Abstractions are what? Art is pointless profound matter pursued to mastery? Is it mine to define for you? I stepped into ceramic sculpture interested in beautiful objects. It was a technique, a craft, and the concept had little to do with anything as far as I knew. This was marginal artwork to academics, it was only process and aesthetics and that interested me. Naturally, I would resent that implication and rebel by agreeing with them. A punctuated level of craftsmanship would become harder to ignore for myself and the opposition. There was a novel sensibility to ceramics...I felt old and was 18....it had an ancient place inside a part of me. I decided nothing except that beauty was my voice and let process and instinct pull at its own will. The art was the surrender and had much Taoist spirit as I was finding it easier to let the path find me. Easy got harder to define and intellectually the pursuit of new process was the difficulty I needed to make the work easy again. Inside, the voice of a concept was thriving and my work was becoming more complex and bizzare. It was abstract and marginal to the voices of my colleagues but now it was insincere and emboldening. The arrival to nowhere was special and the confounding became intentional. I know this sounds heady but it really got me thinking of art as a relationship that would need to endure time yet remain interesting. Aesthetically, I found a mathematical harmonic was what made music and colors work together. The natural world had an inescapable interval and proportion found in Pi. A discovery of beauty in these terms would allow an attraction to pull in more people but they would never know why. The curiousity was the other essential in the art that would last. The binary would put sharp and soft, ancient and future, organic and geometric, order and chaos into abstract yet referential forms and the dualities would keep the forms from stagnation. Aesthetics was not just beauty it was a coded and far less subjective idea to me. Manipulation of abstractions to a harmonic that I would never admit to became frustrating to the high-brow bullshitters that were interested in the work. There was a confounding elegance that was not reduced as easily. I was asked to explain my ideas that inspired my pieces constantly, humans naturally need that framework to classify and compartmentalize everything. I realized that the truth must be hidden and I would answer questions with questions. Eventually, the desire to associate became a Freudian voyeurism that really exposed the viewers to me in a depth that would ask a lot of me to learn how to translate. Time made this type of interaction a layer of my work that I would crave, it was a hunting sensation. I was violating and manipulating my viewers but harmlessly and it became hard to hide. I felt proud of the conceptual aspects as well as the forms. As a senior, public gallery exhibitions were frequent and a "thesis" was due. There was an egotistical desire to see the reaction of my collegues and professors to this. It was my turn to critique on a conceptual level. In retrospect, I am not proud of my motivations but then it seemed like an almost cinematic shape-shifting end to this. I am delusional as are many artists and musicians and thought this was the best way to become a rockstar. The last critiques I was organized and ready to shred the foundations of the pretentious, lazy, and boring majority and I went for it with all I had. My conceptual merit was asked right back and I explained and the reaction was a painful emasculated silence instead of a wow. Their reaction was a wow but more of a "Wow! what an asshole" which was apt. The reality that becomes clear years later is the honest approach is not honorable on its own to people....a padded truth is only slightly better. Ego and confidence appear the same on the outside.....I go for an inner certainty nowadays.
