Douglas Witmer
« Weblog Home | Comments? E-mail Me (for now) » | Highlights of 2004 » | Thank you Agnes Martin » | To Whom... » | Hi There »
Monday, January 03, 2005
I want to believe (part 1)
I still want to believe that art can change a life. Or that the excitement of the potential for art to have life-changing impact would be more constant. I feel like I used to feel that way more.I remember the day I knew for sure I would be a painter, seeing a large Franz Kline on my first visit to the PMA. (I see that painting often these days, and it's not the best, but it is still special to me).
I remember the thrilling disorientation and confusion, the real internal confrontations in trying to understand what I was looking at, seeing the Jasper Johns retrospective (also at the PMA), when I was in high school.
And then in college..I went to a small liberal arts school in northern Indiana. The metropolitan destination in that region for my friends and me was Chicago. That's where we cut our teeth on "real art" even as we scrambled to become real artists. DeKooning's "Excavation" loomed large for me at the Art Insitute. And I remember on our drives up there, hoping so much to see the fine Sean Scully they had. (It wasn't always on view.)
The thing was that I was so unrefined. I had a preference to contemporary and 20th century art, but really I didn't know any better and I made few distinctions in my mind in terms of movements or -isms. It all mattered to me so much. Just seeing it, just the visual power of the artworks...it mattered so much. And then I would go back and try to make it happen for myself. My mind would spin with possibility. The newness of each experience, and each new art-making, was intoxicating.
These days life-changing is a much slower process, and mostly it feels like I'm the one who ought to be making some changes to my life. "Progress" is an elusive quality, harder and harder to measure. But still, there's this tiny part of me that lies in wait. It holds out hope. It lives to celebrate that "zing!" moment.
(to be continued)
3.1.05 