Notes on the Sources of Art

This piece, a cross-post from Horizons of Significance, has grown during the writing, pushed ahead by the ambition of its title, only slightly modified by the insertion of the word “Notes…” I’m resisting the urge to break it up into my customary 1,500 words. I need to break that habit as much as we all need not to get too comfortable with the bite-sized nature of blog posts in general, a “rule” I’ve already stretched with my “average” post!

I’ve had this gestating inside me for a long time. Somehow it has surfaced now, with the catalyst of a post by Achille Mbembe, at the height of the “Dog Days” when we’re all distracted and feeling a bit lazy… So be it! I hope you’ll give it a look, and perhaps save it for later when crisper air brings renewed appetite. This may be as close to a “Manifesto” on Art as I come! So with some trepidation, here are,

“Notes on the Sources of Art”

Banks Schooners

I’ve spent my adult life in the shadow of the Banks Schooners. Growing up looking out across one of their greatest harbors as the dwindling number and growing decrepitude of their bastard descendants, the Diesel powered draggers followed by the ungainly modern trawlers, left the sea as bare above as they had the waters below.

The following is an excerpt from Something for Nothing. A reluctant rum-runner contemplates the schooner he loves and feels he’s betrayed.

‘There’s a dimension we don’t understand…”

In Stephens’ & Swan’s biography, deKooning,

(Milton) Resnick said,

“There’s a dimension that we don’t understand. In other words, if you have a landscape or an interior you have space. You can deal with it in terms of image or what-not. But you can’t really understand what paint is doing. Paint is doing something that you ask it to do in order to get the nose on somebody’s face. The paint also does something that isn’t the nose on the face. What it does is fascinating. It’s a new geography.”

Drawing Distinctions

Another cross-post from Horizons of Significance,

The following is an address to be given at the first session of a class at a school that as far as I know does not yet exist.  Nor do I know who the students might be, or their circumstances.  What I do know is that I’d like to be there, at the front of that room, confronting their eager or timid faces, with the prospect of a long series of sessions to follow, and more after that.

Lilac Blossoms

It’s that time of year…

This new painting confronts these blooms visually. The following essay cross-posted from Horizons of Significance riffs on the same topic,

*

A friend has asked me to meditate on an interesting question, well phrased,

“What is the origin of originality?”