The Lingering Seduction

The dead. They’re all around us – beneath every cobblestone, on the surface of every building. They’re a healthy preoccupation, representing everything that we can’t ever know.

We carry the burden of their memory with us and write poetry. We paint them. We discuss them lovingly with friends, saving our tears for the bedroom.

– – –

I’ve begun to grow tired of artists discussing how their environment – the region they were raised, the religion inflicted upon them – as the root of their artistic creativity. Visual culture has evolved so radically – projecting her images so far and wide – the artist is less and less limited by their circumstance, household, state, race, or creed. Creative influences abound, and our styles need not be discussed in sweeping statements.

Images of the world are beamed into our homes. We’re exposed to distant cultures, wild ideas, foreign belief systems and unusual forms of expression. Books and magazines, television images, billboard advertisements and the cinema – they permeate our lives. To insist that one is a ‘Southwest’ artist or an ‘expressionist’ – an ‘avant-garde’ artist or a ‘colorist’ – has become, to me, an increasingly absurd notion. These don’t describe a method, nor do they reveal any individually developed style – labels like this serve only to express the manner in which contemporary artists are willing to limit themselves.

We are citizens of a world that continues to grow smaller.

– – –

This image is the stuff of crudely lit dreams.

This is the stuff of a confused adolescence. Of desire, frustration, and fear.

It’s meaning continues to evolve – the work is incomplete, and I don’t expect to feel the same about it when I’m finished.