In the summer of 1978, just out of high school, before I went to Brevard, I composed a sketchbook. I called it "artmyth". I made my lines very slow. I followed a stream of consciousness technique - as I understood it. Whatever came into my head, in the order it came, I would write down on the page. I stayed up late at night, through Carson and into the old Tomorrow show. At the time I was influenced by reading Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time; advertising in art deco and art nouveau designs; the surrealism of Duchamp. An odd mix but suited to my adolescent mind.
There's a whole lot more. Through the years this book has fallen in and out of favor with me. When I became a fundamentalist, a friend at the time told me I should burn it. Thank goodness I didn't do that. There's a lot here that still resonates with me: the stream of consciousness approach, the love of Duchamp, the influence of kitsch, the love of the nude. People ask me about my nudes. All I can do is refer them to Western and Eastern art, paleolithic art, contemporary advertising among other things. Making a human figure live on the page is what excites me about art. There are so many problems of space and motion that can only be resolved with a constant and obsessive approach to depicting the bodies we live in. I'll throw in some Freud Jung and Lacan as well.
I make art and this is part of what I've done. After I finished this sketchbook, I did another one, and so on. Lines upon lines; images upon images. Maybe I'm locked up in my own world. This is how I live it, through library school, through divinity school, through working at web companies or military schools, through long periods of unemployment, mostly by myself until these last eight years with Jami. I am grateful for it all, especially that I didn't burn this.
No comments:
Post a Comment