Category: My Art

Broken Sidewalks

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While I love to get out of the city and enjoy what people call, nature–it’s not my inspiration for making art. I have no interest in doing landscapes. Rather, I love broken sidewalks, weathered wood and concrete–patterns and colors that invite my eyes to linger and explore. That was what led me back into making art–gathering trash for assemblages.
I want my work to be like that for others–inviting the eye for an excursion, mostly undiverted by words, word-thoughts: a tactile, sensual, essentially visual experience.

This morning I finished what I hope will be the first of a series of sidewalk paintings, drawings, and prints. I also covered another half dozen older pieces with gesso, ready to paint over them with new work.

Of my accumulated work, I’ve been sorting them out. Those that have helped lead me where I want to go, and I feel are fairly strong, I’ll keep–and offer to people for supporting contributions. Those that have some merit, but turned out to be experiments that pointed in the wrong direction, I’ll give away–leave them in front of A-Space or on the street. Those that are weaker, and don’t represent what I want, I’ll paint over or destroy.

This is proving to be quite liberating. .

You Don’t Have to Be Crazy to Be an Artist… just maybe more than a little neurotic?

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Time to wrap it up for the day. I missed the bloodroot this year in my spring walk in Morris Park. Gone already.
But I started working on a painting–a series I hope– that I’ve been thinking about since I started making stuff again. Broken concrete sidewalks.
So far–it’s like nothing I’ve seen before. I need to do some sketches. If I were to set up an easel (I won’t), and be drawing someplace in public, peeps would come by and look, and say… wha the fuck is that? And I’d point down to where they were standing.
All of my considerable neurotic tendencies are concentrated and intensified in my making … “art.” Not in the doing it, while I’m doing it. But before and after. My only escape is to keep working on stuff.
Note: I said “stuff” … not “art.” Except in scare quotes. Evidence for above.
I really do wish it were possible … to do nothing else.

But not in this world.

G’night comrades!