sliver rivers and internal logic

The canting voices on this particular story will fade, but they will be going strong on other subjects. We live in a time when people feel pressured to make sententious, pompous and completely false statements about the arts. Art does not have an inherent social or political responsibility. Today with the arts funding slashed there are even more temptations than usual to pretend otherwise- to insist that art can save derelict urban areas, that it can heal the sick and make flowers grow. But the very language that claims to defend art can smother it's wild nature. A work of art, if it is any good, is enigmatic, remote and takes centuries to understand.

In the 1930's a combination of economic misery and political crisis forced artists out of their studios and into the world of public argument-the world of cant. European modern art never really recovered from the dogmas and functionalism of that low dishonest decade. Bob Dylan grew up in a folk movement rooted in the 30's, but he saw that politics was not life-whereas art IS life, and life only. He is an example to emulate: a poet, not a politician, who acknowledges no duty except to making great art. I don't think his critics will change that!

so, someone asked JP, is it a record of performance in the studio? Yes, partly. And then I just had to have this on record "a collector of mine caught her husband staring at one of my paintings......when she asked him what he was doing he said he was trying to read Jose's painting and the more he tried to read it, the more he saw his own story inside the painting. When you look at a Cy Twombly painting and you get just a fragment of the sentence, just one word, but that one word leads you into your own (story): the red color, the bright yellows, touchstones in the painting. I think that is what is happening in these works, which can only be read by me. It's like a diary that you lock. It's private"people need to leave a mark, people write messages that are political, messages about love; people tear shit down and put stuff up.Internal logic resides in the traces



Oh ...my seaweed is almost ready
something about these two just sends me....the cardboard,

the neon enamel paint, the breath compared to the piles I've made....

I just don't know what to do now. BREATHE....
smaller and smaller I go...I think now in reverse. These are very cool piles of unpacked paintings. many layers of homemade detritus...some book pages have found there way in. I am taking a breath for a moment to catch my bearings. I think one more large sheet before the June residency. One or two more trips to NYC prior to res as well. Have any of the questions been answered? I got the book Kamrooz recommended called Abstraction/New Perspectives in Painting.........

let me know when YOU think I am going crazy!