WHAT’S YOUR ART ABOUT?
I am often tempted, lured even, to respond to this good-hearted question glibly: it’s about life. In fact, as I have sadly discovered, my longer answers rarely satisfy. I find most artist statements either incomprehensible or silly; even, I am embarrassed to admit, most of my own. An oft used attempt: “my art attempts to be an embodied re-arrangement of God’s good creation into a visual metaphor” was more satisfying to me but still elicited the tell-tale cryptic smile and a sudden change of subject. Most often, the questioner quite legitimately wants to compare what he or she saw when looking at my prints with what I intended-in much the same spirit as you might score a test. We all want to get it right-have the answer. Although some of my art demonstrates these kinds of clear testable “messages,” my current judgment places these same pieces in the “less successful” pile. Unfortunately, my “authorial intent” is becoming at once more as it should be while simultaneously becoming more difficult to place in easily discussable categories. This is my best current short answer: my art is a marker; a visible and hopefully beautiful artifact, a temporary end point in an ongoing imaginative/physical process of understanding.
My art, and naturally I think all legitimate art, is less a means to articulate a complete meaning or conclusion I possess prior to my labor than the very means of coming to a better understanding. I can fairly say all my pieces are provisional, never quite complete or containing an entire story. I sometimes think some of the work is exhibited without my having come to any conclusion-perhaps I was not insightful or smart enough or, and here dear reader proceed at your own risk, an answer was not possible. Artists are not often prophetic, at least not in a Biblical sense. They are, however, craftsmen and women who are committed to the notion that with imagination, a meaning and truth or even beauty are to be found in the physicality of things. The great painter Henri Matisse once said, ”I want to make beautiful things.” Artists work with physical materials that can give great sensual delight. But more than even this wonderful end, good art often points both the artist and the viewer toward an embodied truth much more nuanced than simple concepts or sterile theories, but also mysteriously provisional. Even admitting the provisional, incomplete, and mysterious character of an art piece, we may miss the important point-it is in the active process of making the art for the artist or viewing the art for the observer that understanding happens and ends are discovered. If we fail to grasp the necessary incompleteness and uncontrollable momentum of the process we may not trust enough to see our way safe through the fear of failure, the frustration of dead ends, and the reality of our limitations to nurture our necessary but stunted imaginations.
So what is my work about? Sometimes my prints are a result from my wondering if I can make the materials do my bidding. I freely admit to having made art simply to please others or impress. Some art is made to satisfy narrow academic concerns or pay bills. But as I grow older I think it matters less what my actual myriad of tangled motives for making art are. (If, in fact, I have enough self-awareness to accurately do that job) What does matter is that I must carefully protect and nurture the compulsion to know and imagine. Hopefully, I make clear and beautiful “maps,” art artifacts of this imaginative journey: understanding myself; my loved ones; the crazy world we live in; my spiritual life; those pesky unexamined presuppositions; my sins; unanswerable questions; pain; silliness; evil; laughter; joy and if I am lucky, very lucky, a small glimpse of a far greater glory that is to come.