Above: sunlit detais of new works in progress
The studio is full of new things that have been taking shape for a while now. It's a continuing project that I hope to be ready to show at least a part of in a couple of months. I'm still figuring out some practical aspects such as sealing the opbects and how to best display them.
I feel like I have something of a roadmap that's subject to change all of the time. I think I mentioned it previously, but these pieces straddle the line between painting and sculpture, so my learning curve is kind of steep at the moment. I'm learning a lot and making progress on a lot of fronts. My need now is for more funds so I can get materials in the amounts that I need them in. In the meantime, I keep working with what I have. It's what we do as artists and human beings, we adapt.
Things feel alive.
I was in bed this morning, trying to get back to sleep after waking up way too early. It was still dark and probably around 5am or so. I was trying to rid myself of some bad thoughts or at least put them somehwere out of the range of my immediate thoughts. What happened is I started thinking about the archiving that I've been doing and how it's become more necessary as I move into later stages of life. I'm only 60 (don't ask me how that happened so fast...) but as we know, tomorrow isn't guaranteed to anyone. Getting more serious about legacy matters has been on my mind for a bit and I'm slowly starting to get things in order.
The thought that struck me in the early morning hours was that art is of and for the future. Let me try to explain a bit here. To me, the making of any kind of art sparks a kind of hope. The kind of hope that points to a belief in a tomorrow of some kind. To make art is to look towards having a physical outcome from an abstract idea. The making of art is an alchemical process by which thought combined with manipulating various materials produces outcomes in physical and mental forms.
The transferrance of new ideas to physical vessels, be they paintings, sculptures, films, books, etc... where they are uploaded to the viewer has to stand on a belief in a future. The very act of making anything supposes that there will be at the very least, an object to view or hold somewhere in the near future.
I've been thinking about this in relation to my own work. Many times, I'll start making an idea come to life in some form and don't really understand what it might mean nor exactly why I'm making it. I just know that I want/need to manifest this idea into a reality somehow.
When I was thinking about archiving my work this morning, I was struck by the realization that my work is for the future. Hopefully, enough of it will be around after I'm gone for future generations to see and maybe study. Whatever the work means to me won't matter, it'll be there for others to experience and bring their own meaning to. That happens now when any artist shows and/or sells their work. It'll still have certain meanings for them, but the public comes to it with their own ideas.
This is why I insist on not saying what meanings viewers should get from my paintings. I like to state certain influences, but not direct meanings. As I said above, I often don't really know where images are coming from and what, if any, meaning they have. Meanings often reveal themselves over a period of time and even shift for me after a wnile, so I don't like imposing particular viewpoints onto viewers.
Art really is for the future. We're constantly learning and interpreting more from past artworks and that will continue with what's being made now.