Oh yeah, I can create something

I forget sometimes. After dropping Jami off at the airport yesterday, I visited the NC museum and the Ackland. While I sat in the NC museum, looking at a Jennifer Bartlett painting, a simple series of views of a house, loosely painted, reminiscent of Monet's haystacks, using the palette of analytic cubism (grays, browns, and black, applied in short cezannesque stroke groupings that allowed the color of the underlying ground to come through), a woman and her friend came by, looked at the work for a second, and one said, "this does nothing for me," and walked on. Pity, I thought: I was getting so much from it. Where did her adamant assertion come from? I have to say that people say odd things about art; almost as many odd things as they might say about Church or scripture. Everytime I hear someone talk about the rapture or confidently about Revelation and who the beast is I'm astonished: they seem unaware of the novelty and lack of scholarly and historic basis for these interpretations in the 2000 year history of the Church (but it's probably the lack of evidence that more than suffices for proof itself). Back to the Bartlett painting, or any painting (like the Rothko I looked at at the Nasher at Duke today), I wondered what it was in paintings that I love so much.
I love looking at paintings; as I've grown older I've loved all kinds of paintings: old and new, abstract and figurative, expressionist and kitschified (although it took a long time to appreciate Jeff Koons). I get something from modern art especially. Modernism freed the artist to make mistakes, to comment, to bend the conventions, to break the conventions, to reconceive and reconfigure, allowing all things to be art or nothing to be art. It's not nihilism; it's the embrace of abundance and freedom. There are certain paintings that freed the soul. The Bartlett is like that; it speaks but you must listen. And I think that that's a big part of it - listening. Walk up to a challenging painting like a Rothko, a big expanse of two or three color planes, flat against the canvas surface, soft edged - an absence of representation, maybe a quote of landscape. Don't force a meaning on it. Don't pull it into the familiar. To look at art is to practice restraint in interpretation. Don't look away and let it speak.
Thankfully there are good museums here and good paintings. Yesterday I went to the Ackland and they had a room of drawings, all in varying degrees of abstraction or representation; all in varying degrees of development, some with color some in black and white. A wonderful Schnabel drawing called Barbados is just a mass of deep indigo with some wash. If it's negative space it's suffocating the ground of the paper; if it's positive space, it's swallowing the ground. Something so simple could be so active, so evocative.
Lately I've been trying to write an artist statement, which for me is difficult: it's like describing the inner workings of the soul laying them bare- submitted for autopsy. But I think that that's an irrational fear. What I discovered sitting in the museum the other day was that I make art for myself. It's common to hear that an artist or writer creates for an audience, but I realized that I've only occasionally done that, and that the results are mixed on that score. My best work I've made for myself, as an outworking of an inner need. And I have to say that the art I get the most from, that artist must have created for his or her self. It may be that audiences may discover some rapport with something I've done, but this was not a necessary intention on my part.