Flash Point: Artist Statement

The exhibit series Flash Point is conceived around the idea of physical,  social, psychological and economic boundaries.  The “art world”  reflects in some interesting ways boundaries that suffuse our larger social order.  

Some of the boundaries targeted are museum admission cost, the general public’s unease with visiting galleries, university, gallery and museum systems criteria for selecting what art and artists to promote as well as the cost barrier to owning original works of art.  Each single exhibit is made up of 12 to 24 oil and mixed media drawings on paper ranging in size from 5 x 6 inches to 9 x 9 inches unframed.  Each exhibit occurs outdoors in a public space.  All works are donated to the good home’s of interested individuals.

Artistic Standards

Over the past ten years, the art of landscape and garden design has become another passion of mine.  When I am not in my studio painting or at my writing desk, I'm often digging up a red maple or azalea I planted 3 or 4 years ago and moving it feet or inches to a more precise spot. Through my creative trials and errors, I’ve come to realize now what the Japanese have known for centuries-that landscape gardening is as much an art as sculpture or architecture.  

I ran across this quote by Anna Pavord concerning the garden designer Christopher Lloyd and I couldn’t help but wish we heard more of this type of reverence, seriousness and demand for high standards in the “fine arts” today.

"Over the years I have become more and more aware of how much I owe him (Christopher Lloyd) in terms of setting the highest standards for anybody who enters this field and taking the subject seriously and never losing excitement which you actually have about this whole process of gardening".

Anna Pavord, gardening correspondent and author

Science, Art and a Truth in Peril

Raphael School of Athens

Combative as often as cooperative, the relationship between art and science fuels thought, discoveries and shapes civilizations. Perhaps the most perfect symbiosis between the two disciplines evolved during the Renaissance.  In the course of the Enlightenment, artists and writers eventually broke from the perceived narrow rule of rationality to form Romanticism.

Positivism, “part of a more general ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, notably laid out by Plato and later reformulated as a quarrel between the sciences and the humanities" soon followed and postulated “that the only valid knowledge is scientific” (Eagan 1997).

Subsequently, Modernism in art, music and literature rejected the certainty of positivism as well as that of religious belief but reasserted the importance of intuition and the necessity of balance between an ideal objectivity and the subjective experience of the individual.

While the interrelation between scientific and artistic disciplines has often been contentious what binds them in their parallel trajectories is their common aim.  To know ourselves and our universe is the raison d’être of both art and science. Today as we confront a “post-factual world”  where disinformation is weaponized and disseminated on a global scale and truth is degraded to whatever people can be made to believe, the alliance of art, science, literature and all disciplines committed to truth must stand as bastion against a new dark age.

Reference cited: Egan, Kieran (1997). The Educated Mind. University of Chicago Press. pp. 115–116.

 

Art and the New Front on Free Speech

Artists have a history of being on the front lines when it comes to free speech.  It’s not difficult to understand the artist as activist.  An artist must by nature or training be critical.  Add to that the fact that artists are often forced to live on the margins of society where they experience intimately the broken parts of our civilization.  Also, to devote your life to art you have to be, at least a little of, a romantic. And for a romantic the ideas of truth and justice are real possibilities we must strive toward. 

The first amendment is the battlecry of artists because it is their weapon and means of protecting and disseminating truth. It is in a sense what gives them the freedom to be artists.  Some artists, to be fair, exploit the first amendment to garner publicity but that is another subject.  

In the 21st century we might think that the fight for free speech is only happening in authoritarian countries such as China, North Korea or Russia where an artist might be imprisoned for speaking out.  But in the United States the new assault on free speech is just as serious, only the strategy of suppression has changed.  

In this new environment, censorship is no longer carried out through threat of imprisonment. Technology has given us a more incideous method of suppressing quality, dissent and truth— drown it out.  Drown it out with information clutter,  orchestrated misinformation, fake news and propoganda. 

Although this means is less danger to the individual who speaks out, it is a greater threat to society because so many voices for truth, liberty and justice can be undercut so stealthily and efficiently.