These past few days I've been ensconced with commissions, but I felt the fact that I gave myself some studio time to begin a new piece warranted an update, so here are the beginnings of my next skull in the series.
Distracted from my mission, the yardstick of milestones has plagued me the last several days.Its the usual guff that reminds me of the leaps and bounds that former paragons had achieved at half my age. Picasso had completed his Blue and Rose periods, set the world of new isms alight with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and was a few years short of Guernica by the time he was 40.Having broken ground with albums such as Ziggy, Low and Scary Monsters, Bowie's career was already in creative freefall by forty.
And yet, I console myself that Henry Miller didn't write Tropic of Capricorn until he was almost fifty, and Goya (the greatest artist of all time imo) didn't do his best work with the Black Paintings, until he was completely deaf, and half mad in his eighties. I imagine its relative, propelled by impatience for some kind of recognition and an appetite for utterly undistracted emergence. Not that I hold myself in such esteem you understand, I shrivel in such shadows, except...blah, blah, blah-no answers here-move along.
In the midst of keeping a roof over ones head, I let my attention wander to a biopic on Rauschenberg today. He likened art to trickery,literally consigning much of contemporary art as a blag with that knowing grin of his. If only Vincent had known. I often see Vincent as the ultimate martyr-posthumously, art would only ever be the contrived suffering of Ron Ethey or the shabby little suicide of Rothko. Even Pollocks death seemed paint by numbers by comparison. Fuck you Vincent and your miserable stereotype. Fuck you Rauschenberg and your privelidged cynicism.
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