Remember…
Just because something is possible, it doesn’t infer that it’s meaningful.
Through failure and misunderstanding, you create a new virtual idea.
Too little is made of the absence of wonder.
Too little is made in the presence of beauty.
The essential expectation is that I don’t want to be bored by what’s in front of me… it needs to arouse something in me to be worth judgment… whether good or bad.
The pinnacle of expectation is an shift in consciousness, an experience of a change of perspective or an understanding.
The lowest point is ambivalence…
The mental gridding out of a rectangular image from a photo to paper isn’t a one to one ratio, often it’s elongated vertically, leading to a built in distortion in the drawing. The two could be synced up, but the distortion stresses my system and seems to pull me in more successfully. It a Stockholm Syndrome kind of thing, bonding through trauma.
We’re not in touch with an external shared reality, what each of us is in touch with is our private internal interpretations of reality, a reality for subjective impressions, subjective impressions that arise from the interaction of our innate temperament with a superficial experience.
The assertion that the self resides solely inside of us is a lie… the self is a flowing projection of state, of story, and a relationship between the inner and outer world. The self is an accumulation of impressions, it is not a steadfast object, unmoving and unyielding, instead, it is open to reinterpretation through reexamination.
So many opportunities for light to enter… so many opportunities for growth.
I’m drawn to the arts not for its perfection, but instead for the innate qualities of its imperfections, it’s character, and it’s essence
The draw towards imperfection is rooted an attraction to the experience of decoding what’s being presented rather than relying on being told what is there.
It’s a preference that guides an aesthetic.
Studio note: I found a trove of old books that hit the college dumpster. Some books found their way onto our bookshelves, some found their way into the neighborhood library, and some gave up their blank pages to be used in studio exercises like this.
Remember, it’s your perspective that is your most valuable asset.
When looking at an artist’s work, I want to see what occupies their mind, what arouses their curiosity, the metaphors they assemble to compare and contrast ideas, how these are used to create meaning from experience, their decision-making patterns in the body of work they present, their unique sense of aesthetics.
The enjoyment of sitting in the audience is found in the tells that hint towards an artist subjective perspective. The experience that the artist shares expands our own experience. Much like a dream, art is a shared perspective that safely allows a viewer to grow beyond themselves.
As an artist, there’s a need to acknowledge that our own shared subjective experience is valid as a perspective as well. We just need to be mindful that we are addressing our own viewpoints and not reflecting back what we believe others want to engage with.
If you’re not willing to find wonderful things, bets are that you will not find them.
The strategy of working with stencils isn’t to quicken a process, instead, it’s a method of creating structure, an imposed frugality of choices, a set vocabulary of elements with which to freely engage in instinctive play.
The measure of a work of art is the distance between the physical fact and psychological effect,
“Art is revelation instead of information, expression instead of description, creation instead of imitation or repetition. Art is concerned with the HOW, not the WHAT; not with literal content, but with the performance of the factual content. The performance – how it is done – that is the content of art.” Josef Albers
“The aim of art is a constant, and a continuous job to reveal visually the attitude of our mentality. And the less we disturb the influence of our mentality the more I believe we come close to the truth.” Josef Albers
Intentions, motivations, goals:
An off the cuff difference between intention and motivation is that intention is a course of action that one intends to follow, while motivation is the arousal of action by the giving of purpose. It’s a willingness to action.
Goals are specific, achievement focused, destinations. Goals aren’t actions, they are descriptive of a situation, a person arrives at their goal, they achieve a situation.
Intentions are lived each day and are independent of achieving the goal. (A person can have an intention without realizing a goal, but they could not realize a goal without the intention to do so.) Goals are external achievements. Intentions are about your relationship with yourself and to the world.
Goals are defined as the “state of affairs that a plan is intended to achieve”. Goals are what a person wants to do, achieve, or become. …
Motivation is what arouses and sustains action toward a desired goal. It gives purpose and direction to behavior.
Zygote Blum 