifted to a new beauty revolving around ideas. I liked reading his excitement about Matisse. I think Matisse is still relevant. As for the new ideas, well, I think that if most of the American university scholars who misunderstand Derrida would read some Diderot, maybe, somehow, they'd see that the new ideas are nothing new to the French.

Student studies

Not long ago, I showed images of all my old work to some of my graduate advisers, with the hope that they could understand where I'm coming from as I work on my thesis. If they could see my entire body of work, maybe they'd understand that there are themes and stylistic consistencies that run through it. Maybe they'd understand what the thesis is about. But I was stunned when they liked the work I did in high school and the first year of college the best, showing far less interest in the more original work I've been developing over the 27 years since.

Certainly, the early work has a freshness. It may be less over-thought and less overwrought. But looking back at this early work, I realize that it is all very familiar. Those first couple years, I looked at the work of famous artists and I produced similar work. While it's never easy to make good art, it's a lot easier to copy what someone else invents than to invent something yourself.

Let's take, for example, this bicycle sculpture that I made within the first couple weeks of my first quarter. You have to love this. But in some ways, by the time I was assembling it, it was doomed to read as cliché. In fact, I recently stumbled across what could be the prototype in a Sanford & Son episode, pictured below.

I enjoyed making my bicycle sculpture, and I'm sure part of the game was demonstrating that I was up to the task of making expressive art. I think I demonstrate a remarkable control over the materials I was working with. But I don't believe I ever seriously thought of it as anything other than an exercise. As soon as I was finished making it I was ready to move on and get into something more personally meaningful.

The first series that felt like my own was a series of photographs made using flashlights. I'll write more about this series in another post. I began the series in high school as part of a senior project and I continued working on it my first year at Tri-C in Bruce's Life Drawing course.

The class met on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and each Thursday, from eleven to noon, we had Creative Hour. During this last hour of the class, I worked on the series that would be featured at the Annual Student Art Show at the end of the year. This series began my lifelong interest in melding realistic proportions of the figure with a rustic, sign- or symbol-like simplification. Even still, the point of departure was a popular trick that I learned from a Photography magazine. My early work tended to be tinged with a "neato" factor in the process. These little gimmicks matured into a lifelong interest in alternative methods. Like other early works, this series began with me proving I could mimic existing art, but I refined it in my own inventive ways.

This wire sculpture is another example of derivative experimentation. It's derived quite obviously (to me) from Matisse and Picasso. It was my original idea to use the metal bands that normally bind cubes of bricks. But the figure is reminiscent of the great modern masters and reminds me of a sculpture we had in our hip, modern church. It is another example of my interest in reducing the figure to a symbolic, linear shape. But I did not have a clear stylistic direction when I made it, and the other two or three sculptures in the series are not figurative at all.

My interest in sculpture can be seen in this early ceramic piece that I made in high school. This, also, attracted the attention of my graduate advisers. But what we have here is a rebellious coil pot. My high school art classes were not particularly creative. When directed to make a coil pot in art class, I liberated the coils from the mundane spiral and gave them some poetic freedom. There is a little of me in this but, again, no direction. I like it, but it's transitional.

This plaster piece was made by simply shoving a vacuum cleaner hose into a mop bucket and filling the bucket with plaster. I spray painted it and was done. It is simple, elegant, sophisticated, remarkably mature, but it hasn't a whole lot to do with the themes that really interest me. I like it, but I had to keep moving.

This piece derives from several sources. The first was Bruce's own interest in minimalism and shaped canvases. The second is Josef Alber's experiments with colors. And the third is the use of color to evoke depth, which we were studying in class. I also wanted to find out if I could push the depth a little by raising the red rectangle just slightly above the blue. You can't tell, but it may enhance the illusion. I don't know. Bruce told me to be bold, not subtle. This was one of my first experiences in which an instructor challenged my method. Again, this piece was about mimicking other artists and an exercise in applying the principles I was learning. It was also one of my first attempts to see how the artist's intent and the audience response might relate. But the piece has little to do with my style. Looking back, I think it accomplishes what I wanted it to do, but it's obviously very dated looking.

This painting is another that caught the attention of my graduate advisers. Why? Because it's big? Because it looks like a Lee Krasner painting? This painting was a joke that my brother-in-law and I played with a huge, abandoned canvas that had been in the storage room for ages. We dumped every kind of leftover medium we could find on it. We made a mess on the floor, jimmied the lock to the janitor's closet, got a mob and bucket to clean up, spilled the mop bucket all over the hall floor, made Mike laugh and got a light lecture from Bruce when we hung it on the wall wet and the President of the College leaned up against it. It took forever to dry. Again, not my direction. Not my work. We said, let's see if we can make an Abstract Expressionist painting, we did it, and we moved on. Experiment completed. Obviously we used our talent and skill. And it's not bad, at all. But it obviously lacks the control of color, in particular, that one finds in a more serious piece. It really was just us having fun, and maybe showing off.

I played a lot, early on. But I was always interested in bringing something new to the world—something all my own. So, while I proved my capabilities and my understanding of art history, I was always driven to develop my own style. This is what I've been trying to do for the last twenty-seven years. As I gain control over the resources and discipline I need to regularly produce finished work, and as I find ways to secure the time that I need to create, I expect that I will accomplish that goal. I will do my own thing, drawing on tradition and the influences of other artists, but making it my own.

All the preceding art works date from 1985 to 1987.