Journaling and Art...

Because journaling & posting my traditional art work online is a new experience for me, and even the computer-generated image-making is new for me... I wanted to begin my online presence with no real rules for presentation. I have though, allowed my love for the academy to inspire the personal standard I do create for myself. Allow me to qualify that I love the academy as an artist, certainly therefore as a non-conformist. Yet in my life there is enough life-circumstance conservatism, the reflection of full-time single parenting for twenty years, to make for an overly controlled tone of voice in the entries at times. It bothers me. I look forward to moving away from this particular detail, toward a more free state of being in my own skin and bones.
What is your point here, Kerrie? One: that inserting someone else's writing into my journaling is a long-standing practice. What I call here online a breadcrumb pageant of personal wisdom, inspiration, thoughtfulness, and motivation that I want to share with many other people now.
Two: having a place to further one's own conversation with the world on what is being developed through art productivity, and writing from a unique personal standard to build the working foundation under an individual life_ a w-i-p since 1972! This standard embodies deeply held desires and the goal to become reasonably materially successful in the world as a single person. In this case as a single woman_ not too UNCOMMON anymore, right? However, because this direction in life is not destructively selfish just commonly unfamiliar, and I have gotten this far alone_ my life is currently without any immediate, or externally supportive spontaneity since my daughter left for college. I keep working to get out of this place but yet my life is just stuck!
I want, yes I said, I want a more worldly life of action with others. For me, that would follow a continuity, that mine is a life outside that general social anesthetism of the senses. A life that does not deny what is seen, felt, touched, experienced, understood personally, wondered about outloud, explored, or discovered internally through trusted astute observations that are brave and hence shared no matter how intimate, within reason. My life always has been expressing that which gets the messenger in trouble. My experiences growing up were dominated by being harshly criticized as odd, and being frequently left out of the circle of family acceptance. That of habitually denying from the intensely, negatively harsh criticizing reactions, having just witnessed what was real! What is now called "shielding." Or in other circles, "a presbyterian habit of burying real feelings." I wish the affect was that simple on a child trying to grow up in the chaos and abuse.
This family history profile then, in combination with the therapy years, being the student of eastern healing modalities, all combined with a focused single-parenting of both of us_ has lead to strengthening and clarifying individual voice. Duh!
Yet, so far either online or in real life I encounter: 'don't tell me the details of your struggles to get to your successes until you ARE successful.' (More shielding?) So far, in this global village, it seems journaling and art posting continues to be encountered only with those who do read and listen quietly, privately, but who also keep moving on. Is it because the reader traffic is dominantly young and still forming the individual foundation of values? Is what I post too different? This is the point, correct? So, don't be afraid, or negatingly insecure_ just try to balance personal voice without reactionism-only, is all.
For me, this phenom is just not clear why not knowing about each other is seemingly prevalently preferred. Is it the convenience of emotional sterility that won't distract from being in marketplace-killer mode? What?!
I am already paying the price of social isolation for this very human path, and more than ready for that to end. A reasonable period of rest would be nice, in fact on order from these recent years in the trenches, before I jump into the main confluence of life... affording it is tricky right now without apt alliances, and this is also the point.
Many women, couples, men of a more conservative history in my experiences, perhaps men at all now that I look back_ nevertheless, people seem to take for granted the cumulative ways rest is built into their own life; a day at the beach, a trip to the beauty parlor, a facial, a massage, a week-end on the river with the guys, or just time at the end of the day checking in with the spouse who happens to bring home pizza from time-to-time. Even the presence of another adult on a regular basis, with whom you know you can count on to debrief even a little, makes a lot of difference in the quality effects of carrying any sustained responsibility over the long haul. I have had to do it all, and by myself.
Now though, I sometimes wonder why it has been so easy to remain alone in a world full of other people. The town I have lived in like a hero for my daughter and myself, does not easily foster people just showing up at the door with goodwill_ it is a quirky social corner by reputation. Just not one that is easily decipherable at a distance... so after thirty years with a deep desire to follow through on the original plan to move on, I am stuck. No resources, no allies in this individuating process.
I have a lot to offer, just not a fit where I am. I confess that I didn't want to fit either, but don't be too quick to judge, I am a friendly sort, and my reasoning still is sound on this front.
I am an artist in need of greater access to a more sophisticated metro-market environment, and I like greater flexibility present in my abilities to make choices. So my valid question is: anybody out there available to interact / to play, with maturity, with effective helpfulness?


study after Thomas Hart Benton,
prisma color on archival paper

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mess

The Chronicle Review of Higher Education, from the issue date June 3, 2005
by Laurie Fendrich
(this image is changing, keep checking back...)


