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I am looking at unfinished paintings leaning against a wall
in my studio: I question what about them repulses me from
finishing them, what compelled me to create them in the
first place. These are works from 1996. At the time, they
were part of a creative linearity and a belief being advanced
to ever more intricate explorations. I believed what I was
creating was interesting art, for myself, and perhaps others
would also find it so. They (the artwork) were a continuum
of my artistic musing on a certain insanity I felt was driving
our American Culture in general and our society in particular.
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Now they just speak to me
of ineptitude. Perhaps I never finished them because that
sense of the great amount of effort and time to create them
was not worth the final result, especially when the effort
would only drive me into isolation and debt. There was no
joy in that. There was certainly more joy to be found in
planning things that 'might be' rather than actually committing
to things I no longer believed in. Feeding a progressive
aesthetic psychological thread that no longer seemed appropriate
to my belief system and personal outlook was not the lit
wick of desire. If I am to be poor and isolated, better
to be "deluded" in the promise of a brighter future.
Interesting - some would say that is the very psychological
statement that drives people to believe in God, Christianity
in particular - the promise of a brighter future - enduring
the darkened 'now' with the hope of a Heaven, the promise
of a Savior. I have heard this criticism. Though I am not
deluded in my ambition nor is Christianity unsupported by
her apologists.
About
these works that sit here in my studio unfinished. That
was then, and I thus reflect, looking upon these unfinished
works - so raw - so clumsy - pretentious with satire. No
wonder I could not find it in me to finish them. Yet I do
find an artistry that I am fond of in these works. Too bad
the paintings are scheduled to be removed from their stretcher
bars, turned back to front, re-stretched and re-gessoed.
The
time is near. Soon everything will be in order for beginning
the first tests and the 10 foot prototype painting for Genesis.
It is time to reacquaint myself with the medium of painting
- I have been away from it for years. Caught up in a seduction
of digital imaging, learning new computer programs, visionary
development - solidification of ideas - I have been so far
removed from painting.
Yet
I love painting - there is a romance between it and I -
a sensuality. In relation to isolated imagery, which my
paintings were, something bigger is always driving me somewhere
and to something other than here - my time in Laguna feels,
and has felt, transitory, though I have lived here for 18
years. This BIGGER thing grants me no peace by staying idle.
The only peace I have
is when I am for God.
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