My taste for blogging has waned of late, however I do want to send everyone the latest on my survey show coming next month at Walker Art Center. I found the new calendar magazine at the museum Saturday with my pony painting on the cover, that made me very happy. The print job is so beautiful best I've had even better than Penthouse Magazine painting I got paid for, very precise very delicate and jewel-like colors. I saw Joel and Nancy Shinder today very sweet Joel is such a gentleman and Nancy saved my bacon by offering a painting to MIA for free; which Evan Maurer did picking the over-all field of cartoon faces that MIA has had for 20 years. Evan went for the most beautiful painting I'd ever made that's why he was an ace , nothing but the best and at a discount or free.
I'm working with Betsy Carpenter ( curator of WAC permanent collection )on this show, she works hard and I'm lucky to have such a supportive partner in this enterprise. She wanted to do this show and that makes it easier, by the time this is over she'll have quite a file on me and my art. I was thinking I wished my father and mother were still alive so they would know I made out ok being an artist. My Dad was worried I'd just be poor always which has been the case most of my life but I've still managed to make a ton of good artwork. It takes longer to build a reputation in the Mid-West art-wise the Mid-West is a cultural wasteland even if we say elsewise or dream elsewise. Places like the Walker Art Center are outposts in this bleak frigid area. But the Walker also gave me a sense of ambition and scale, to show at the Walker magnifies your art and presents it to a much larger audience dare I say a posterity ( most especially when you have an ever increasing amount of art in their collection). You become part of the story something unique right here in river city. INSANE PHILOSOPHER'S CLUB - I'm showing several large works depicting the Hebrew Sephiroth a sort of tree of life that was a key iconography regards Hebrew Cosmology. It's like a guy to the celestial location of the key elements in Hebrew Mysticism. The sephiroth is a map of the 10 qualities of G-d , it was used as a meditation device to undertand the essences of Hebrew mysticism. And map is a key idea, if we seek an understanding of this mystical terrotories the sephiroth guides us in our thinking and it creates a map and a ladder to help us climb higher up in this tree to see more of the way up, the sephirotic trees appear in 4 levels one atop the last composed of the 40 spheres and the 88 channels between them. Aleister Crowley supposed a divine electrical liquid current passed through the channels which in turn fills the initiate with g-d like power! For me the sefirotic tree was a readymade motif (subject matter) and a means to learn more about a foreign culture and especially a way to study mysticism. Because the breakout of my own psychosis meant I needed to understand better how mystical experiences related to my mental collapse. As my work proceeded I discovered the bits and pieces of my remembrances and forgettings could be given some meaning. I found ways to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The mind thrives on puzzles and mysteries. Of course pieces are missing by it's nature mysticism resists science it is after all in the realm of the subjective. Even the intra-subjective a deeper sort of leap into the darkness of things hidden and lost. My medicine was Ludwig Wittgenstein whose philosophy is about sweeping away the subjective, and finding language that only says what can be said (in the light of natural science.). When Wittgenstein writes that what is mystical is that the world exists at all, it touched a resonant chord for me. The mystical experience does not hinge on the religious experience but rather on the perceptual sense of the mystery of their being a world at all rather than nothing. The tangled mess in our minds, of fear and wonder out of which comes our thoughts our creative acts does not need the superstious black magicks to act but rather we resist unclearness and move towards reason and ease. It's also the balance between what we can say and what is impossible to say because the words make no sense. God does not reveal himself in this world. Or is it he's too busy to visit.