For centuries, aspiring artists got their starts by observing and practicing what professional artists did inside their workshops. After mastering enough skills, they would then head off on their own. Modern art, starting in the middle of the 19th century, changed all that by calling into question what constitutes a work of art. Art began manifesting two things in tandem_ radicality for its own sake and self-expression. Aspiring artists no longer needed to go to workshops or studios to become artists because being avant-garde and self-expressive did not depend on learning crafts, techniques, or studio methods.

For 100 years, from the mid-19th century up to World War II, artists flocked to Paris in droves, absorbing the spirit of the avant-garde in bars, cabarets, theatres, and salons, and developing their styles either as loners in their ateliers or as members of various bohemian groups convening over absinthe. But after World War II, when the center of the modern-art world shifted to New York, the education of artists began to take place more and more in colleges and universities. In the United States, part of that was due to an influx of government money, much of it disseminated through the GI Bill. many artists who were perceived as avant-garde, and who therefore couldn't support themselves through their work, found that they could support themselves by teaching in the academe. Ambitious young art students gravitated toward college art departments where these avant-garde artists were teaching, if only to hang around other artists and pick up their bohemian attitudes.

Although plenty of solid teaching and learning has gone on in art schools and in colleges and universities, by the 1900's, as Howard Singerman argues in Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (1999), art education no longer demanded the acquisition of specific skills, but instead became simply a shortcut to an artistic identity.

Now, however, a tug of war is going on over what exactly constitutes an artistic identity. the result is that art education (by that I mean the education of artists for the professional contemporary art world, as a opposed to the education of high-school art teachers, which is an entirely separate matter) has become a hodgepodge of attitudes, self-expression, news bulletins from hot galleries, and an almost random selection of technical skills that cannot help but leave most art students confused about their ultimate purpose as artists.

This mishmash approach has been going on for so long that it amounts to an orthodoxy. It dominates the education of artists both in colleges like my own (Chicago Art Institute) and in such schools as the Otis College of Art and Design, in Los Angeles, and the Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn. In this aleatory orthodoxy, it falls to first- and second-year "foundation" courses to provide any meaningful link to art of the past. Those courses -- "Basic Design," "Beginning Drawing," and so on -- teach line, tone, shape, form, proportion, color, and some fundamental "hand skills." On the opposite side are what are sometimes referred to as "post-studio" programs, which are growing increasingly popular. They, too, offer "foundation" courses, but instead of studying techniques and studio skills, the would-be artists, often fresh from high school, study ideas and concepts -- the putative social, cultural, and theoretical issues having to do with art. This kind of program is the visual-arts equivalent of the liberal arts' "critical thinking." Its premise is that only by shaking off the dust of the past can students become viable commercial artists or successful artists in the 21st century; it directly transfers what's trendy in the galleries or advertising agencies onto the plates of undergraduates. Its overriding assumption is that although 21st-century art may contain some keystroking and button-pushing references to old-fashioned, handcrafted beauty, most of it will be otherwise engaged.

The seeping of more and more theory as well as "critical thinking" and new technology into traditional studio-art courses make sense if art is seen as the product of a conceptual educational rather than the result of acquisition of the creaky 19th-century skills that are are attached to now-defunct ideas about beauty. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, for example -- where I did my graduate work in painting in the late 1970s, when video art had just been added to the M.F.A. program -- the revised first-year program instituted last year requires all incoming undergraduates to purchase a laptop computer. Students are given special lockers for their computers that, in effect, pre-empt space that otherwise would be designated for such messy art supplies as paint or charcoal.

What happens at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago matters: It is one of the nation's oldest and largest art schools and is therefore seen as a leader in art education.

