the fire

Locked out of the studio for the past week and a half has me self-destructing, and underscores that fact that I paint as much to survive and be human as anything else. Visited Charleston and got the painful reminder of the Art World I choose not to live in, albeit in micro chasm. The problem with what the internet has done to people's notion of proximity is this: everywhere now thinks it is the shit. Don't get me started on Greenville...where? exactly.

There is something magical and self-expanding to getting on a plane, bus, boat, car and going someplace that scares the bejesus out of you...preferably alone and knowing no one there. Those experiences let you find your core, the sum total of your own wretched self-ness and the excavation of "I". If you're not in it, you're not part of it, and in the end it is easy to complain, criticize and dismiss from a safe distance. that's why there is so much vitriol on newspaper blogs in the comments section.

I was fortunate enough to sit in on an improv workshop with my wife on Sunday and I was struck by something our friend Greg, the workshop leader, said afterwards. he said he wasn't interested in making decent theatre. he would rather it be horrible or brilliant than decent. the highest compliment I can give art is when it makes me want to make art. that's the real stuff. everything else is vanity and bullshit, no matter the price tag.

I don't care about anything but making significant work. i have realized that may take the rest of my life and it may come with numerous heavy prices in addition to those already paid, but it really doesn't matter. so much undone right now in the studio waiting for a thaw. rejections and dismissals aside, i answer to me and me alone in the studio. at least i know what i'm looking at and how to see. fits and starts come, always there are interruptions -well deserved and well-meaning, but interruptions nonetheless. i'm riding a razor blade in those perfect moments of focus when time falls away.

watching theatre students struggle with the unknown aspect of art was revealing. i forget why it's scary to pedestrians sometimes. possibly because I like the scary. I like the unknown, the potential for abject failure, the risk of soul and fortune. it makes me feel alive to watch/conjure this living thing called a painting...like flame, like fire one must tend it but it always wants to escape and consume or die out completely. the moments in the fire are the greatest moments of living.