Vulnerabilities Of Truth

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable… A quote by C.S. Lewis.

The notion of being vulnerable might sound like weakness, but knowing the vulnerabilities exist and embracing them fully makes a person strong. To be vulnerable is to be real, for even the strongest, such as tigers, are vulnerable. In the series One Hundred Years Of Solitude, my art focuses on certain themes central to our emotional and social existence and what makes us human.

The painting is not a depiction of a fantasy. The subjects can be interpreted as metaphors for the fragilities of life — maybe not actual tigers crossing our path, but rather the impediments, emptiness, imminent dangers, deaths, and waning memories, that we all, if we’re being truthful, must inevitably encounter in life, and through which we must make decisions and push forward.

Detail.

Detail.

Detail.

An otherworldly realm

I love texture in art, even the most subtle brushstroke that reveals the painting was created by an imperfect human. As machines continue to infiltrate our lives and change how we operate, where we rely on technology and computer processes to make everything more efficient, it is easy to always expect people, society, and relationships to function in similar predictable ways. Nature, however, is not always predictable. Painting is not a digitized flat image on a screen. And it is the imperfect nature of humans and their attachment to art that ignites a fire where computers cannot access, in an otherworldly or spiritual realm. 

This painting continues the Intermission series. The series is about the spaces in between the beacons of our lives. For example, author Stephen R. Covey writes: “Between stimulus and response lies a space. In the space between stimulus (what happens) and how we respond, lies our freedom to choose. Ultimately, this power to choose is what defines us as human beings. We may have limited choices but we can always choose. We can choose our thoughts, emotions, moods, our words, our actions; we can choose our values and live by principles. It is the choice of acting or being acted upon.”

 The above picture is a detail of the surface, and the below is the final piece: Intermission XVII, 36" x 48", acrylic, clay, and epoxy resin on canvas over panel, 2018. 

Dude, stop being so serious

With this piece, I turned a doodle into a painting. The purpose was to create something, well, humorous, while also retaining something more than just a punchline. 

I am sometimes annoyed by the overwhelmingly vague and grandiloquent language used by many folks in the art world to legitimize certain artworks. If they can create enough confusion by linking inexhaustible theories to such language in their art of art-writing, using overused words such as juxtapose, banality, and utilize (instead of use), then I suppose many people think they are smart and unquestionably correct. 

Why is the art world so serious? Is it because of the millions of dollars being exchanged by the few financial elite over a handful of contemporary artworks? Does a work of art really need to be valued as though it's a cure for cancer? 

Here's a middle finger. And the art police are chasing. Take the Ball and Run with It. 18" x 24", oil and acrylic on canvas.

Philosophy Of The Eternal And Universal

How to create art that is timeless? I think it must represent the eternal and universal. In my endless mission to create more meaningful work that transcends cultures and borders, I went back to a few philosophers for guidance.   

Although it appears that Arthur Schopenhauer was a cynical sexist asshole, he had some interesting thoughts about art: 

The deliverance of knowledge from servitude to the will, the forgetting of the individual self and its material interest, the elevation of the mind to the will-less contemplation of truth, is the function of art.

A work of art is successful in proportion as it suggests the Platonic Idea, or universal, of the group to which a represented object belongs. The portrait of a man must aim, therefore, not at photographic fidelity, but at exposing, as far as possible, through one figure, some essential or universal quality of man.  

For example, tragedy may take an esthetic value, by delivering us from the strife of the individual will, and enabling us to see our suffering in a larger view. Art alleviates the ills of life by showing us the eternal and universal behind the transitory and the individual. 

The title of this painting is Tell Us Where The World Went. Over the summer of 2017, I camped in and just outside of Yosemite with some friends. I took a photo of them and used it as a reference for this painting. Only a few days after we left, a huge fire broke out and destroyed the area and thousands of acres and homes. The year 2017 is going to prove devastating with regard to wildfires. 

Tell Us Where The World Went, 36.5" x 48", oil and acrylic on canvas over panel, 2017.

Note: The title of this piece comes from a line in The Road by Cormac McCarthy, p. 166.