Color is the seducer… Form frames the experience… Representation brings meaning.
The visual artist is individual who comes preloaded with a notable predilection to objective reality, who’s primary rational for their effort is the representation of the world as it is.
The craftsman, an individual who finds their self worth in demonstrations of their ability of unifying skill, utility, and form.
For the haptic artist, the experience of the artist takes precedence over the artist’s devotion to the subject. For these artists, reality is put through their own personal subjective filters.
Generally speaking, artists were believed to be self selective in these matters, drifting towards one end of the spectrum or the other solely at the whim of their own personality. At times, sofisticates would believe that skilled mememic representation trumped the playful massing of line and color, and other times the pendulum of consensus would swing in favor of the other. It was tha just that. It was black or white, one or the other. Craft wasn’t even a noted choice.
Things always change, even when no one in authority has asked for change. Artists have long shed their reluctance to mix their objective realities with their subjective experiences. Even the mixing of fine art and craft has became gentrified.
I’m very aware of where I stand on the issue. I’m easily bored by the skill for skills sake approach of both academic realism and formalized craft. Too often, the adherence to a standard or an ideal results in an object’s creation that is absent of any dither, there’s no looseness or play in the finished object.
I prefer the vocabulary of the haptic artist. A language that gives preference to feeling rather than precision. The feeling created by balance. The feeling created by color. By line. By rhythm. By harmony and discord. I willingly talk about a world that exists, but not as it appears. I dream that it is more than that. I believe the world exists in poetry.
The limits of a person’s language are the limits of a person’s world.
Zygote Blum 