I’ve been offline for the last few days with computer problems which were finally cleared up late yesterday. I find myself caught in a love/hate relationship with the computer. I fully appreciate its incredible utility as a tool and its ability to spread information quickly via the internet. Or the web. Or interweb or whatever you wish to call it. That thing that infamous Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens once called a series of tubes.
But the technical aspects still evade me, for the most part. I try to learn what I can to make my time online easier and less frustrating but I still find my eyes rolling back into my skull when I have to get into the technical jargon. When I speak with techs and others in the know about computers I feel as though I am trying to maintain conversations in a language that i don’t know or understand. Complete sentences and phrases fly by and I’m still trying to pick up the one or two words I understand and put them into some kind of context that makes some sort of sense to me.
I suppose that’s why I’m drawn to the world of art. Oh, there are technical terms and some love to toss them around to prove their supposed mastery and understanding of the subject. But for the most part, you can navigate the world of art without being immersed in terminology and such. Art is totally subjective. There is no right or wrong. You like what you like and you feel what you feel. There is a place in art for all tastes and attitudes. What an awful thing it would be if someone were able to break down our appreciation of art into a science of exactitude, where you could only understand a piece through the knowledge of arcane phrases and concepts.
Oh, well. My computer’s up and running once more and that’s okay, I guess. The couple of days it was down were very productive for my painting and I’m beginning to see my quickly approaching show in Alexandria take shape. The painting above, a 24″ by 24″ canvas, is a newer piece. The red chair is very evident in this show. It’s an icon that has been in my visual vocabulary for many years now and one that still is an enigma at times. It takes on many different meanings for me that change from piece to piece, never letting me fully know what it means. Kind of like most people.
Okay, I have much work to do today so I can’t sit here and babble incoherencies. I’ll be back…
Redtree Times 