One more drawing; one more day; many more thoughts on how my art should be. Never a minute relaxed; never without discontent and anxiety; always in my head there is this question, "How can it be better?" What should I try? In what image can I find truth and reality? Always there are more questions, more answers. No answer feels adequate! I must try again, make more answers. Relentless!
Constant work leads to success. Oliver Wendall Holmes said, "Every calling is great when greatly pursued." I agree. I am in the middle of a great pursuit. I predict, if my time and my energy continue, my art will fulfill itself greatly. Yesterday was one more day in my relentless pursuit. I am inspired by insight; I do not see this ending any time soon. I do worry; time and energy must be preserved; they must be nurtured by good eating, robust exercise, and fostering the luck of good health. I am pursuing all of that. I need years to get this greatly done! Godspeed!
I work. I wait. It comes at me. Insight arrives unannounced. Clarity surprises! Suddenly I am charged with a task. Like needles pinpricking my brain, there is insistence; I must clarify myself. This is a race; self-acceptance becomes intent. I act. I pursue reality. I know better today than yesterday; I recognize truth. This is not a lame game of truth telling, it is a spirited debate upon canvas and paper. Yesterday's painting is a sincere step toward unabated image clarity; it was just one step. I will be relentless because I have yet to arrive.
Yesterday, while in the studio, I heard Samin Nosrat say, "I actually like constraints. I think it makes us more creative." Samin Nostrat is the author of the cookbook, "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat".
We are all living in a time of home restriction, personally centric space, and social distancing. What remains is isolated creativity. Exhibits are cancelled. Galleries are shut. I am in the studio. I made this drawing yesterday. It moves toward an emotive realization of space: negative, positive, two dimensional, artificially three-dimensional. It is in contrast that makes for emotion; negative versus positive, and real two-dimensional space versus the artifice of three-dimensional space. This take I show today, this drawing from yesterday, moves closer toward my recent creative insight: I am moving toward robust expression of all I am able to express on a flat two-dimensional surface. The constraint of aloneness is good for finding my truth; right now, our world insists on the loneliness of self-dependence for self-expression. Over the last weeks I have taken risks. I have made many drawings, most very different than the image I show today, Yesterday's drawing is a result of that search, a search through nonsense and failure and some success. I have been in the process of sorting out authentic emotive and intellectual representation, sorting it from the nonsense that resides in my head. For me, nonsense must be seen to be recognized as nonsense; then it can be tossed away. This is my creative process. I like the drawing I show today because it is closer to my personal reality. Making falderal is easy. Making substance is difficult. This drawing has substance. The world outside of my art studio is particularly scary; there is Covid-19; then there is the political manipulation occurring during, and around, the attack of Coronavirus. How will we, the United States, exit this time of worry, turmoil, and personal disasters? One of us who worries is Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning economist (see below). I worry too, but I dedicate myself to art-making. I hope there are enough strong, able people in this country, who take Paul Krugman's worry seriously; I hope we come out of the 2020 elections toward more universal societal enlightenment. I make art. This is my primary concern. On my way, in this journey, I am comforted. I am hurting no one; I am swept away; I problem solving. Problem solving is similar to mediation. It is complete divorce from one's exterior. Thoughts, ideas, and memories, fully engage the emotions and the intellect. The world outside the studio is mute. The loudness that is me is centered in place, on a cement floor; I move back and forth to view, then mark paper (or canvas) with graphite sticks or pencils (or, in the case of canvas, I mark with paint). My body, my mind, become one in an endeavor to solve; I struggle to enlighten myself; I struggle to make visually real the thoughts and feeling I am having, moment by moment. This is me swept into knowing; this is personal presence. And thus, yesterday, I made three drawings. They are unique, one different from the next. This is me struggling to be free; these are me focussed, concerned with myself. I hope you also find value in these drawings. American Democracy May Be Dying
Authoritarian rule may be just around the corner. -Paul Krugman, The New York Times, April 9, 2020 If you aren’t terrified both by Covid-19 and by its economic consequences, you haven’t been paying attention. Even though social distancing may be slowing the disease’s spread, tens of thousands more Americans will surely die in the months ahead (and official accounts surely understate the true death toll). And the economic lockdown necessary to achieve social distancing — as I’ve been saying, the economy is in the equivalent of a medically induced coma — has led to almost 17 million new claims for unemployment insurance over the past three weeks, again almost surely an understatement of true job losses. Yet the scariest news of the past week didn’t involve either epidemiology or economics; it was the travesty of an election in Wisconsin, where the Supreme Court required that in-person voting proceed despite the health risks and the fact that many who requested absentee ballots never got them. Why was this so scary? Because it shows that America as we know it may not survive much longer. The pandemic will eventually end; the economy will eventually recover. But democracy, once lost, may never come back. And we’re much closer to losing our democracy than many people realize. To see how a modern democracy can die, look at events in Europe, especially Hungary, over the past decade. What happened in Hungary, beginning in 2011, was that Fidesz, the nation’s white nationalist ruling party, took advantage of its position to rig the electoral system, effectively making its rule permanent. Then it further consolidated its control, using political power to reward friendly businesses while punishing critics, and