2005-12-10 - 12:06 p.m.

Today's pile of words about my artmaking (an artist statement of sorts)

Woke up this morning knowing Matthew Arnold was right - we are all islands disconnected by the recession of the sea of shared perspective. Yes, came barrelling up out of strange dreams, of rooms crowded with familliar faces, and a Victorian poet in mind. But it makes sense.

Words are coins passed from hand to hand, and the person holding them invests them with meaning. How we use words to describe, to tell stories, shapes the stories themselves. Words become the bridges between you and I. Where is the truth - in the bridge itself? A compact between speaker and listener, between writer and reader?

Images speak to the prelingual mind, to the place where words are born. Still, depending on your experiences, and your ability to trust your own explanation of your experiences, you will get very different things from the images I create, than I get from creating them.

Literalism is dead.

I'm still emptying the Graduate School Experience from myself. The very-fast-cycle of Produce the Work, then Immediately Explain/Contextualize It. Represent. Getting off that hamster wheel takes a while. Yes I've been producing work and showing it. I'm only momentarily satisfied with it. Its too easily explained in words, much of it.

I'm chasing the ineffable, that perspective-changing work that, once out there having its own life, affects people...The way I was affected looking at Mark Rothko's paintings when I was nine, considering Picasso's Demoiselles D'Avignon over a three-year period in the '90s.

I have a day job so I can worry about producing Good Work. I struggle with the formulaic way I have to Explain It to Other People. In order to PR it, in order to Sell it. There's that hairy ape, literalism, again. The Words on the Wall of the Museum Gallery, aesthetic fascism. The language describing the work for people...get rid of it. Please. Let them experience it for themselves.

Sweep the words out, get them out of the way of the artwork.

Wait I forgot - we live in a culture that encourages mediated experience. Spoon feed spoon feed. Certainty. People like certainty. People like blue paintings of landscapes with famous historical figures in them. My opinions shaped by Personality X on the tee vee. How am I supposed to act? How am I supposed to fit in? Get in my essyouvee and drive to the show so I can tell my friends about it later...

Somehow I have to kill that cynicism. My friends help in that respect: Wow! People who think for themselves - they exist! But - the dependance on Theory to rationalize one's own experience, one's own work...

I've been making paintings in fits and starts over the last year. I struggle with the 'demand' for a 'cohesive body of work', and realize, I'm still painting for an academic viewer. I flip between the academic/literal work (which is like hooking myself to a plow, or digging ditches, to produce) and work that feeds me - the intuitive gestures of paintings that come from my body and my inner experience. These are the paintings I love to make.

Every experience has a map. These abstractions map inner psychological states, responses to underlying questions that drive inner aspects of my life. Repeating the question to myself as I paint, I apply the paint in as answers to questions - What color next? Where does it go? and let my arm paint the painting...I am very satisfied with the results.

Still, when I read that "abstraction is a hard sell" and remember the 'feminist' artists in graduate school telling me not to make abstract paintings*...aaagh. I'm still killing those critical voices.

Making artwork is digging, for me. Sometimes the dig is easy, sometimes hard. The paintings, the videos that come out of the dig are the symptoms of a process of exploration. I have to do this process, regardless of what else is going on in my life. That's how art chose me, not the other way 'round. I need the making process to make sense of my experieces.

Leap and the net will appear.

*The "feminist fascist's" argument against abstraction: We women artists have fought so hard for our voices to be heard, we have an obligation to produce Overt Content, to Tell Our Stories.