February 2010

My time in Redford is closing down. Finances are running low and therefore I must break from my productions in order to "refill the tank", so to speak. Hindsight is beginning to set in as I work to finalize a few paintings and bodies of paintings I sought to complete out here in the desert. Of course, through the pursuit of those projects, new and bigger ideas have been uncoverd. New directions. Reflections of premeditations in art, world conditions, and the influences they have placed on my work. I am comfortable with those influences, as I'm aware of how lethal they are, how controversial. I want to stir the spirit from slumber. I want art to make war in the soul. I want to produce situations that raise the human experience to their radical extremes, to heightened awareness.

In the end, here in Redford, I see that my true feelings for art and it's power lay in the extreme. In the power to say to people the words they refuse to listen to. The power to bend minds, the force of nature, the conduit of God's voice.
However, as a mortal being inflicted with multiple flaws, I could still use a lot of improvement. My work ethic has wanned a bit in the past couple of years, a poor attribute aquired from a lacking of spirit and faith in myself as an artist, a regard built up around a social upringing that says louder than anything, "you are a failure if you have no money". That is a lie, a stipulation I have tagged to my success as an artist; But also feelings of inadequacies as an artist that build each time I have to stop working in order to build up finances. Art is so much more that money. These things I will overcome.
Therefore, my next move in this chess match of art and the resources to produce work will not be a return to academia. At this point that move would be no more than an eloborate credit card giving my art some illusion of security and importance whilst plunging me far into the darkness of debt, defeating any successes in my work with a mountain of financial burden that is showing it's strangulation upon my entire nation. No, not that road, not for me. I move my pawns back to the highway. My goal now to become debt free, a small undergraduate loan being the last barrier betwixt me and financial freedom. I'm tired of being a slave to monitary machines, I'm tired of it's parasitic depletion on my art, my people, my country. I will move my work forward without restraint, as art must not be restrained. Just as my immaterial feeings of inadequacy must be extinguished, so must the material also be vanquished.
Checkmate.
image detail from the painting The Breaking of the Last Horse