inarticulate dredge

They seem to think artists bring up a passionate inarticulate dredge from some primitive center -Brian Eno

And I suppose in some instances they are right.  But as we look at them -which is mainly what we do

-we begin to understand more about the picture, or what our pictures are becoming, or maybe coming from, and to slowly attempt to articulate the knowledge of what that is. 

And we do that through the pieces we make.  It's just work, painting is just that, but it is fun work, interesting work, rewarding and sometimes frustrating, sometimes apparently going nowhere,

or sliding backwards,  not going anywhere, not moving in any direction.  But then, in some detail of a painting we spot the diaphanous object behind the sheer curtain, a small spot of light, and we throw out a line in that direction, hoping to bring it nearer, and to explore this point, this small configuration.

Yep.  It's a little difficult to explain, this painting, but no more difficult than the entire morass of activity that consumes people, whether it be cooking, or dissecting small living things, or collecting butterflies, or working with tiny diodes for years to capture some sound for a guitar pedal.

Really we are a funny lot we humans.  We get attracted to something, we wish to shape it, to perfect it, to develop it and form it, whether it be a tool, or something as abstract as a musical device.  Look at Bob Moog's synthesizer, an utterly new instrument.  How often does that happen, every thousand years?

And Leo Fender's magnificent electric guitar, and even though he didn't invent the electric guitar, it was his instrument that allowed an almost unknown form of creative expression to bloom and flow all over the world, and that only took a few years after its initial development.

And I wonder, though I haven't read anything directly about it, how do we think that new instrument affected the entire field of expression in painting, the work of a Pollack and Rothko.  Or even the writing of of maybe Jack Kerouac, who we know was under the influence of music most of, maybe all of his carreer.  I had nothing to offer anyone except my own confusion. -JK