Firefly

I’ve been thinking about what kind of artist I want to be. After 45 years in the business, I think its time. Do I choose to respond to what other artists are doing successfully and turn myself inside out trying to beat them at their own game? Or dare I trod my own path? One would assume we might naturally choose the latter. But in defense of the reactive approach, where no man is an island and we can argue that we are perhaps only the sum total of those wonderful others, the influences of our lives, we have dared to allow into our psyche. I hope I am reacting to the masters who have come before and yes, to my esteemed peers, who are carving new paths and exploring new methods and approaches to painting.

The Skeptic

And here’s to the poor proactive artists, who believe they are paving the way. I say “believe” because in a very real sense, the brightest, newest ideas, are derived from something that has come before. It reminds me of when I had my gallery in Detroit. Every week or so a young artist would walk in, their eyes fixed to the floor, arms full of paintings they are certain are brand new and completely original. Why? Because they have never looked at any other art, so it must be original. Inevitably, their work was horribly derivative and amateurish. There truly is nothing new under the sun. All we can hope for is to do what we do, with more skill, depth and insight than what we have done it before. My work draws heavily on the masters, particularly the masters of light. My ideas are constructed from ideas other have attempted a hundred times over. My job is to ask what they may have missed, to find some twist and create my own tryst. In other words, my work is almost always reactive.

Perhaps it is better to think of the reactive and proactive not as opposites but simply as an ongoing conversation. We listen and we speak and as we speak, we listen. I ask a question that my work tries to answer. But the work sparks a question that then must be answered, or deliberately left unanswered. These are my best works. For instance, in Firefly, my question was how can I make the light of the firefly brighter in the mind of the child than any other light on heaven and Earth? This called into being realms that could not exist without the question. In The Skeptic the question has to do with shame and the price of guilt.