The ultimate human experience: creating art

[Susan (Szn) Kraft]

Creating art, to engage in creation, is my ultimate human experience.

I don't want to be too far out there, so that this blog becomes a soap box trapped in a hall of mirrors, where I only see myself nodding in agreement at every angle. But sometimes I get so choked up with what it is we all do with our lives as artists, it becomes condensed and heavy by the time I speak the words.

I once listened to some crazy Russian artists giving a talk at a UC Berkeley hall. Personally, off stage, I found them to be pompous *ssholes, but their thesis rang so true to me, I've stolen it and used it many times over. Their line of reasoning, put bluntly was this: God created us, we create art, we have become the Creator, come see our art and take communion with us. They had a tray with dozens of small glasses filled with some Russian-style Jägermeister liqueur. We each came up onto the stage, one at a time, to be personally blessed and take our communion with them. That was cool. So maybe their cool *a*******. A notch up.

That was about seven years ago. Actually, I think they are famous, cool *ssholes. You know, shown in museums (plural) and referenced for some other public oddity like polling people to create a the people's choice painting. Then they actually painted it using statistically winning elements, such as a blue landscape with a deer and a human. Something like that. Anyway, it turned out to be an uninteresting piece, thus supporting the original thesis, in my mind - we are the creators and different from the non-creatives.

[Donald Kennedy]

When I paint or sculpt I develop my thoughts on my visual experience through the medium I have chosen, art is a process not a product one visual experience evokes another it maybe cerebral in execution, but its visceral in the initial inspiration and the process begets more and more work, if I am lucky the work gets out of the pupa stage and becomes a butterfly. I have to paint through the ugly to achieve a satisfactory result. Art evokes a response in others it is not a form of communication. I always need exterior input, because nothing exists in a vacuum. Visual artists experience the world in visual terms, the musician depicts the world in auditory terms and there are vocabularies for both disciplines. There are artists like Hokusai and Jackson Pollack expanded their visual world and musicians like Schoenberg and Harry Parch that expanded their music beyond the eight tone scale using twelve and forty eight tone scale respectively. You may call these artists far out, but their collective experience brought them to more expansive reality in their art and truths they found came about; because, they were attuned to the process and it produced dramatic results. Pollack dripped paint on his canvas which shocked the world why, because, no one had ever exhibited paintings that were done that manner before. James Brooks stained his canvases and Clyfford Still toweled paint on his canvases and it created little or no commotion. Why, each method used was only another application of paint Pollack’s method painting didn't fit in with the public's concept of painting "should be"? Using that static concept we would still be counting in Roman Numbers a perception of numbers which is static and had no concept of, "0" or negative numbers. So please be more expansive in your concept what art should or should not be.