Art is essential. If there were no culture, what would be the point of survival? How might we greet the day without a song? In any enclosed society we take intense pleasure in the masquerades which distract us from the routines of everyday life. The artist addresses the task of taking the future by the throat. Many artists keep diaries of lively drawings, pleasures in calligraphic terms. These may be easygoing drafts for future reference, perhaps to be developed into enlargements on epic scales. They can become majestic, even sculptural.  An advanced artist may even suggest the depths of human frailaty or its reverse. The artist understands the overall play of ight that caresses the human and other forms. Darks and lights are among the artist’s gifts. He can add or subtract it at will.  A picture carries the future with it,  and it also carries the past. It has echoes and adaptations of early,  primitive art.  A work of art can stand squarely on the hinge of time.  An artist can make the future visible.  There are new ranges of developmental possibilities ahead that will astonish us. There is unquestioned freedom to reorder the evidence of sight. (Physicists are revising our concepts of physical space.) There is a constant transformation beneath the appearance of things. There is a delicate equipoise of internal contradictions. We must make human statements unique for their rich, slow beat and the steadfastness of warm, underlying beliefs. There is a quite unscientific pressure of the brush as it touches the canvas. These works are sanctuaries of openheartedness in which the artist holds nothing back from the viewer; imgination, deep feeling, and truth to self.  There is an absolute dignity that can characterize the basic furniture of life.     Artists, let us now begin with spare, bleached landscapes.  First, let us devour the light.

December 29, 2009. Uncategorized.