One of the two required first-semestre courses in the new SAIC program is "Core Studio Practice," whose catalog description begins: "Core Studio Practice is an interdisciplinary investigation of technical practice and conceptual and critical skills common to various areas of creative production." The description of the other required first-semestre course, "Research Studio I," begins this way: "Research Studio I offers students an opportunity to explore creative research strategies used by artists and designers."

The words describing those courses jolt old-school professors like me who are oriented more toward drawing and painting than theory. Keep in mind that as late as the 1990s. Art Institute students were required to take 12 hours of drawing.

Because much of the de facto curriculum at the Art Institute is determined by what individual instructors decide to teach under the loose rubric of course descriptions, there is no way of knowing for sure exactly how much development of studio skills goes on. But by using such terms as "creative production" instead of "creativity" and "critical skills" instead of "skills," and in citing drawing as just one among several "notational systems," the catalog descriptions make the practice of skills appear to be a very low priority. The first-year curriculum seems to promote a web-oriented workplace full of computers, where students work to promote antiseptical and collaboratively with others, behave like wannabe public intellectuals, and develop "concepts" that borrow heavily from the vocabularies of sociology, computer science, and government bureaucracy. Within this matrix, artist develop "research methods" for their "studio practice." Whatever odd tool is deemed necessary for their "practice" (formerly known as "work of art") -- whether it is colored plastic bags, city-sewage-system diagrams, LCD displays, Webcams, or however unlikely, a piece of drawing charcoal -- is picked up and used without benefit of prerequisite courses that teach specific skills with a specific tool.

Instead of students individually observing art and life, steadily focusing within an art discipline, and working toward developing a signature style marked by self-expression, the "studio practice" has its practitioner busily collecting data, working in groups, constructing theoretical systems, and participating in interdisciplinary projects. "Studio practice" and "creative production" are conveniently nebulous terms -- it is unclear, in fact, if they even need to culminate in a work of art.

As uncomfortable as I am with this sort of curriculum and "practice" of art making, I recognize how attractive it probably is to 18-year-olds who have grown up with the ubiquitousness of computers and an industrial-strength popular culture. By patting their most facile drawing protégés reassuringly on the back, art professors cannot really protect the foundation-skills courses that they profess to love. There are, after all, some aspects of the new programs that will prove useful to the next generation of artists, who will grapple with an even more digitized world than our present one. Besides, in a short time many of the same fine-arts students nurtured in foundation courses offering traditional art skills will invariably turn around to metaphorically slay their old teachers by making their professional debuts not with tenderly painted easel paintings but with sexy video installations or cool interactive Web sites.

On the other hand, educators who love traditional art but who, out of fear of being left behind, are jumping onto the theory-driven bandwagon are marching off to a land ruled by dilettante sociology, bogus community activism, and unrigorous science and philosophy. The notion that there could be fusion of "studio practice" with old-fashioned artistic skills that would yield a wondrous hybrid in the same way that African and Western music together produced jazz hasn't panned out, at least not yet. The reason? Whereas African and Western music, for all their differences, were both about how things sound, theory-driven art and traditional visual art are not about how things look. In art, fusion merely strips the traditional art object (that is, one well-crafted physical object) of meaning while replacing it with a jumble of fatuous words.

The heart of the problem lies in the fact that ever since the birth of modern art 150 years ago, all artists -- no matter what their visual style or theoretical intention -- have been riding a great wave of Romanticism which has been rolling across the arts for almost 300 years. With Romanticism, the autonomous self as the basis for all knowledge trumps everything. And even though the Romantic, "authentic" self of Odilon Redon or Lee Krasner has been adulterated by postmodernism and turned into constructed, artificial self, today's artists remain exactly like their early modern counterparts. Deep down, they consider themselves to be morally superior non-artists -- more intensely emotional and sensitive -- and pitted against a cold corrupt society.

Artists justified the esoteric nature of modern art with the idea that if something came from an authentic artist, it didn't need orthodox social justification. Modern artists define their work as worthy, and themselves as special people, simply because they were artists. The audience for modern art long ago gave up expecting or wanting skills, or beauty from artists and willingly acceded to the idea that an artist is a creative outsider whose usefulness lies mainly in being critical of everything. Think "court jester" without the humor.

