a little color

Things clog up if you think the first rule is that your work has to make sense, or that your process has to make sense. Making art is not efficient. I observe people attempting it. They have teams of specialists. Perhaps they succeed. But for myself, and for others I've observed, art is not efficient. Typically we don't have teams of specialists. Part of the aesthetic is not the mathematical intricacies. I've known people for who this was true - at least for a while. I remember people who fell in love with the Golden Mean - and people can only fall in love with the Golden Mean: there is no simply liking it or casually being acquainted with it. Eventually the GM exhausts them. The truth of nautilus shells and fibonacci  numbers allures like the great westward frontier. Art almost seems to make itself. Armed with rulers and protractors or cad programs or whatever, they advance on the aesthetic frontier like early settlers to New Mexico who believed that the railroad actually brought rain with it (that was apparently part of the advertising for farming on the high plains). I remember seeing Susan Rothenberg on PBS explaining her studio practice: she goes into her studio and stays and either paints or knits. I said, "that's it!" Her statement relieved me of the despair that I'd never have a team of specialists to carry out my mathematical permutations on large walls. Not that the results of the team are unpleasant: they're quite wonderful. I would prefer to do it freehand. Free Hand: two important words for me - I only wish I could squeeze Eye in there: Freyehand. 

Artists can be as bad as anyone at making rules: Don't use pencils in watercolors; collage is cheating (I really heard this recently); you've got to have your studio this way or that. Part of it is what I've witnessed in teaching and library science - the desire for scientific validity. Art must have a rigorous criterion of practice so we can be taken seriously. Part of this comes in the desire to have some initials after your name. Really there are no rules. John Dewey is a good example. When I was studying philosophy of education, I remarked that the problem with Dewey is having to rediscover things all the time. But in art I think that that's the way it is best. We are rediscovering things all the time. Every day I relearn drawing or relearn painting. Every day I try to glean out what is habit from what is process (habit is not process - I've had to come to terms with this several times). 

We are all free. The world is filled with artists, but there is still room.