How One Thing Leads to Another

This piece of artwork went through a considerable metamorphosis from its early beginning, illustrated in my April 9 post. I seem to be launched on a new series of paintings, and am feeling good about making art once again.

It is easier to explain why I stopped making art for six months, than to explain why I started again. I stopped because of the commercialism and superficiality of the whole art-making enterprise, because of the difficulty of finding audiences who actually take the time to look at one's work, and because art-making seemed fundamentally less important compared to the other things one could do, such as respond in a communitarian fashion to the big issues of the day: global warming, violence, and public health.

I stopped making art for long enough to remember that doing good is a lot trickier than it looks. People don't respond to pious lectures about what they ought to do, they don't do things that the times seem logically to demand, such as conserve energy, carpool, and start managing their land according to the principles of permaculture. Moreover, the community of do-gooders, the 150 people in town who can be counted to show up at the same music events, fundraisers, and lectures--are too pressured for time to engage deeply and collectively with the issues. My need for community and depth around sustainability is unmet.

What really made artmaking possible again was an appreciation of the gift aspect of art. I remembered that the process of making art was a gift to me. We all have our critiques of how society is. It is healing and affirming for the creator of art, to use artistic forms and media to visualize and bring into existence a version what beauty and wholeness could look like.