On Art and Love
Thursday December 3, 2009
Sometimes I wonder why I would choose to dedicate my life to something so completely subjective as art. One never knows if one is successful. Unless one has incredibly high self-esteem or burns with an inner light of self-knowledge as elusive to me as a personal relationship with Jesus Christ (Maybe some day I’ll have both.)
There is the idea circulating that no one would continue to make art unless he or she had to. I continue to make art. Therefore, I must “have to” make art. That is to say, I have no other choice.
But I don’t believe that. I believe there are plenty of other things I could do. I was going to be a German teacher at the secondary level. I would have been good at it.
I don’t do this because I have to. I do this because I fell in love. And I am a sucker for falling in love.
I fell in love two or three times before I fell in love with art. By age seventeen I was not only in love, but I was in my first Very Serious Relationship. Not only was I a teenager in love (why must I be…), but I went on an exchange program to Munich and left my one and only behind. This was before email or cheap international phone calls. For four and a half months we wrote daily letters and waxed poetic about the meaning of our love.
Nonetheless, I was intensely lonely. But I didn’t go off and find some other boy. I found a painting instead. The painting was by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. It was two large roughly painted heads, I believe painted in blue, titled The Artist and his Wife. I can’t explain what I felt except that I felt all those loving feelings I was missing. From that point on, I chose to be an artist.
So sometimes I have a hard time talking about my work and what it means. I have a complicated relationship with it. I talk and write about how it’s about man’s search for meaning and passion. But isn’t it simpler to just say that it’s my search for love?
Love isn’t easy to talk about, especially if you’ve developed a sarcastic wannabe hipster persona to cover for the fact that love is all you live for, and that you are truly a hopeless romantic. But make no mistake, that’s what I am.
Pictured above is Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s Young Woman’s Head. I have never been able to locate an image of The Artist and his Wife.