The thing I imagine about a detective story is writing it spontaeously so the writer doesn't know where s/he is going. This is oddly how I make art sort of out of thin air, from nothing to something. But the analogy to detective yarns goes further I like my art to be puzzling and intriguing as opposed to enlightening at first sight. Some of this I guess is my native inclination towards complexity and mysticism. I do think life and art are an intertwined riddle. I set out to be an artist long before I had an inkling of what art was. Tolouse Lautrec's paintings were a sort of art portal for me, his pictures seemed to portray another world and time so vividly that it became my greatest desire to inhabit my art the way he did and very few artists ever have , his art posits a glowing living moving world of dancing and partying in Paris in the late 19th century. Picasso as a young painter made highly Lautrec-like paintings, Lautrec had influence on many artists then and now. His art is so much a picture of his own world his bower of the Moulin Rouge the great stewpot of modernism and of the coming age (the 20th century). Art history requires us to dig about to uncover the true story of an artist or a movement or an epoch. Each of us has their own version of the history of art, a subjective version of the facts that meant the most to us that greased our slide into the unsettling life of an artist. For me the color and modulation of light in paintings has always held me in it's spell. As much in the morning light and shade of an Edward Hopper clapboard building drenched in sun and shadow or in Lautrec's incredible effects and confections of color. It devolves to a question about meaning, what do feelings mean what do we seek in art? In theater we seek the catharsis, not so much meaning,in art we sort of find an odd acceptance , this is what I feel as with the what outcome awaits us when we visit Monet's Waterlilies at MoMA, we are surrendering to the art (or not). Meaning is a gnarly concept it has thorns , the narrative say of Vincent van Gogh his suffering his ear etc but they paintings are joyous, he obviously could speak clearly in his idiom, his painting are joy incarnate. Life can be good when a baby is born what joy what happiness, when you win the glittering prize when you meet a great love. And for the artist the work becomes the vessel of emotion and thought. For all the literature about Paul Cezanne as a structuralist a formalist the great architect of early modernism etc. the truth be seen his paintings are raptuously beautiful, sensual and just sublime. They are objects of great luminousity and hue. The contrast between his formal aspect and his sensuality was his main struggle and it was never quite resolved itself and all the better for we consumers of his beauties. Duchamp thought the retinal art (impressionism. post-impressionism)which preceeded modernism as cubism (earth colors dominate cubist paintings) was the true calling of art, an art in the service of the mind and so did Cezanne, he was the first to express the desire to put art in the service of the mind. I for one think the nihilism of the great war period and afterwards was a very big factor in the development of early modernism. But what does it mean? Ha, it means art is not seperate from world it inhabits, The binary nature of our existence plays out in our art, maybe I see things more intensely because of my brain disorder or my tumultuous life? I think so indeed the way I see it art is the fruit of this life the enduring legacy of our time and it maybe difficult but it's also true as perception and experience of the artist making things. I think I was right as a child to see art as my means to be me. The difficulty was greater than I expected. But posterity the great arbiter will decide who's art is saved and treasured. And in this short life we must do what it takes to get it on!
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