Wild Cards

Featured image: Sky, Earth, River

Where is your card? In your artwork? In your life? Do you have a wild card?
I sure have one. It’s my spirit, my unconstrained spirit, which is also my sense of freedom. These exist in the individual. Whenever I am challenged, I bring up my wild card, the individual.

A constrained vision for others is moral. Why? Because constrained visions usually come from others who want to control, govern the individual and put them in order.

Constrained visions for others hold others back and from reaching their full potential.

My unconstrained vision is a moral vision that leads to an individual’s vision for themselves. If an unconstrained vision is held by an individual who wants others to be constrained so that they, the individual, being constrained cannot reach their full potential – this I believe, is simply immoral. They are restricting an individual of their individual rights and their personal sovereign self.

The constrained vision limits high ideals. For me, high ideals include exploration and discovery that lead to better lives for all.

Most of my growing up years were constrained which is why this is so important to me. I wasn’t able to recognize my individuality until later in life. All of my teachers, with the exception of my kindergarten teacher, thought that they knew what was best for me and how to work with me based on their training. They were all wrong and it affected me for most of my growing up years. I just learned differently than most people did. Once I figured this out, learning was a piece of cake.

As individuals, we need to realize that we are all different in many ways. We need to keep that in mind when we think someone is wrong.

Multiples

 Featured image: Shoreline

The growth of something, an object or a concept travels through time and has a history. We know that as something travels through time it changes. It either grows or dies, depending on how popular it is and how we, as a culture, popularize something.

If the changes, growth or non growth determine something, which to some extent is determined by its popularity, does popularity determine how we know?

If that is the case would da Vinci ever have been considered a great artist? Would Picasso?
We adapt to our times, as does our art today? Multiples, multiples.

Reimagining History

 Featured image: Nature's Beauty

Rethinking History -

Recently when considering art exhibitions in which I would submit my work, I came across a call from an art center in California that was inviting “artists to submit artwork for Reimagining History. The idea of reimagining history is not new in the world of art and literature.” This art center went on to give examples of “works of artists such as Robert Colescott, Cindy Sherman, and Enrique Chagoya examining issues of race, gender, ethnicity, and political identity through their visual retelling of iconic images and historical figures. In literature, examples span from Herodotus' The Histories in 440 BC to Tolstoy's War and Peace to the contemporary Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter.”

What a grand idea and what an outstanding way to approach history! When I was in graduate school the trend was to rewrite and rethink history. I questioned the idea of rewriting history. It is something I am totally against. Things happen and they are written about. Artwork is created telling the story of what happened and histories are written. Yes, historians have a personal bias when they write. Yes, artists have a personal bias when they create, BUT …. that doesn’t change what happened during a particular time and place. That doesn’t change how individuals at the time depicted the events. Time can’t go backwards just because we wish or factually know or believe that perhaps a history or artwork was done with a particular bias. The only thing that can happen is that we write and create today how we think, know, believe and wish things had happened back then. We can create and write about the difference and move forward in our thinking, writing and creating with these differences in mind. We can’t erase time just because we wish that we could.

In art there is an excellent example of attempts to erase time. Robert Rauschenberg erased a work he owned by de Kooning. It is said that Rauschenberg was making a statement about how the tradition of drawing did not have to be the foundation of a painting. It was also said that Rauschenberg could not appropriate the work of de Kooning. Think about it, once the de Kooning was erased, whose work was it? And now since Rauschenberg and many others of his time made the point that the tradition of drawing did not need to be the foundation of a painting.

I rarely use a drawing as a foundation for a work. And when I think about history and the recent events in our current history that destroyed historical statues in the United States, I told myself, “That is no way to go about protesting how history was written!” I would prefer to think of history, and how it has been written as artists in the past have done, by approaching the past from the present and making a statement of how we can think differently.

My recent works highlight individuals, and how individuals, individuality, and independence does exactly that. My work reexamines and asks others to think about how individuals and the concept of the individual is thought about and I ask others to think differently about the concept of the individual.

The Mind Sings - Listen

 

Featured image: Your Mind Sings - Listen

one's own unknown

dream filled heart, hopes

the wonder of you.

your mind sings

listen

recognize the power

in your own life

let the light of you

the rhythm of you

sour

Two Things

 Featured image: Poppies and Roses

Take two things, put them together and create an entirely powerful different thing. That’s how I think about art. I am taking two things and creating an entirely powerful different thing.

Royce Ave

 

Featured image: Royce Ave

When I was six, I lived on a street named Royce Ave. My family had a small red house with a front porch and a garden in the back of strawberries. There was a little white fence around our yard. One of my most memorable memories of the house on Royce Ave was the sidewalk that went from one end of the block to the other end and around the backside to where our little red house was.

I learned to roller skate when I was six and those magical wheels on my feet took me lickety split down to my friend Sally’s house and back. I didn’t have a bike back then. For the longest time I couldn’t go beyond Sally’s house and Sally’s mom always knew when I was coming. Pretty soon my roller-skating territory went to the end of the block and back. The sidewalk wasn’t all smooth back then – there was a huge bump in the sidewalk where the one block heaved. I had to be careful and sort of hop over the bump. I learned that the hard way when I fell and really scratched up my knees and broke my nose. There were no knee pads or helmets back then.
The glory of moving quickly and getting down to Sally’s house and eventually around the entire block, and the liberty and freedom I felt was wonderful.

The Individual: America's Heart & Soul

 Featured image: Soulful Jazz Singer

“Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.”

“Everything is energy and that is all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you can not help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.”

"I am happy because I want nothing from anyone. I do not care about money. Decorations, titles or distinctions mean nothing to me. I do not crave praise. I claim credit for nothing. A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future."  Albert Einstein

The Individual: Americas Heart & Soul

Individualism, the rights of people, all people is a sovereign right in the United States.  The creative process belongs to a single individual creator. 

We all learn from others that have created before us.  We are taught how to think and how to create from those who have come before us. We exchange and intermingle our creative ideas with theirs.

No one can teach another how to be themself or how to think for themselves.  Even with all of the exchanges that have happened, it is still only the individual that can do that.  Otherwise, they are not unique and authentic. They would be working with another’s spirit and another’s soul, not their own. 

It is also extremely difficult if one is using the thinking of another to see individuals, unique, authentic individuals and their inalienable individual rights. Hence, my extreme caution when I see another that is not thinking for themselves but using the thoughts and thinking of another.  

Sometimes it is hard to find one’s unique self and soul.  But,  thinking on your own and not thinking the way that another thinks is what it takes. That’s why it is hard.  Sometimes, it is also hard to see America because so many people are using the thoughts, spirits, and energies of others and not their own.