moved to suppress independent news media. Until recently, it seemed as if Viktor Orban, Hungary’s de facto dictator, might stop with soft authoritarianism, presiding over a regime that preserved some of the outward forms of democracy, neutralizing and punishing opposition without actually making criticism illegal. But now his government has used the coronavirus as an excuse to abandon even the pretense of constitutional government, giving Orban the power to rule by decree. If you say that something similar can’t happen here, you’re hopelessly naïve. In fact, it’s already it’s already happening here, especially at the state level. Wisconsin, in particular, is well on its way toward becoming Hungary on Lake Michigan, as Republicans seek a permanent lock on power. The story so far: Back in 2018, Wisconsin’s electorate voted strongly for Democratic control. Voters chose a Democratic governor, and gave 53 percent of their support to Democratic candidates for the State Assembly. But the state is so heavily gerrymandered that despite this popular-vote majority, Democrats got only 36 percent of the Assembly’s seats. And far from trying to reach some accommodation with the governor-elect, Republicans moved to effectively emasculate him, drastically reducing the powers of his office. Then came Tuesday’s election. In normal times most attention would have been focused on the Democratic primary — although that became a moot point when Bernie Sanders suspended his campaign. But a seat on the State Supreme Court was also at stake. Yet Wisconsin, like most of the country, is under a stay-at-home order. So why did Republican legislators, eventually backed by the Republican appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court, insist on holding an election as if the situation were normal? The answer is that the state shutdown had a much more severe impact on voting in Democratic-leaning urban areas, where a great majority of polling places were closed, than in rural or suburban areas. So the state G.O.P. was nakedly exploiting a pandemic to disenfranchise those likely to vote against it. What we saw in Wisconsin, in short, was a state party doing whatever it takes to cling to power even if a majority of voters want it out — and a partisan bloc on the Supreme Court backing its efforts. Donald Trump, as usual, said the quiet part out loud: If we expand early voting and voting by mail, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Does anyone seriously doubt that something similar could happen, very soon, at a national level? This November, it’s all too possible that Trump will eke out an Electoral College win thanks to widespread voter suppression. If he does — or even if he wins cleanly — everything we’ve seen suggests that he will use a second term to punish everyone he sees as a domestic enemy, and that his party will back him all the way. That is, America will do a full Hungary. What if Trump loses? You know what he’ll do: He’ll claim that Joe Biden’s victory was based on voter fraud, that millions of illegal immigrants cast ballots or something like that. Would the Republican Party, and perhaps more important, Fox News, support his refusal to accept reality? What do you think? So that’s why what just happened in Wisconsin scares me more than either disease or depression. For it shows that one of our two major parties simply doesn’t believe in democracy. Authoritarian rule may be just around the corner. I have done a lot of work, tons! Yet the insights keep coming. New knowledge never dies of old age. Looking back, perhaps I have not been clear enough, direct enough, not as forcefully true as required to be fully communicative. I worry. Perhaps my art has been difficult to comprehend. Perhaps my previous work has been more complex than simply lucid. In comparison to older things yesterday's drawing are simply intelligible. These drawings go right to truthfulness, i.e., they communicate without distraction. My art is beginning to make complete sense.
Looking is better than saying; this is particularly true in the case of yesterday's drawings. FIVE (5) of them!!! Count them! Look at them! Insight is coming fast and furious. These are proof that mindfulness is a matter of practice. I am working hard on being present, being real, being true. My practicing mindfulness has begun to pay off! These drawings indicate me in infancy. Better is acumen! These drawings are mindful practice at work!
At this very moment, I feel sane. The world around me is in tumult; Covid-19 has sickened many of us, but I am good. My art is insightful in a time of confusion. I feel very good about my analytical abilities; I am challenging my norms; I am producing works toward my goals of wholeness, fullness, and comprehension. I cannot brag about excellence because I am in transition. I do, however, comprehend ideas that I did not comprehend prior to this moment; here is good stuff coming.
Yesterday's drawing combines many of my interests, from round to flat to three-dimensional artifice to compositional carry-through to light and energy to contrast in value and form. The 3D deception is robust. Formally, this is a success, but is it an emotional success? I worry it feels more an intellectual achievement than a grand display of all things me, i.e., emotions and intellect. Not to worry; this is merely a step along to way to all-inclusiveness.
I insist upon an absence of dogmatism. Everything considered, everything made, everything encountered, is questioned as new, as if it never existed before. Nothing is taken as truth without inquiry; there are many possible truths. Robust debate occurs, always. I believe there is no other means to sort the valid from the invalid. This is a slow process. Being openly inquisitive, taking nothing as immediately true, takes time and mindfulness. Thus comes yesterday's drawings. There will be many more to come. Art is made from questions. Answers arrive, one by one. Given that no answer is ultimately nor solely true, there are many more questions to answer and many more answers to question.
Of the three drawings I show today, I thing the last best. This is an intuitive feeling; I will not intellectually defend it. Today more questions arise. Tomorrow I will show you the answers I generate today. And so it goes, one day at time, one answer at a time; drawing, after drawing, after drawing... |
To read my profile go to MEHRBACH.com.
At MEHRBACH.com you may view many of my paintings and drawings, past and present, and see details about my life and work. Archives
April 2024
|