Well…I guess this is one way to end a series or body of work. First off I would like to apologize to anyone affected or traumatized by fire, it just felt like good closure to get rid of the weight of these drawings by turning some of them into ashes.
Please don’t think that I’m singling out anyone, or trying to burn an effigy. If anything it’s in retaliation for art itself. The force that commands fools like myself to create and then wonder why we thought it was a good idea in the first place to work on a project.
It’s not that I was unhappy with the piece or the act of creating it (why else would I be on my floor, hunched over for hours?) but the sheer clutter of it all. Books are not light, magazine stacks get tall, and even simple paper drawings in a portfolio can get heavy and a bother to store or stare at.
Most of the work featured in this burning aren’t my signature pieces, they were just random ones pulled from the stack. What happened to the rest? I kept just a few of my favorites, but the hundreds of other drawings I’ve torn apart and will be sent to the recycling plant, to be made into paper for future foolish artists or sales papers.
The pen and ink drawings I never really needed to hang on to those since they became computer graphic files, but they just added up over the years. The other drawings, successful or otherwise, they got archived in some way.
I still have scans of the work or photos of their process of being created, but to hold on to these drawings as if they have more possible value than the enjoyment of creating it, that’s just silly.
I’ll probably also need to apologize for burning my drawings of monks, but you know, it actually makes sense, a certain someone did tell us not to hang on to impermanent things.
If you ask people in a bar about what sports team/player is better, you’ll get many opinions and no clear cut winner. If you ask the same thing in learned circles, as in, “Who is the best American artist of the 20th century?” You’ll probably get either Jackson Pollock, mostly for his lifestyle and his approach to making art, and others will probably say Frank Lloyd Wright, because he created architecture that can house all the works of art, whether it be painting or sculpture.
As I get older I would have to say the greatest artist might be a musician, and music might be the highest art. Music takes some complicated tools to make its product, but it exists and then it is gone. A song can stick around like a memory, but doesn’t clutter up things like drawings, paintings, and even photographs.
So that’s it, I’m done, Series Finale, right? 🙂
