I want to talk about spaces that exist in perception, and those that are really places in the world. These days I feel that words and pictures are at odds with one another. We live in a mainstream culture that celebrates immediacy.
After more than half a century of TV watching, we have become a nation of watchers rather than readers. Many people would rather watch a film on Netflix, a video on YouTube, or play a video game. They get something from watching that doesn’t come from reading, with the added benefit that it never seems like work. Now I love great films and TV shows, but there’s something about reading, something about the structure and texture of the act of reading—a sort of space into which I am transported—that appeals to me even more. It’s why I am a writer. When I read a great story, or even just a very good one, I am in someone else’s world as their words put it directly into my head. I am using my brain in different ways. Without this kind of effort, the brain gets lazy. When imagination loses ground, so does intelligence.
As a writer on art as with books, there’s always a story to be told. Don’t think the only story is of the artist physically making their work of art. They live in the world and are formed by it just like the rest of us. It’s only the final product that diverges from accepted norms. Not only do all our lives contain stories, but there’s a greater story to be told around the objects themselves, and the subjects they manifest. Metaphors live in all things, natural or man-made. This is what allows me to invest my posts with a more introspective language that’s neither dense nor chatty. I am thinking about where things come from, and not only where they end up.
I’m open a to a broad range of ideas and associations for my interpretations, taken not only from concrete descriptions of the works on hand, but also from their own statements and quotes from people from whom they take influence, even if it seems to come out of left field. There’s a great wealth of possible context that can be discovered if the writer avoids critical cliches in argot and structure. Certain styles of diction lead immediately into perceptual dead ends. I must sometimes toss the entire text out, demolish it, burn it. Expunge it from memory and rethink everything. Since I’m not bound by convention I may reach a place where my language defines new territories, laying down new roads and erecting new landmarks.
Take my last article for instance, about the work of Andrea Burgay. I first included her work in a long form article on a theme called The Making of Unmaking when articles of that type were my main goal for The Other Side of the Desk. I am glad to have written a few of them but had to move away from the process because it was creating textual blind spots in my growth as a writer. Compare her section in that essay to the new essay I wrote and you will see what I mean. Here are the links: The Making of Unmaking / The Actual Arranged...
I was very proud of the language I used to describe her in the first article, but the more I thought about writing something more expansive about her work, the more that I realized I had to, as the saying goes, throw the baby out with the bath water. It had to be new language, representing fresh thoughts. I had to imagine what I had not previously intellectualized.
It’s this depth of thought that I want to bring to my best writing here at The Other Side of the Desk. It’s also my reason for asking you to consider Subscribing. I’ve made it nominal at $5 per month or $45 per year. Consider it, with my thanks.
My comment is exactly how I am thinking now about my life, my art, my memory of my son and his poetic license. I'll tell you about that later. Tonight I had a meaningful discussion with his daughter Freya. It seems that the transient of his soul has transferred into her. I can copy paste that part of our conversation to you in email. She is into anima, she is into a lot of things that suit her generation, one of which is tattoos. But his spirit as he compelled me to paint for him his imaginings, subjects that leaned on both spiritual and an imaginative world, what an experience that was. You haven't seen the results in the paintings. Well it is complex reaching all the way back to his birth when I realized he was different. He had the same brain problem that my two brothers had, and apparently it came from my maternal grandfather. So he wasn't "quite right" and I intuited it from the start, when he was an infant. There was a distance. Now If I had known what I know now concerning the intellectual tenets of Judaic thought, I would had overcome my doubts of who I thought he was, and treated him with the kindness that is given to every other human, within the Judaic thought. The purpose is to grow, to know thyself as what is happening with your realizations in your writing. Not to judge.Yeah, so my art is now not to paint things, even not a semblance of a non objective work, but to let each new thought come from within. As soon as it is crystalized into a crystal mountain scene, but not yet on canvas, I let myself wonder if that is a path, or a mirage. Enough. Tanks for writing the above, I want to print it out and put it on the wall in bold font.
I'm gonna print out what you wrote. I only read it once, it touched the chord of truth.
My comment is exactly how I am thinking now about my life, my art, my memory of my son and his poetic license. I'll tell you about that later. Tonight I had a meaningful discussion with his daughter Freya. It seems that the transient of his soul has transferred into her. I can copy paste that part of our conversation to you in email. She is into anima, she is into a lot of things that suit her generation, one of which is tattoos. But his spirit as he compelled me to paint for him his imaginings, subjects that leaned on both spiritual and an imaginative world, what an experience that was. You haven't seen the results in the paintings. Well it is complex reaching all the way back to his birth when I realized he was different. He had the same brain problem that my two brothers had, and apparently it came from my maternal grandfather. So he wasn't "quite right" and I intuited it from the start, when he was an infant. There was a distance. Now If I had known what I know now concerning the intellectual tenets of Judaic thought, I would had overcome my doubts of who I thought he was, and treated him with the kindness that is given to every other human, within the Judaic thought. The purpose is to grow, to know thyself as what is happening with your realizations in your writing. Not to judge.Yeah, so my art is now not to paint things, even not a semblance of a non objective work, but to let each new thought come from within. As soon as it is crystalized into a crystal mountain scene, but not yet on canvas, I let myself wonder if that is a path, or a mirage. Enough. Tanks for writing the above, I want to print it out and put it on the wall in bold font.