A new blog for a new state of the union

I thought I’d start a new blog this year and change the subject matter while I’m at it. Since I’m an art student and need to spend all of my time thinking about that sort of thing, why not have my blog be a running dialogue? I’m not sure what that all will entail, but it will most likely be about the things that give me ideas and about trips to NY and Boston and Maine.

I ask myself all the time what use it is to be a painter . I hate to say it but I don’t have much respect for the profession. There are many reasons for this, but mostly it just seems obsolete to me. It is especially discouraging when I realize that any given person who walks into a gallery and looks around, doesn’t really think about what the artist was trying to say. Because, in thinking about my future as an artist, after I get past the initial twinge of nausea thinking about how people regard artists, I eventually reach an unstable resolution that has a lot to do with having something to say. I had a thought that maybe filmmakers were the artists that dominate this age and painters have been passed by, but I eventually dismissed this thought because I decided there are far too many ideas and granules of information in a film for the author to be attempting to make the same kind of impression on a person as a picture would have or something that doesn’t change that you can look at and think about for as long as you have the time. That is why I wish, as a painter, I could leave the same kind of impression on a person as a word does. I think that the jump from a picture to a film is the same kind of jump as from a word to a picture. A picture has an infinite amount of possible words to describe it and thus it has too much room for distraction to really hold a person’s concentration or guide them in the same path as the author. But a word, or a description can lead a person through another world in exactly the way intended by the author. I guess that’s what some people appreciate about a painting though; it can sometimes be interpreted any way the viewer wants it to be. And that is good sometimes, I, however would like to have some control over the effect my work has on a person, and knowing that paintings don't bring you through the story thought by thought like words do, I wish I could use words or something in my artwork and accomplish that elusive feat of convincing a person to consider what I have to say.

Words are much easier to communicate with than pictures, even though the picture's worth a thousand words, those thousand words all come at once and you don't have time to make up your mind about any of it so you just go on and leave it all. But anyway, the lack of resolution goes on..my one consolation is that a fundamental attribute of God is creativity so I feel like I am sort of doing what God loves to do. Anyway, painting pictures is such a small part of the things you can do as an artist. I think I'd rather make furniture, at least then I'd know someone was benefitting from it.