I wasn’t going to show this. Part of being an artist is in creating and maintaining a certain facade, playing up the more favorable facets of one’s personal prism. To show something that might be perceived as contrary to this nurtured persona is always a risk, at least in an intellectual sense. People don’t always want to know anything beyond the single dimension they might know and to offer more than that imperils their regard for even that single dimension.
For instance, several years back I did a series of dark figures that I called the Outlaw series. Whem they were hung at my annual show, the gallery asked for a separate statement to explain these figures out of the fear that my collectors would think that this was the new direction that my work had headed, instead of it merely being another view of those same emotions that had created the more calm and placid work that they recognized and were drawn to. I did, in fact, have several folks ask if this was the new direction and some even asked me to promise that it was not. I tried to explain that this was not new but merely a different part of the same person. Another facet on the prism.
I’m not sure they were convinced.
It was painted yesterday in about ten minutes, without much thought or care. It’s about 16″ by 20″ and painted with one large brush. Over the years I have periodically dashed off these characters, calling them my angry pictures. I am not necessarily angry when I paint these figures. Perhaps frustrated or anxious. I don’t really know.
I have had these guys in me since I was child and periodically they emerge. I don’t know if they serve a purpose or what part of myself, if any, they represent. I always feel a bit of release after they are on the surface and perhaps that is the purpose. They usually go into a sort of file and aren’t often seen after that. Occasionally, I will pull them out and be slightly baffled by them and very seldom do I show them to anyone.
But I felt that I would show a bit more of the prism today. They don’t change the visble light coming from the other facets. It comes from the same source but out in a different manner.
At least, I think so.
Redtree Times 