Musing on the muse
Yesterday I bumped into an artist I haven’t seen for a while. He asked me how my painting was going, I said fine, I was re-thinking some things. He replied by saying that he couldn’t re-think his work, that it was his ony source of income, and that he was more like a factory.
So, I’ve been taking this in, understanding how this could happen; he has a product and it is a product in demand. He knows that if he keeps making the same sort of thing, he will have a paying audience; he’s become dependent on his product, feels he can’t strike out for fear of loosing that audience.
Then, I watched a wonderful video on Jim Dine, who has over the years explored painting, drawing, printmaking in many variations. In this video he is working on sculptures in the context of walls that he has his poetry. Two very different ways.
Re-thinking my work means to me that I keep some of the things that I have been working on in the past year and a half, which I see as smore deliberate, painting more from photographs I’ve taken, keeping certain images, staying with images of water, allowing my work to get more specific, and now wanting to flow more into unknow territories, places that might not be as tidy but that allow me to explore the boundries that I’ve been working with. An endless flow between the unknown and the known, the ebb and flow, at least in my current phase between Landscape and Abstraction.