I've been inspired by many artists throughout my life. Working in the fields of film, literature, theater, poetry and the visual arts, they've all brought their own unique slant to the dance. Great line here, beautiful vision there; honest touch and the sensation of the timeless. Life seems to eventually show pungent edge, genius, no matter what tools or device. Closer to the home of my heart, so many painters have pursued the elusive jewel. Bosch gave us the internal, Goya the dark, Van Eyck the ineffable, El Greco the lightning, and on and on and on...
More recently, Philip Guston gave painters the path of courage (haven't they all?). He walked away and left behind an "image brand" or style - beautiful, buttery applied, easily loved, historically important - in the field of abstraction, to eventually paint for us, in stomach-felt cadmium reds, crisp greens and dirty sheet whites, the ugly truths about this American Society. This unpredictable move by a guy who'd already struck painters gold, not only upset but burned the apple cart down to the ever-loving ground. He felt it wasn't honest to continue in an abstract manner. Dishonest and immoral.
For him, for us, something was afoot.
Interestingly, the strongest human creative forces, always hungered for "that;"
the something, the smoldering, the itch, still out of reach. What was created in the search, was simply the artwork, the effluent, the "found" on the way to the "there."