The Studio (Annex)

I don't have exhibitions. I don't show, well outside of this site. The truth is I'm in a crisis. I've been making work half-heartedly. In The Studio I make openly and honestly, crafting ideas about my self, my humanity, my power so to speak, my individuality and my freedom. I guess I believe that being an artist can be more than just paint and paintings and galleries and museums...it can be about self discovery and the manifestation of an inner truth as presence. When I would draw I would not be thinking, just doing, whether it was a surrealistic image or a realistic still life. The process would be intuitive just like now. Even when I would make music or perform there was, I feel, a culling from the deep. My well of experience and intuition joining with an inner source nature to produce a song or musical collage or drawing. The same source seems to be in play when I do anything at all. My intention is to create 'art' that carries my spirit to new levels of understanding and learning. I want my love of learning to be my artwork. I would love to cultivate and develop a way of working here in The Studio and beyond that that focuses on in a way curating the opportunity to tap into the creative force, the one that yields art works but also lives, cities, cultures. I see art going in a direction that is more than what it has been similar to the metamorphosis it already has undergone going from cave walls to church walls to government walls to gallery walls and residential walls. And then also in the performative arts where dance for example goes from the street to the field to the ballroom to the hall and auditorium. Art goes beyond "the painting" " the sculpture" etc,. Art can become a procedural project as in the spirit of Christo having to get ordinances passed and committees to comply with the placement of orange cloth in New York's Central Park. I want to tap into the nature that 'ships' a work.

After some reflection it occurs to me that I am not very involved at all with the art scene but I have lost that love for the mystery of being an artist. Right now my work is of a transformative nature and a manor of raising self awareness. It is still about an expression but not so much about a mark.

So much work is out there. I keep my work close to my breast. My white whale is my own and I seek it tirelessly. I am just here now in what we call this body and on what we call this planet. Artwork CAN be about ideas and you don't need to be in the Met or the "big collections" to be a real artist! I'm doing an escape art like Matthew Barney and his Houdini routine except I have foregone the appeal to phenomena as necessary for the transmission of meaningful personal feeling. Of course there are words here and a certain type of phenomenon is necessary to write and read but I hope that my meaning is understood. Of course, if all artists were like myself it could seem like a very sparse even desolate landscape, artistically or otherwise. But then I think of being inspired, really inspired and it happens when I get a feeling from another person' words or actions like when singing a song or giving a talk and I realize that something is turned on in me by my identification with the feeling that that person is emanating. I think of Barney again and Marilyn Manson again. I used to watch the 'trailer' for Drawing Restraint 9 over and over again, with Matthew Barney in that small boat with a beard and coat moving through the water while music played and I just felt 'the white whale' in that moment. Technology with the human adventure pulling me in.

I wish to do that here