Before modern art, though, artists had to take account of the larger society because they were forced to, by either the limits of patronage or official censorship. Since the advent of modern art, however, few artists consider the larger society beyond the art-world cognoscenti. To do so would mean either selling out to some version of Thomas Kinkadian aesthetics or, equally frightening, assuming a massively difficult chore.

Yet reassuming that task is precisely what artists must do. The future for thoughtful artists lies in rethinking how art fits into society as a whole -- and not just as self-righteous, intellectual fashionable social or political critique. The time has come, in other words, for artists to think about how they fit into society. What do they really give to it? Are they necessary to it? Who, exactly, constitutes their audience?

In this case the only way to leap forward is to go backward -- to ideas that had credibility before modern art. We need to dig them out, however, from beneath the accumulated rubble of history. The idea I have in mind is one of the oldest of all -- that artists need to consciously consider their audience.

The basis for a truly interdisciplinary art education of the future requires art students who read some of the great treatises on the role of the artists in society. Without turning students into research scholars, we can guide future artists to be more philosophical and relevant to our culture as a whole than most artists -- even those with the best intentions -- are today. We need to direct art students to serious thinker of the past who have reflected on the nature of art and the artist, in philosophy, history, or fiction, and whose whose historical distance allows us to see ourselves, in effect, from the outside.

For example, by having art students read Leonardo da Vinci's paragon (a rhetorical device used to explore the merits of the different arts developed during the Renaissance) on painting -- without an art-historical or philosophical intermediary -- college art professors would expose aspiring artists to an articulate master whose thinking about art led to art's being accepted into the university in the first place. Moreover, younger artists would learn not to dismiss Leonardo as a mere archaeological relic of 15th-century Italy, as so much current theory is inclined to do.

When students read Laocoön, written in 1766 by the Enlightenment essayist Ephraim Gotthold Lessing, they are prompted to think about the differences between the spatial and temporal arts (in Lessing's lexicon, painting and poetry). Laocoön contains a down-and-dirty struggle over what constitutes our visceral reaction that something is ugly and whether, or to what extent, we can get around our aversion to specific physical things or our attraction to beauty.

If you really want wake up 18-year-olds, discuss with them why a mole located very close to the mouth ( an actual Lessing example) makes so many people squeamish. Talk with them about the risks artists take in using visually disgusting subject matter ( which Lessing also writes about) without historicizing Lessing into an "example" from the Enlightenment. Talk about, as he does, the natural limits imposed on the arts by our sense of smell. Point out to them that so-called risky contemporary artists like Paul McCarthy, who uses bloodied meatlike figures in his art, or Karen Finley, who notoriously smeared chocolate over her naked body a series of performance pieces, implying all the while that she was smearing excrement, are actually not that risky. Both are merely simulators of the disgusting.

By teaching students Rousseau's "Letter to d'Alembert on Theatre," an attack on the arts that recapitulates Plato's examination of the generally uncritical assumption that art has some inherent social vale, students would be prompted to ponder whether art is automatically good for people, in all times and all places. In that context, students could be asked to think through whether becoming an artist is actually closer to becoming a swindler than a social worker. Selected passages on art from de Tocqueville's Democracy in America would reveal the particular pressures on artists that result from living in a democracy, compared to living in an aristocracy, and lead them to see the inevitable tension between social equality and excellence in the arts.

For art professors whose cup of tea is not hardcore philosophy, why not teach fiction that puts artists in real predicaments about their purpose? For example, in Balzac's allegorical short story "The Unknown Masterpiece," the lead character, Frenhofer -- a character who loomed large in the imagination of Cézanne, Picasso, and de Kooning -- gets sucked into the black hole of artistic self-absorption. In John Fowles's The Ebony Tower, two artists clash over the meaning of artistic freedom.

Readings from outside the modern and postmodern box would shake up art students who have learned bromides in high school such as "Art is a form of communication," only to have them replaced by gaseous pseudosociological truisms along the lines of "Art derives from myriad socially constructed 'truths' based on the repression of the Other," or "global nomadism produces hybridized cultures." Wrestling with perennial questions about how art fits into a good society, or how it might function differently in a bad society, would inject an intellectual and moral rigor into art education.

A new reading curriculum such as the one I am suggesting could prove stronger at salvaging hand-on arts such as drawing and painting than the head-in-the-sand, keep-on-truckin' attitude now favored by professors who believe in the centrality of drawing and painting. For it was art that inspired Leonardo, Lessing, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and Balzac to think so deeply in the first place.

