All art is about choices…hundreds and hundreds of small choices…managing the muscles of the arms, hands, fingers…the choice of colours, of the curve or line or dot or spot. Sometimes, not always, agonizing. Because it matters. You don’t do these things to throw them away. They are the evidence, not only of your existence but how you chose to record its moments. You can leave them behind…hide them to be found later…but not throw them away. Some artists, painters…return to canvases and paint them over…change them. They’re allowed…but I choose not to. For me the discipline is part of what I learn about myself. When the thing is done, whether written or drawn or painted I want it to be the best articulation of what I’m trying to say that it can be at that time. Coming back to it a year or even a week later I know I wouldn’t be the same person…wouldn’t be talking or thinking about anything in quite the same way. My work is a gang of bugs in amber. I may not like the bug after a while but I’m not interested in digging it out of the amber and trimming its wings or lengthening its tail. I like it when people like my work…hate it when they call it a hobby…I’m not overly bothered if they don’t like it because I’m sure they don’t dislike it for the same reasons as I do. I respect that. I personally loathe some of the things I did years ago and even some of the recent drawings. I could choose to destroy them…and I have jettisoned some…threw them at the sky hoping they’d never come down…but I don’t know whether I’ll come around to liking some of them again…and I might even recall what I was trying to say…so I keep them. Mostly I hold the whole business of choosing, of choices…to be a sacred concept. Well maybe not “sacred” sacred…but pretty close.Freedom is the right to choose…isn’t it? The commerce of art is subversive…it invites you to pander to a taste, find a marketable “style” and stick to it. How Andy Warhol must have love/hated that fucking soup can…and Picasso must have known that Guernica was the end of the line. After all he’d been locked in “blue period “jail by dealers who couldn’t get enough of that stuff. Maybe it’s all an egotistical delusion…this elevation of choice. We all make choices a million times a day…and we all live in a world where the choices are limited by a multitude of factors. Yet, there is magic in art…in poetry …in music…in dance…in war. Oh? Yes. It’s the magic of inexplicable choice. Is to be enlightened to know why you’ve made these choices? I think then that enlightenment is finally unattainable. Of all the things…all the choices I make, the ones related to my artwork are the most accessible. It’s there and I can look at it and ask myself over and over …why this colour and why that line? And most amazing…most astonishing is that the answer doesn’t matter as much as the question.
Blues: May 2011
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