"Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one consciously, by means of certain external symbols, conveys to others the feelings one has experienced, whereby people so infected by these feelings, also experience them."
- Leo Tolstoy
Do it again. Do it again and again and again. And again.
What I want to say is something beautiful, but it only sounds repetitive. I am beginning to sicken myself. It's easy to give when all you offer is junk. By what right do I say that I have transformed this trash into art?
When I think back on what I have done, I see that I revisited the grotesque so many times because it was so easy. It is child's play to render an old, withered face with a crooked toothed grin. But to reach the sublime- that is a difficult endeavor indeed!
I know that there is a sweetness to ordinary life perceptible only under the optimal conditions. I call it the ecstatic ennui. This seeming paradox is really just a heightened appreciation of what goes on around you. An artistic representation of it elevates it to the sublime. Sort of like the idea behind a zen tea ceremony, of finding enlightenment within ordinary actions.
In the bakery section of Dorignac's, Three women reached for bread on the exact same shelf at the exact same time. Last Christmas, right before the break, a third grade boy idly hummed the melody to Frosty the Snowman on his way to the bathroom. The ugliest telephone pole on Metairie road is festooned with vines of jasmine in early May. There is harmony, synchronicity, and utter loveliness in all of the things we overlook. Why does this bring a tear to my eye?
I have attempted to find it on my own with my work, but I have always missed the mark. I perceive it in the art I admire, yet I have never made such work myself. How can I move others with what I do when I am not moved by it at all?
When I listen to the album, If You're Feeling Sinister, I am moved. When I see The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, trendy as it sounds, I am similarly moved. Perhaps nothing that I've ever drawn or ever painted has had the same level of involvement as record album or a motion picture, but by my own work I am never moved.
Sometimes it amuses me. Sometimes I giggle at naughty caricatures or visual puns, but it is a short-lived titillation at best. It never reaches the heights that I would like it to.
As today commemorates the 33rd year since I was extracted from my mother's womb by cesarean section, I lament that no great piece of art bears my name. I could say I am working for my own satisfaction, but masturbation also gets that job done. I could say that I work for the enjoyment of a small circle of people, but it becomes about little more than an inside joke. When I blew out the candle today, my wish was only for an idea, a single idea that wold enable me to infect others with the same feelings I have been infected by (to borrow from Tolstoy's definition of art), and to use that idea to steer me into a new period of creative productivity. Suddenly, I cannot bear to think that I shall never create something that can induce a feeling of sheer visual bliss within the viewer, that the reception for my work will always be apathetic and cold. I have to reach out to the world, to offer something up as a testament of hope for the human condition.
I want to create something that makes you hear music in your head when you look at it.
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