-------Order-------

The second guess gets tiresome. I'm pleased with myself to have cultivated some discipline, I am painting just about every day. In earlier conversation with a friend I told my dissatisfaction with what I view as polar inclinations of our culture- the drive to progress forward and the yearning to go back. I want to cash in my ticket with the latter ideal, seeing it in ways as the less harmful of two impossibilities, but I don't really believe in it. It's impossible to erase what we've already experienced, but I feel it in my bones that were just going too quickly, we were anxious to forget where we've been, resourceful and fast paced in the construction of industry & technology. I learned about the painters who worked in classical style to an uncommon result. I'm going in a different way- slowly considering traditional methods and results, but without the old structure, without apprenticeship I'm picking up tools randomly and learning at the cost of my comfort & habits. Right now I want to end up with traditional feeling paintings that are arrived at through basically untraditional means. Tradition chained us so long, even in me, I feel the resentment that leads to a break away. But we've had that, right? Numerous time, and we'll have plenty more. I want to present images that are unchanging, that are spiritual and human, industrious & uncertain, but not 'out there' or seperate from the world we live in.
These matters can be questioned intricately forever, because I wonder now and often times if the world I'm experiencing is common to the one your experiencing. Most fine art I encounter I feel repulsed by in it's haughtiness of individual expression and what appears to me as absence of meaning, and then worse a ring around the rosy song and dance that praises itself for this. But Who decides what is true? Why, we all do, with our lives in every act, thought, feeling & moment. I don't believe we 'create' truth, to me life is the experience of getting reduced to what we are. We guess and throw ourselves at various ideals but what is lasting has always been lasting, except perhaps after it has done its part. The artist is the middle man who works in private, steps out into the public glare, stares with fright at the mass, and then out of that, one person steps out, they receive the sign they are ready for, and they take it with them back to the private. So art should not just be someone expressing themselves & it should not just be a reflection of communal life, but an individual expressing themselves in such a way that someone else may look over and recognize themselves within it.