an artist is an artist

An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.  -Charles Baudelaire

Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams. -Baudelaire

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him!  But remembering is only a new form of suffering.  -Baudelaire

The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality. -Baudleaire

I have always loved Kenneth Patchen, both as a poet and an artist.  I can remember, long ago, how I used to see his hand-painted books in the used book store, at first out in the stacks, and later safely behind the counter.

I do wonder just like you about all these quotes.  What is that all about?  What does it have to do with the paintings one posts?...probably nothing.  It's just that the names pop into my head when I am looking at these paintings, so I have to go look at their things...but the best quotes are the ones I no longer remember, found when I first read them...

idle thinking

I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission. -Robert Rauchenberg

As if that helps. Well no, I guess it does.  But the easiest permission is the kind you get by being completely unknown, a total singularity of nothing to no one, and the only arguments come from the idiot who hired you.

Let's face it, painting makes you happy or something like that sorta.  Well no, not really, I don't know, it's not like watching a cool movie, no maybe it is like that, no not that more like something to do with painting.  Ah that's it.  It just is this thing you do.  And I like seeing the things that could be...

or the things I think I see when I look at things, like outside, or weirdly enough in the air itself.  Like do you sometimes see lines in the air?  Oh you don't? Well, they are there.  I don't know where they come from.

It just seems strange the 100 billion things you see floating around, made out of some kind of nothingness, and there they are, so you blink your eyes and they are gone...

I just wonder like, do these things exist or not?  Is it just my vision, or is it something else,  like dust in the air, or water in the air, trying move around...?

the box of toys lost to time

So, I guess it was three years ago I got my framer to make a real big box so I could dump in it many of the toys from my boys early childhood.

I though it would make a good composition with bright colors, its strong forms, and objects each of which demand unique attention.  I also thought that over the years rubber would bend plastic would stress and shatter and that finally there would be left only shards and tangled remains.

My boys got a kick out of it...they sat in front of it for about an hour, each of them pointing to certain figures, and telling each other how they played with it, which toy was the one they wanted in the bathtub, which one was the one they had in the bottom of the bed, how one was lost for so long but finally turned up in a crease in the couch.

They remembered the old movies they saw, and they remembered the time surrounding many of the toys, they recalled which ones had been outside with them, which ones had consequently been lost for periods of time, what house we were in when these events occurred, which friends had been over...

And now they all rest in this pauper's grave and I am reminded of a story cousin Edith told.  How, when my father's mother died when he was five...how when he grew up he learned that she was buried in a pauper's grave, how this appalled him and he determined to have her dug up and buried properly...but gave up when the man explained to him how many people were buried together in those graves...

He was determined not to be buried at all...and when he died his ashes were spread across the island where he lived...

...and now when I look at these figurines, all buried together,  I feel the sadness that comes from growing up, not losing your affection for childhood toys, but feeling the interests of new feelings and thoughts that have taken their place...and the sadness of the ruptured toys, lost forever in time, forever collapsing, sinking, crushed together under time's endless mass...

thinking only begins

Thinking only begins when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.  -Martin Heidegger

What does it represent?  There was never any question in plastic arts, in poetry, in music of representing anything.  It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic. -this is by no means the same thing. -Fernand Leger

Ah, these now seem like old stories, truths from the times of our grandfathers.  -we all know in our hearts that the only truth is the one we tell, the one we say. -it is the one that is hardest to tell, and to tell over and over, until the rest of humanity knows we will not change, we will not alter our beliefs.

The paintings, though they change, are all the same.  The gestures all come from the one hand.  The details are from the same mind and are reflected in each picture...

And no matter what one wishes, you remain the same person.   From the many that one was as a child  to one person laid down to earth.   -an endless yet brief existence.  for each of us the same.

One painting seems dark and dreary, full of darkest thought, blackest detail, the next one light and airy -yet is just not true not in that way.  For each one blares out the notes for help, for beauty, for truth, and for secret peace.

And in each one we see the same self-proclaimed words, the assassination of thought, the traitorous compromises, childish frustrations, idiot, fool, go away and leave art to us -the anointed, the purified, the long-standing truthers.

April flowers and Love Letters to God

That is the title of a book on her art work the my friend Justine wants to use.  Perfectly out-of-sync with any current suppositions on art...especially on some supposed linearity.  Her work by the way is beautiful, large and marvelously deceptive.

I wish I had an example for you...I'm sorry I don't.  I just have this one of my own, that I don't know where to put.  Its large, at least in my opinion, but not nearly as large as her work.  Really it doesn't coordinate with anything.

I think I will simply bury it in the bottom of a large box and forget about it.  When you make a bunch of art, sometimes these things will happen.  They are strange ugly creations that just show up, ungainly, uninteresting,  simply ugly things that exist, at best.