Living Art

A year ago I rebirthed my blog as a way to share art and ideas and poetry. The work is meditations on art, and on life.

After sharing new work, works in progress and the work of artists that move me, I find myself thinking in new terms. Maria Lassnig, Lee Friedlander, Romare Bearden, Kehinde Whiley, Robert Davidson. They’re all good, powerful artists whose work is worth seeing, thinking about, meditating on.

But just as I am a member of a new generation, sharing my point of view on the works that strike me, I am asking what my generation of artists wants to say. What do we think? What do we feel? What is important to us? How do we see that is different from the way generations before us saw?

And why art?

Visual art is communal and it is immediate. We enter galleries and museums and walk down our city streets and art comes at us, lays itself on, enters us. We are submerged in art’s wake. It washes over us, like it or not. And we have reactions – thoughts, feelings, memories, places, spaces, words come up in us to meet what we see.

When I walk into a museum I am flooded. This is what I want. I want an immediate experience of something more than my self, a new creation coming from a creator and made from this life, this world, this earth, this experience. I want to see how someone else sees, experience what they experience. I want to be brought into a new point of view of this world, and in so doing have a new experience of myself. That’s what happens when I look at art.

And I can do that with you. I can see art with my sister, my son, my brother, my friends. And we can experience it all together. We can talk about it, we can muse over it, what it means to you, what it means to me.

Part of what I love about visual art is that because it is visual it is both communal and immediate. What this means is that we can talk about us now.

Us.

Now.

"nada dura para siempre" (nothing endures forever)

Who are we now? Where have we been? Where are we going? When we see art together we are in it together, just as we are in this life, this world together now. So, it’s time to start talking about what we are talking about now. What we as humanity, as individuals see, what we do, what we make, what we are living.

There's living art and then there's living art. Any art that is still viewed has a life. But art that is made now, among us, that is living art.

It’s time to listen to my generation.We’re getting older and we're hitting our stride. It’s time to bring us up into the light. That is what you can expect in the new year of this space.

All visual works:

Faile  (a life)

@BrooklynMuseum

August 2015