Current Painting Themes

A taste of some of the current themes bumping around in my brain as I start off down this long and winding road (well hopefully not too winding): "A darkness emanating"; "suggested ecstatic mental states"; "the transferrence of enlightenment" ... yes, heavy much? (Light and airy isn't really my style, don't know if you could tell.) "Magical Dieties in Poses of Divinity"... indeed.

But aren't all artists in some way overly profound about their work? (This is about to be the start of some unappreciated criticism, I can tell.) We're all so lofty and verbose when it comes to our artist's statements -- what we exorcised from the undulating bowels of our turbulent psyches, how the meaning behind the work is open to the reader's interpretation (it's always open to the reader's interpretation, because we learned early on in Art School, well not in my case, but in open critiques that the minute you announce a work's "meaning", all discussion ceases. Defining your art always becomes the death of it.), and we've all been this intensely dedicated to drawing and painting since we were at least 3 and a half. Every artist was a childhood prodigy.... Don't you even!

But that's sort of what the institution of the comtemporary art world revolves around, and that's what your decidedly overpriced art education instilled in and demanded of you. Of course I went to a university that was about as conceptually oriented as it gets (as opposed to commercially oriented). It was entirely unimportant what was on the page, as long as the statement in some way justified it. My teachers scoffed at my efforts to perfect the style and craftmanship of my work. There was no place for anything outside of the over-intellectualized concept piece, preferrably in the form of mixed media and/or installation, "ephemeral" in nature, "reappropriated" from something, and "juxtaposed" to something else.

I remember being 17, in my first semester in college, taking a 2D foundations class, our instructor showed us his series entitled "Fucking Jesus Christ", all terrible, atrocious, literal stick-figure renderings of the artist and Jesus in coitus, presented as some sort of ironic twist on Christianity (but read more like repressed Catholic guilt). For an assignment I drew the cover of U2's album, "War", didn't actually have any sort of profound reason for doing so -- I just liked the picture, and he failed the piece. "You haven't added anything to it, you just copied it! Don't you realize the political significance of that album? The context in which it was first released? This image carries with it a specific contextual framework and if you don't consider this you're just ignorant!" The thing was he was right. Can't say I liked the guy, but he was right.

Ironically, I see works reappropriated all the time, especially within the low brow world (high brow wouldn't make this mistake), without consideration for the piece's original context. And yet, this flies, contrary to what my instructor would have had me believe. I guess he figures "Fucking Jesus Christ" will make its way to the Guggenheim one day -- maybe if his artist's statement is convincing enough.