Why make art?

Making art takes up space, it is perhaps the ultimate act of self involvement to ask people to stop what they are doing and look at artists' work.

I think there is another possibility. As artists and performers, we are exposing something that would not otherwise be seen or experienced. Whether it is ultimately of importance or necessary, externalizing ideas in a form that can be experienced by others is how we, as interdisciplnary artists are known to each other and to the world. It is a way to enter into a shared experience without language, to find community more directly.

I desire balance and harmony. My studio work demonstrates a commitment to producing images that replicate this experience for the viewer. It is not possible for me to know how or if my work effects other people until it is experienced.

The response places the work beyond my personal voice. It enters without words and joins community in the experience or recognition by another person. Some of the first commissions I did in 1980 were for waiting rooms in Boston Hospitals. My work was placed where it would be experienced by the families who waited for loved ones. I finally understood the impact of my work when my son hospitalized at Children’s Hospital. The work becomes a healing, meditative space, where order is restored. In the abstract space I found some rest while I waited, helpless to do anything but wait. Art in this place says, you can wait here where there is light and color, order and space.

packet one

I managed to send out the first 40 pages of my thesis. People ask me what it is about. I hardly know myself. Contextualizing my practice, articulating some personal theory of art, my understanding of interdisciplinary art.. GOD knows what....else..

I feel like my passion for the moment is lost in this process. I am my own archeologist, art historian. diggin around. Trying to remember why I think this or when I saw this...

Last night I was showing the self portraits of an Alzheimer patient to my drawing class at CSMD. This artist continued to make images of himself after his diagnosis, and as he deteriorated.. so why do I like the ones at the end of the series? They are so clear to me.. in their abstraction, they have more room for possibility.. the more academic work has answered any questions I might have, where the later ones leave a lot of room for thinking about the nature of identity.. What does it even mean to make self portraits if we do not go beyond what we know about the face?