Month: June 2010

Here is a question for you. If you have some big thing happen to you in your life that looks like it is slamming the door   on a plan that you have, is it directional or is it just another obstacle?? How do you know???  Do you turn left or plow the obstacle down?

After much contemplation, I think you should plow it down with all your might and if you still can’t budge it then it must be directional.  That is what I am going to do with my France thing. Which means I have to sell more art in the next two weeks than I have over the past two months.

How am I going to make the market better?  I can’t.  But what I can do is make me better and pray. When I grew up, I was surrounded with brothers and sisters who knew how to fight to get things done. That is one thing my Dad taught us. How to fight for your dream. Well I am going to have to do that now every way I know how. I am going to take my own advice – from this blog. I wrote this blog and I better reread it.

What I have to do is not impossible but I have never done it before. I think this is an obstacle that will make me stronger. If I am wrong then it was directional but at least I gave it the old college try. I need more like an olympic try.

I need feedback on this blog.

photo by this person

When I was really young, I did not know there were any limits. I was 18 and I wanted to start a dance company. I would call it absurd ballet in America because I did not take dance lessons so I thought I would be a purist dancer. I thought knowing nothing was good.

I called it absurd because I figured that if I called it that it would give me license to do anything and still call it art .I had read Gertrude Stein and figured that if she could be called a great writer when she wrote almost intelligibly, and Man Ray could do bizarre things and get away with the same thing, I thought I could too. My high school experience helped me also think I could do anything too.

I marched into the Paramount Theater and told the manager there that I was going to do this great performance so he better get ready. Then I put an ad in the paper looking for dancers. I actually got responses from dancers to do a show at the Paramount. At that point reality kicked in and I freaked out and didn’t do anything about the dancers. I did not even have a studio to practice. I thought that would magically appear when I needed it.  Looking back. I wish I had attempted it. I do not regret everything I did up to that point and I think I could have pulled it off. Now that I am old I think that the pure synergy of that wild idea might have turned into something.

Like my webmaster has said before sometimes pure audacity has power. It is really shocking that I got as far as I did with the idea. I can’t believe that the manager of the paramount talked to me seriously. I can’t believe dancers called me. I wish I would have jumped. Ahhh I wish I would have jumped. I better jump now before it is too late. Too late being dead and that is the only time it is too late.

I did a painting to commemorate that experience.

photo is this guy’s wife.

We all are afraid of risk. I am thinking what if I do not sell really well in France and I have spent all my money to get there etc. What if I fail, What if nobody likes my work. So what/ Life is not about money. Life is not about being pain free, Life is not about safety. If you want all those things then stay home and hoard your money and stay  under the covers where it is warm and comfortable. Life is one hundred percent a risk. At least in our minds.

But here is the reality. We are not in charge of life. God is in charge of life. He can take you out in two seconds and then all your risk analysis is for nothing. He also can let something happen to you that you could never have foreseen. A tsunami, an earthquake, a flood, lightening, an aneurysm. You are done. It is over for you. No more time. Business Plan gone. The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray.

The moral of the story is Plan but do not worry. There is nothing you can do to really make life predictable and risk free. Nothing. Make sure you are going to heaven by trusting in the Lord because that is the biggest thing to worry about. The rest is small potatoes.

photo by this person.

NOthing in life is light. There is no incredible lightness of being. There is only incredible heaviness of being. Everything you do and say and think is recorded. People would like to think everything is no big deal. Everything we do. But unfortunately it is. What is an artist to do with that? Is every painting counted as something or is it no big deal.  What does painting say that is important.

When I was young, I was so offended by the notion that violent abstracts are no really worthy paintings. It seemed absurd to me that you could put morality on art. Art  was freedom of expression. But now that I am older and I hope wiser, I think that art does have a responsibility to not offend God. I think God is absolutely creative but I do think he abhors glorifying violence or ugliness for ugliness sake.

I have seen art done just for the sake of shock and really who cares. If you have to shock someone and hope that that is hip enough to market then there is something  wrong there. People hate to say something is not good in the art world. They hate it and won’t say it. I also think the when art magazines write about art and use this  unbelievably complex jargon, they are trying to make it sound so important and intellectual that you feel stupid if you don’t get it. Art should be SIMPLE in the deepest sense of that word.

photo by this person.

I got a comment on my blog from someone who said that blogging was like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum. Well I tend to disagree. I think it is just the oppposite.

The thinking process that is lightening fast in your head , that never is quiet, that is constantly changing and growing or shrinking but never stagnant is like being in an insane asylum. Blogging makes you bring out the voices and look at them and use them and organize them to make sense. Putting dreams on the mirror of the computer screen is helpful and sobering.

It is like a business plan for your life. Write it down, weigh the pros and cons, examine the pitfalls of going this way or that.

As I have mentioned here several times, writing down ideas is paramount to three things. a. getting more ideas, b. calming down the raging storm of excitement, and  being rational for a few minutes.

In my world rational is sort of the bane of my existance. I hate being rational because rational means somewhere someone is going to say no to what I want to do so  I avoid it. I like to think everything is possible all the time.

But this belief has gotten me pretty far.

The only part of rational I like is when it stops me from going too far and doing damage in any way. You want damage control in your life.

That is why i go to super conservative church. It grounds me and helps prevent damage.

Its a good combo.