Author: wjacobr

Visual artist, poet, novelist, activist & Street Medic, living in North. Penn Name: Jacob Russell My blog is a confluence of art, writing, politics. my Art portfolio: Art-by-Willard.com

Crystals of Eternity

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Perhaps it’s like this.  The eternal and universal are not something that is already there, but rather are something that is produced.  Here, of course, I’m dancing with Badiou.  If it is true that the eternal and universal are something produced, then they are also wagers.  No one can know in advance whether something will be eternal or universal.  Only time will tell.  This entails that both universality and eternity will perpetually face challenges.  At any moment these crystals of time could fracture and shatter to pieces.  I am here, above all, thinking about works of art.  The eternal and universal work of art– song, painting, sculpture, prose, poem, architecture, etc. –is slippery.  From the beginning, it doesn’t fit with its time.  It’s irreducible and can’t be dated, even if we know its date and its origin.  Often it will create strife or controversy; which is to say, discussion. …

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Drawing is the Mother of All Visual Arts

 

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I sit in the El. I look at the man in the seat across the aisle. I see lines, mass… shadows. He leaves at the next station. A young women takes his seat. I watch, but from the reflection in the window. I don’t want her to think I’m leering at her.

It’s what I do when I’m drawing—working intensely at learning, doing studies from photos, coming back from figure drawing classes at Fleishers.

It becomes a mode of seeing. Seeing. Not representation. Seeing, and process. Like Chinese brush work.

Though most of my finished work is abstract, I think of drawing as the mother of all visual art. Nothing else schools you, trains you—molds your very brain to a way of SEEING… to an attention to vision, like drawing. Nothing.

I’m getting better. I’ve said this before. It’s an obsession with me. How 40 years ago or more, I gave up on being a visual artist. Because, I thought… I couldn’t draw. Not well enough. Not with the apparent ease of my mother, my uncle. I thought it was.. just ‘talent.’… and I didn’t have it.

I didn’t understand.. it was about work. Practice. Drawing bones. Learning anatomy. and just drawing… everything.

Looking back—I had the “talent” thing. But talent.. whatever the fuck that is, might be the difference between commercial skill, and “art”… whatever the fuck that is… but there’s no way to avoid the work. A musician… you have to train your fingers, your voice, learn scales—even if you don’t know the words for music theory.

I do constructions. From found objects. Nothing to do with drawing that you might imagine… but it does. It’s not different, but as one medium differs from another, as charcoal differs from pencil from pastel from pen and ink.. from paint.

Drawing is the mother of all the visual arts—because nothing, nothing so intensely trains the eye to attention, to see…. to see… to see

Every work of art, every poem… is an investment

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from October, 2010

I walked down Passyunk to 5th, and then to South and the Eyes Gallery. 42 years ago, Eyes had been open… maybe a year. A proposal to build an exit from I95 to South, fought and delayed for years, had driven away old businesses and made rents cheap: perfect for Artist Urban Pioneers like the Zagers.

1968, I walked into the Eyes with my wife, then five months pregnant with my oldest son. We left with a birth announcement, a wonderfully visceral silkscreen of a newborn, Oct. 29. Ezekiel Zager. A few months ago I came across this print and thought of how many photographs, mementos, drawings that I’d done, had been lost over the years. Not surprising if Julia and Isaiah had lost the last of these. Today, being the 29th of October, I walked the mile or so to the Eyes Gallery. I saw Julia, who now manages the business there. Said, I may have something you’d be interested in… and took out the print, gave it to her.

She thanked me… and remarked on my Spirit Stick, and seemed pleased. It was like returning something that I had held in safe keeping–but was never mine. I can visualize the image without it.

This is what life is meant for… to return what we’ve been loaned, without ceremony. No one ‘owns’ anything. We don’t always know to whom or where to return what we hold in trust. It’s a great moment, when we are able to to make good on the loan.

For me, every work of art, every poem… is just that. Returning what we’ve be given… for temporary safe keeping. The interest… how I’d understand the parable of the talents in the Christian bible… about interest on the talent, not as profit… but creative investment. We give back… with what we have created out of ourselves from the seed of the gift.

Art in Service of the Empire…

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When I’m intensely involved on new art, the pleasure expands way beyond the time spent physically working on a piece. I walk down the street, imagining what I can do next, experimenting in my mind. I try this color combination and that, discard one idea and take up another. Thinking in both images and words, and not quite either, the one flipping to the other and back again. Then when I get back to the easel, it’s all visual.

I feel somewhat conflicted. I love painting… working with color, but it takes money and space. I see work in museums that I admire, but am deeply troubled. They belong to the elite. The monied elite. They are the property of those who would own every THING and every ONE, who are destroying our public schools, growing fat on their perpetual wars, privatizing every last vestige of the public commons and with it, any sense of community not owned and made serviceable to their interests.

I’ve looked at paintings I’ve done, and destroyed them—because I could imagine them on the walls of corporate board rooms. . I play with the idea that I might go back to doing nothing but constructions… and that, with materials I find… not even Modpodge. Wire and nails from the street and junk yards. What kind of artist am I, that I depend on working within the supply and material conditions of a system I despise?

How am I any better–pining for a nice well lit studio–than those capitalist feeders who produce huge expensive works with grants and contracts gained by doing stuff to entertain the Empire’s ruling class?