ART IS

ART IS  (In 12 Steps)

1. All art is personal, both for the artist of individual constructs and as an avenue for those who approach individual pieces.  

2. All art originates from and extends toward a sense of place and time.  Time and place are parts of our art as much as materials, technique, and misunderstanding. There has never been a sentence written or spoken, a painting painted or a dance performed that didn’t have at it’s core, specific information about time and place, delivered in a personal way by the artist. 

     (Hindoo Basin Old Growth, looking south)

3.  Materials define the boundaries of any art form.  If we don’t work toward understanding and respecting those materials (their character, limitations, manufacture and essence) we are destined, as artists, to fail. 

4. Freud was right: The elemental urge of the human spirit is to return to those assumptions we formed as children. That past, however we view it, is our ethos and the fiber of the artistic content in any expression and the point of departure in all things us.

Toltec Warrior

5. Art is who we are, anything less is imitation.  We don’t create from time to time, we create every minute of every day or our creations will be lacking in proportion

6. Art is cultural and therefore expressed as traditional content and rebellious challenge within the dictates of human actions and ethos.

7. The forms of art are related both by contrast and by similarity. We learn from each form of expression more about the others.  An artist must participate in many forms of expression to understand any single artistic experience or product.  The challenge for the artist is expanding context and embellishing counterpoint

8. Each artist must define their own art while defining art for themselves.   Art is our biography, it tells us who we are, it locates us in the universe, and from it we derive the only meaning possible There is no universal marker within the definition of art just as there are no two trees with the same given name. 

9. The market for each artist is unique and integral with the artist’s experience.  Artists are molded over time by their art and their statement resulting from that shift toward oblivion requires a platform defining those differences.  Art’s place in the public market is not necessarily relevant to the expression of individual pieces; only an artist can judge their own construct.  It is to others to feed back to the artist the connections and limits of their appreciation.

11. Humankind can only evolve individually or in groups when they recognize and nurture the artist within.  We grow when we recognize that everyone is an artist and our art is our charted course of self discovery.  The act of returning home servs to establish the topography of self and helps us understand from where we really have come.  Thus all art is self portraiture, and the mirror we approach as we abandon the past. . 

12.  The language of an artistic form is how we accept the challenge  suggested in interpreting form.  There is no good or bad art, only the intensity that the artist imparts to the personal experience of extracting expression.  We must understand the language and accept the challenge inherent in the promise of unexplored form. This is the metaphor of chord and discord, harmony and dissonance,  acceptance and rebellion, duality and duality. 

(Stone tablet in the Hindoo Basin,,, what does it say? not sure, I don't read farsi)

AND, as if that weren’t enough:

13. The most important construct of the artist is crafting a body of work.  Dedication to the building blocks is more important than a personal vision of the body of their work or a fascination with individual pieces

14. Honesty (the absence of illusion) is the most overrated virtue of artistic creation and has little meaning to the individual artist.  The challenge is simply to drop the illusion that we create anything or are able to “know” what it is that we are up to. If you purge illusion and nothing remains, grow potatoes/mh.