Sometimes I wish I were more of a poet. Then I wouldn’t be tempted to use the phrase “words cannot express…”, an expression that is really a cop-out of the time and effort it takes to find the correct words. A poet knows there is no direct relationship between words and feeling like a painter understands not to paint the urn but the light that it scatters and is filled with. And if the net result of even the best poetry is that sometimes words fall short (another cliché!) then that is the beauty of writing. But I think a good poet knows how to restrict themselves to only a portrait of sentiment—like a portrait of a person—and they are never concerned with explaining so much as drawing out something like its essence. I'm reminded of J.M.W. Turner’s never painting to show he ever understood what he was witnessing so much as “what it was like”, and like him, I think the best poets trace the faintest contours. Their marks never touch yet we somehow we can see the line, imagine the volume and feel.
My latest thoughts in studio are not inexpressible so much as all occurring at once. I think I still need poetry: The paintings. What few have been made. What medium/Why have I seemed to abandon even thinking about the possibility of other mediums. Although that’s not true, what about the plastic bags formed into seashells that you can put your ear to and hear the ambient sound of the stores they came from? The photos with vomit? Two ideas that keep circling in my head like sharks forever about to eat the diver that is my fear of either embarrassment or the possibility of never actually making either idea happen. What about what I've done already? What is true and what’s ugly?
There is the question of how to best express myself. That is the goal isn’t it? If all art is about death somehow, then showing knowledge of one’s own mortality—the ultimate “truth”—is always also self-expression. But that is not enough somehow. With the watercolors… a few reviews came back to me as surprise that I would paint something like that, and I immediately understood I was making anonymous paintings, which, even if any were beautiful, and the creation of beauty a noble pursuit (which is not always the case), the distilling of beauty from an empty paper and head was in some way untruthful, and therefore not art. Like all kitsch, they proclaimed eternal life.
God bless Banksy. My second favorite quote from him is where he says art cannot happen in a studio, sitting at a computer with Photoshop open, revising and cropping the final result, and my first favorite is when he says that saying “let’s just stay in tonight and get pizza“ is the death of all art. I’m not a nihilist, but I love pizza. I also hate protest, but not because there is nothing to be angry about so much as protest is an obsolete means of achieving anything. Banksy graffitis two men kissing or an oasis through a “crack” in a wall on the West Bank. And what revolution is he the author of? I don’t hate him at all—actually I love him—but the art, as always, is the flower budding from the soil of human civilization, and not the other way around. I hate it when I sound conservative.
The moral imperative is not standard, or a given. And modern art is a gift. No one is forcing it down your throat.
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