Andros Psyche
"crying like a fire in the sun...
the empty handed painter from your streets,
is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets..."
-Bob Dylan, Its All Over Now, Baby Blue
I make art every day. It's the first thing I think about in the morning. I have dozens of notebooks filled with ideas for paintings, to-do lists, artist statements, notes about art history and theory, quotations from authors I think are important to keep in mind while I'm trying to make work that I think is both honest and beautiful. It's a hard road, and despair always walks right behind me and to my left. What is the point, nobody cares, we'll all be dead soon at any rate, and no one will know, and no one will care...
Life gets so much in the way. There are hundreds more paintings and projects in the notebooks than ever see the light of the studio (and dozens more paintings than will ever see the light of a legitamate gallery, but that's another post). Those to-do lists, those endless to-do lists, are piles and piles of things that must be done, before/in-order/so that I may find a few hours in the studio, "in the paint". I work I work I work, manual labor, build walls, paint walls, scrub toilets, carry things back and forth. I prepare for the painting, I internet, read, produce exhibitions and events, cultivate my audience (some would say market, but I'm a socialist and haven't reconciled that yet), care for dogs, care for people, pay my bills, try to heal my body, make surfaces ready to imagine on and at the end of all these musts find myself in front of the picture objects, searching, scrutinizing, touching, moving, thinking for a few moments about how many thousands of generations of people have toiled to survive, and how they failed, and how they succeeded, ans stop thinking about that
And I think about the mess we are in, a lot. About how all those thousands of generations of human lives, all those calories and movements and schemes and to-do lists, have accumulated...the great bonfire of the human species...we are the fuel and the flame...
Each moment there are new demands, the to-do list expands endlessly, an absurd Euclidian plane...but art flattens the image, it puts infinity in the present, it brings the imagination of mankind, the light of our bonfire, into the nooks and crannies of the to-do list, it brings peace, and insight, and beauty.
But it can also bring madness, obsession, pain. We hold so much in ourselves, all of us. The point of all these mad movements, scratchings in the dust, is that there is no point. It is searching for a way to be ok with that.
Achilles, in the Illiad, says "once it leaves the circle of his teeth, the life of a man [andros psyche] can neither be replaced, nor stolen, nor bought". The pictures are a shining, a relief, and outline of my form, a locution of my consciousness; paradoxically, that which is now and will never be again.
the empty handed painter from your streets,
is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets..."
-Bob Dylan, Its All Over Now, Baby Blue
Life gets so much in the way. There are hundreds more paintings and projects in the notebooks than ever see the light of the studio (and dozens more paintings than will ever see the light of a legitamate gallery, but that's another post). Those to-do lists, those endless to-do lists, are piles and piles of things that must be done, before/in-order/so that I may find a few hours in the studio, "in the paint". I work I work I work, manual labor, build walls, paint walls, scrub toilets, carry things back and forth. I prepare for the painting, I internet, read, produce exhibitions and events, cultivate my audience (some would say market, but I'm a socialist and haven't reconciled that yet), care for dogs, care for people, pay my bills, try to heal my body, make surfaces ready to imagine on and at the end of all these musts find myself in front of the picture objects, searching, scrutinizing, touching, moving, thinking for a few moments about how many thousands of generations of people have toiled to survive, and how they failed, and how they succeeded, ans stop thinking about that
And I think about the mess we are in, a lot. About how all those thousands of generations of human lives, all those calories and movements and schemes and to-do lists, have accumulated...the great bonfire of the human species...we are the fuel and the flame...
Each moment there are new demands, the to-do list expands endlessly, an absurd Euclidian plane...but art flattens the image, it puts infinity in the present, it brings the imagination of mankind, the light of our bonfire, into the nooks and crannies of the to-do list, it brings peace, and insight, and beauty.
But it can also bring madness, obsession, pain. We hold so much in ourselves, all of us. The point of all these mad movements, scratchings in the dust, is that there is no point. It is searching for a way to be ok with that.
Achilles, in the Illiad, says "once it leaves the circle of his teeth, the life of a man [andros psyche] can neither be replaced, nor stolen, nor bought". The pictures are a shining, a relief, and outline of my form, a locution of my consciousness; paradoxically, that which is now and will never be again.
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| Chronos, oil on panel, 30 x 24 inches |
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