But Alexander Pope I hate you slowly,(with a slow burning vengence ) with no good reason other than jealousy of your rhymes! And your wisdoms your insights your poesies your greatness become a world of unhoneyed rhyme. I remember Bernie Van Marm and I climbing high into these giant trees in the park behind the Art Institute and the lake (Lake Michigan) we got on a jag in those trees, Bernie would go higher than me. I remember thinking if I break a leg my college days are over. But the whole world was taking risks that year, a young president was murdered that fall they stopped drawing class told us to go home. Kennedy had one the election by 1/10th of 1 percent. He was president with a lot of folks who didn't like him, although his popularity when up after he was killed. I thought he was a trust fund kid I knew a few and they aren't the sweetest apples on the tree. Risk is a lot of things bareback fucking is risky more so than in 1963 (the period herein) the war in Vietnam was in ramp up stage for the next year, conscription was in full effect. Barry Goldwater was on his way to running as the Republican Presidential candidate. The minimum wage was $1.25 an hour after taxes a 40 hour job paid $32 a week.
So risk is our companion our shadow. Recently I've been thinking about Cezanne again as if my thinking about art doesn't always find it's way back to stubborn old Paul Cezanne, his color never lets you go, it is so powerful it's as if he didn't just make a picture of a mountain but rather the painting became the mountain. And all with his petit sensation which he accused Gauguin as stealing. Anyone can see that Gauguin took some color ideas from Cezanne.Picasso takes the tonal essence of Cezanne in creating Cubism, Cubism is earth colors not prismatic like Cezanne, Picasso was seeing the tactile aspect of Cezanne the myriad tones and shades that gave his paintings so much gravity and materialness. You find this palette in Courbet this earthy brown and weedy green orches and rusts and lots of black. Some modernists saw the prismatic nature of Cezanne and painted less earthy colors and rarely black. It was the beginning of the division between retinal artists and so-called non-retinal artists like Marcel Duchamp. Coming out of Cubism color arrived in various emphasises. Obviously there were differences about color maybe it was the same old mind-body problem transposed to visual art ? It points as well to certain binary contrasts that define us as this or that (color or less-color) Brainy or Feelie . I joked about a curator friend who I felt was anti-painting as if painting was so last century but don't I take a similar position regards what I find important - painting, drawing, writing -music . Not like Math. physics and computers. I mean my history is a bit odd five and half years of art history with not much history otherwise . I see the world through the spectacles of art. I learned about Nietzsche from a German professor in California. And I guess I never stopped being curious about philosophy. And the way that the things I know color my art is obvious, I'm an experimental artist even my portraits are profoundly curious in form and color not to mention expression. I am a creature of my times I know about a lot that's happened since I came of age. I felt I had to follow a thread , a sort breadcrumb trail left by the modern artists who preeceeded me and it's a trip through some pretty strange ideas. And now the last 10 years or more it's getting to be such a puzzle, art seems as if it's veering towards sociology and some sort performative form in any case Contemporary Art is all over the map it's like hard to believe it is all under the rubric of art. I didn't feel this way when I was 40 but I'm grown old bewildered by the Buck Rogers cell phones and the friends you'll never see never meet on FB. I guess I like change because of my brain chemistry and because change is the one thing you can count on - otherwise the news would never change - art would be too fixed like a star we want our art to be comet-like.