Making Art is a process of discovery, a journey into memory, fancy, a mind both unconscious and aware. Emotional and sensory experiences abound.
Playful and experimental, disciplined and unruly, an artists toil resembles archaeology and the digging starts with personal.
The process is magnificent, yet merciless. It ought to be healing. It is an act of love, lust, despair... It is obsessive, passionate, hopeless, riddled with pain, stolen from time... at times a choice, at others a must.
While unfolding, an artwork transcends personal, it becomes political. The meaning is ascribed, intended or not. As Rorschach ink blots, it calls for projections, unpredictable, unnerving and unavoidable.
Art has long been about freedom, freedom from, freedom to, freedom for... both for and from self-expression.
Liberated from didacticism of religious figuration, and the propaganda of social realism, giving a viewer the same freedom the artist aspires to, abstraction is both political and lyrical.
It comes from the Achilles Heel
Abstraction can reconcile a discord between formalists and structuralists, allowing a response and aesthetic experience to the former, and a process, mixed media, references and communication to the latter, a communication with, rather than a communication to.
After deconstructing became an Art paradigm, the analytic breaking down reflecting the fractured society, when our mere survival is in question, what is an artist to do?
Continuing the destruction is - pointless, reconstructing what was - misguided, reflecting what is - redundant, expressing the frustration - expected, inventing escapist reality - a new trap of irrelevance, employing AI - the trap of novelty relevance...
And what of the trap of bile-spewing divisiveness of social media, leading the splintered humanity toward extinction? Will the self-hating haters hate us all into the Earth's oblivion? Is there hope for the possibility of a future?
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An allegorical method of Art, as a blueprint for constructing anew:
Not idealized as geometry, or simplistic politics, the pieces imply an uneasy complexity, symbolic of inclusion and integration. The long lost vigor of subversive reductionism run itself into a dead end, a revolutionary self-destruction. But Art must go on, painting and all.
Creative thinking is synthetic, the constructive amalgamation eclectically embracing what still matters of yesterday, forging a gestalt of today, a dynamic assemblage of fragments, unfolding into the possibilities of tomorrow.
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The rebellious artist, growing into the productive adult, still insubordinate, always nonconformist, curious as archaeologist, still a psychologist, a woman, an immigrant, a widow, a parent... digging to discover how to construct in this fleeting moment, and another, and any....