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Posted on 1/20/2020 5:01:11 PM
By Donald Fox
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Earth Awning
Artists task themselves with interpreting their experience of the world around them. This often includes the imaginative world within as well as that imagined world projected outward. An artist’s vision comprises the felt, the perceived, and the imagined that is expressed in whatever art form is the chosen language of that artist.
Often art has been suggested to be a lie in order to tell some truth about existence. Stories, for example, are inventions of the writer’s mind, but characters can play out their perceptions of their world and in so doing represent philosophical, emotional, and psychological depth that convinces the reader of the truth of that fictional world. The lessons that characters learn or fail to learn enlighten readers who now gain enhanced experience of the literary world, the world of art, and the world from which the art sprang. All art does this in some manner, and it is the audience that benefits when fully engaged. Some artists gain from their own insight, but others are consumed by the brightness of the muse that guides them.
The power of art for some is likened to the goddess that is both creator and destroyer. Does the artist sacrifice for art and give him or herself willingly or is there a devil’s bargain with power beyond the artist’s control? Is the price of immortality too high? Sadly, we may never know, but for whatever suffering that artist may experience, something lasting graces the world.
Posted on 1/5/2020 4:48:54 PM
By Donald Fox
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The fifth day of the new year and so far I have not made any paintings. Instead, my time and thoughts have been occupied with completion tasks, preparations for returning to work (school), planning for work on the house, dealing with health issues, strategizing for taxes, and, always, thinking about art, which these days includes thinking constantly about the state of the world. It is said that art is always an expression of its time, and in hindsight, perhaps we tend to simplify the influences that have affected this or that artist, place some neatly within their respective period, some represented as ongoingly relevant, some pushed aside as less important, and a few rediscovered as the shifting lens of history compels one generation to understand its present by reconsidering its past. Present and past are always bound together in a work of art.
On one level, an artwork is a chronicle of its subject but also of its own making. Landscapes portray particular times and places unless fantasized or otherwise imaginatively manipulated. In some cases, the landscape is simply the means by which the artist exhibits his or her style of representation, his or her emotional response, or his/her attitude or philosophy. A finished work lives in the present moment of whichever viewer acknowledges its existence. The work’s origin may be tied to another time period, but it always surpasses that and the artist who created it. It is continually renewed by a new audience and new interpretations. But isn’t this what we do on a daily basis? We think we have continuity when we actually create anew from memory and whatever icons we previously made into substantive form.
