Plan of Action

Clues

2009-01-02T10:08:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year. waking up this morning I thought of the beginning of The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. Its been a long time since I read the book, but in my memory, the narrator, as a soldier in the Korean war, comes to consciousness and notices a dung beetle crawling around. He describes this moment of present-ness or awareness as “a clue”. Later he describes other moments in his life where beneath the veneer of the ordinary he was made aware of perhaps something greater. The narrator never really goes farther about what he means by “a clue”. That agrees with my general feeling that it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to put spirituality into words.

I started working on a project today to make a drawing a day for everyday in January. It is inspired by the fun-a-day project of the art clash collective in Philadelphia. (www.artclash.com). I thought that I would title this project “Clues”. (generally I take it as a red flag to have a title before the object is mature- but I will risk it here.) Small observations. Nothing that takes more than half an hour to create.

Christmas Day

2008-12-26T11:29:00.001-08:00

Christmas day. I’ve been reading “The Gift” by Lewis Hyde. What a great book. the subtitle is “creativity and the artist and the modern world”. This book is inspiring me to take action. It really puts words to ideas and problems that I have lived with for a long time but never felt that I could adequately verbalize or explain. The part that I am reading now, the beginning, deals with issues of the value of things in society, including art. Many times when I have been working on a mural commission, someone will come up and say,” do you get paid to do that?” the implication is that art is a labor that different from other labors. Many artists, myself included, make their work with out the expectation of selling it and would make it whether or not they sold anything ever. The book talks about creativity and art as a gift and then looks at how gifts are different from commodities. Here is a quote that I liked. “…for it is when art acts as an agent of transformation that we may correctly speak of it as a gift.”

Anyway, back to the workshop to think about how, in specific terms, how art can act as an agent of transformation and change, inspiring us to action.

What to do?

2008-12-23T13:25:00.000-08:00

Well, here I am starting a blog. trying to collect my thoughts and document my the development of ideas for the Art of action grant.

Truth be told, I am not sure what to do. But with experience as my guide, I know that this is the first stage in every artistic journey. What immediately comes up, that I have been struggling with, is how do I make meaningful artwork, that inspires Vermonters to take action, when I do not live in Vermont. Certainly I love Vermont. And over the years the time I’ve spent in Vermont has meant a lot to me. But what do I do? In my mural painting process I begin things with visits to the site. at the site I do drawings. the drawings help me to become familiar with the visual language of the area, to take the time to notice the details. while I am drawing people sometimes come up to talk and that begins the deeper part of the process of getting to know who lives there and what the place means to them.

in this blog I plan to post images as well as text of what I am thinking about and what is percolating up through my sub-concious in visual form.