Tuesday, October 17, 2006
What inspires me.
Happy New Year! Wow another year gone by so fast. Oh wait it’s not New Years yet…so Merry Christmas then! It’s not Christmas either? Well I was just in Home Depot and they had all their Christmas displays up wouldn’t that make it the Christmas season? It certainly doesn’t help that we‘ve already had our first big snow for the year.
Given that it’s not Halloween yet does it make anyone else sick to their stomachs to see twinkling lights and tinsel while the leaves are just beginning to turn? What’s going on, besides anxious marketers pushing the envelope to win those big Christmas bucks? I was talking with my brother earlier today and we had a short discussion on how most humans, that’s us, aren’t satisfied to live in the present. We have a tendency to live in the past or the future and not for today. This tendency will most likely keep growing the more technical and complicated our world becomes. But all wisdom says live in the present. You cannot rewrite your past and you are not assured of any future. One day at a time. You know “give us this day our daily bread and forgive our trespasses…” It doesn’t say “give us everything we need for all time and erase all our past so we don’t have to deal with anything…”
So what does this have to do with art if anything? Simple, it’s about great inspiration. Not only is the past and future great inspiration for our ideas seeing our past or future in our today provides for some real interesting dichotomies and apexes of creativity. What? Taking objects from the past and placing them into our present or future is an a-one first class ticket to creativity. For instance a painting of a horse and buggy in the country can be quite tranquil and refreshing for some. But place that same horse and buggy on a freeway say in LA at rush hour and you get a whole new story that provokes thought and makes a societal statement.
Net net art should communicate, teach, provoke, inspire and perpetuate more art and If we didn’t have some future in our present or tinsel on our pumpkins we would never have great works of art like “A Nightmare Before Christmas”.
New art to come I promise.
Given that it’s not Halloween yet does it make anyone else sick to their stomachs to see twinkling lights and tinsel while the leaves are just beginning to turn? What’s going on, besides anxious marketers pushing the envelope to win those big Christmas bucks? I was talking with my brother earlier today and we had a short discussion on how most humans, that’s us, aren’t satisfied to live in the present. We have a tendency to live in the past or the future and not for today. This tendency will most likely keep growing the more technical and complicated our world becomes. But all wisdom says live in the present. You cannot rewrite your past and you are not assured of any future. One day at a time. You know “give us this day our daily bread and forgive our trespasses…” It doesn’t say “give us everything we need for all time and erase all our past so we don’t have to deal with anything…”
So what does this have to do with art if anything? Simple, it’s about great inspiration. Not only is the past and future great inspiration for our ideas seeing our past or future in our today provides for some real interesting dichotomies and apexes of creativity. What? Taking objects from the past and placing them into our present or future is an a-one first class ticket to creativity. For instance a painting of a horse and buggy in the country can be quite tranquil and refreshing for some. But place that same horse and buggy on a freeway say in LA at rush hour and you get a whole new story that provokes thought and makes a societal statement.
Net net art should communicate, teach, provoke, inspire and perpetuate more art and If we didn’t have some future in our present or tinsel on our pumpkins we would never have great works of art like “A Nightmare Before Christmas”.
New art to come I promise.
