It's true, a person has to be a maniac to make art. To be so driven not even to think about the consequences. The possibilities of no one looking at it, any one or every one not liking it.
To be so driven that your need to put your particular twist on what has been done again and again overwhelms the rationality of doing it.
Forget about paying the bills and cleaning the house (well, perhaps figuratively, not literally, but definitely, when working). The pleasure, thrill of creating a work of art is all that is important.
I have been pondering Jasmin's comment/question to me (in my January 2 entry) about the motivation behind abstract art, what's in the mind of someone who paints with no recognizable image.
When I was in art school, a group of us drove down from New Haven, Connecticut to New York City to see the exhibit of Sixteen American Painters (I think that was the title then), paintings by the Abstract Expressionist group, Kline, deKooning, Rothko, Motherwell, and others at the Museum of Modern Art. We were all so energized by the adventure that we were issued a speeding ticket. Seeing so much strong abstract art in one space was confirmation for me that this was the direction I needed to go, what I needed to do.
What goes through my mind is similar to what brought on that speeding ticket: the excitement of seeing what paint can do, how manipulating the paint creates something that has no immediate story to tell other than itself. How color, marks, texture can have a life that transcends the process of choosing and creating them.
I do have certain qualities that I want a painting to possess, qualities such as weight, mass, color. The particular form that takes is dictated more from what happens as I work than what I think I am going to make happen. One painting informs another, breeds the next one. They don’t exist in isolation. And it all works best when I feel I have stepped out of the way in the process. Wherever the road takes me.
Posted by leya at January 14, 2004 07:01 PM