I needed to create another work of art to share with you. I hadn’t especially planned for this piece for any length of time. In fact, I produced it just tonight in one sitting. I already had the material to make it. I already have scanned in a lot of the drawings and collages I’ve been creating for the last few months, so I’m not lacking new material to work with digitally. I just haven’t posted much of my art lately to my profiles online.
I find the blogs I’ve posted previously with artworks intimidating because of the amount I’ve written for them. I’ve been at a loss for ideas in literal form lately because I’ve been developing a lot of visual ideas in my sketchbooks. So there’s been less writing on my part going on here.
One way I’ve found to help mobilize my writing talents is to record my dreams and write them down. Writing is an action. It’s more of an action than thinking, to be sure, but less of an action than carrying out the actions prescribed in the words. Actions, such as scribbling or writing, can stoke the imagination into finding new inspirations. But if one doesn’t do anything about the ideas that occur, then the ideas are as good as lost.
Some people have thought of art as not creative, but more like just rearranging matter and energy that already exists. My take on it is that, if time is removed from the equation, then an artist really is creating something. In timelessness, an artist is at the moment of conception in the universe, thus he or she is co-creating with the beginnings of what we might imagine to be our universe. Measurements of time may be relative, but timelessness is everywhere because it has no measurement.
I titled this piece Developing to Save, first of all, because of the text in the background collage work; second of all, for the activities I’ve been engaged with in my art lately. I mentioned that I’m developing a lot of ideas in my sketchbooks to use for further future developments. I have this habit however of not going back to previous ideas when I want to have an idea to work on. I have a strong urge to always be developing new ideas. It’s like I can never have enough new ideas to work with. I feel like an innovator. I can’t get stuck in a rut of one idiosyncratic dimension for the rest of my life.
A role model who has helped me understand this urge is David Bowie. I’ve micro-blogged before how he was constantly reinventing himself for the new trends that would arise around himself in the music industry, in culture, society, and art. I think he often juxtaposed himself with respect to whatever current trend there was and produced a lyrical and musical commentary on it. Art is about relationships, really, and Bowie was constantly readjusting himself with new identities in the continuum of change.
This piece, Developing to Save, is an attempt to deal with a contradiction. Developing implies a state of change, and save implies a state of fixation. The traditional visual arts—not counting motion picture or animation—are about the fixation of ideas into visual forms. The images produced in the visual arts are snapshots in time, space, energy, and the artist’s peculiar perceptions of his/herself and her/his world.
This image depicts the curved horizon of a landscape in my mind with odd shaped trees evenly spaced on the horizon. The green I imagine to be grass below the horizon. Yet, it’s like paint, or wallpaper, that was once applied to a wall, and it’s rubbing off now due to time, wear, and tear. The background is a selection of paper collage I assembled and glued together last year. I’ve used some of it in other works of art I posted to my Art of eVan blog.
Art of eVan 