In any event, the most crucial job at hand is to steer art students away from the self-congratulatory, self-indulgent deconstuctionesque platitudes that increasingly guide their educations. After all, why major in art just to become a half-baked social scientist? When things things get this messed up, it's time to go back to the future.

Laurie Fendrich is a professor of fine arts at Hofstra University.

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 51, Issue 39, Page B6
To be continued...

The example art process behind this link represents a sublime contradiction in my humble opinion, and simultaneously a good study in the new media, of the professor's educational and skills development challenges।
Take a look: Chiani paints the Mona Lisa in photoshop, watch this as a slide show!
Here's another albeit "traditionally" commercial example, of current 21st C media advances in the visual arts: digital painting forum

A seminal designer

the designer william presents to bioneers

Who is this "William?" What are "Bioneers?" Click on 'presents' statement, and follow a natural inquiry after watching the video, to expose yourself and then find out?
This is an inquiry-invitation for those who want to look in order to see_ because the work of this person is valuable for the world, and his challenges to us all are important to get the word out, and set about understanding in order to get going on it, no matter who we are, or what we each do!
Coming from people who are 'white Presbyterians, and who do only continue to bury their feelings' (behind "Christ"), I am skeptical yet desirous of more naturally curious people's perspectives who are less fearful, and who are more constructively intra-participative on the leading edges of living consciously. In case this hasn't been obvious.

a graphics student-project
that I originally reproduced
in macromedia Freehand MX

Words are not the enemy...

On Thursday evenings from 6 to 9, I am attending social service agency-level series on money awareness. I really cried in that class last night...it was a crisis experience for me. Listening to a twenty-something lead the class with the sheltered, good-child's youthfulness of: 'cover-all-the-material-in-the-time-allotted, life-in-a-straight-line perception.' Hey! What's so hard about this stuff_ is probably the developmental view on reality that dominates for this youngster's life-view at this point... It's a drag for me as the idealist and artist. I really counted, a lot more than I know how to change right now, on the off-spring of my generation to be cultural allies, and to be so much more enlightened because they are the off-spring of my generation who collectively have looked beyond the veil. You kids have been cheated, and now you are no more than programed to be good corporate fodder. Guarding your own thoughts in trade only for money!
My journal writing here is not for soapboxing, and this sadness I feel today, is principally about what is unresolved yet in my own life: the relationship to money. Poor money, it's just an abstract concept really, but its power is in the idea really that it is an abstract that has global agreement_ I mean entire countries, like the good ole U.S. of A. are built on this abstract idea!
It 's power then, is really in the world-wide, subconscious agreement that keeps spinning through us all. So, what provoked my crisis responses in the 'Financial Fitness' class last night?
Very simply, all the anxietal tension that accompanies the subject.
This entry may take a lot of hits that result in more avoidance, but I write on the subject because it is deeply part of my work as an artist_ not just in reciprocity in the market but also on the canvas. So much of human subconscious self-worth is entangled, unresolved here in this concept that is called money. Since very young, I have just wanted to function as the artist in a world where more are clear and brave about money and worth. I think this view was at the core of my childhood logic of wanting to leave and find my real family. That the two, a human being and money can stand independent of each other, and, where love for one another is not caught in the web between. That's the part I believe that is unconscious in all of us the world over. Internally we are not separated from the values about self that we place on money, nor hence are our relationships with money itself, or as a result, are those relationships any more clear with each other. On some level everyone's everything is tied to this unresolved set of ideas about self-worth on an abstract concept that amounts to no more than the energy of exchange, using paper and metals as symbols of worth.
I was sad last night to the point of tears at the memories and still am processing the residue of that sadness today, because I grew up around adults with an overwhelming set of messages for a child to encounter, as they expressed very unhealthy dependency on the ideas of money and personal worth or identity.
My journaling in this blog, alludes to notions that I have done a lot of personal work to change (this) family past in my life even as it materially is not good right now. All changes in their time, the dominant chaos that impacted my childhood is not to be my daughter's inherited influences. At this point money issues are emerging for their turn to be recognized and acknowledged, in all the ways I have learned, now having done the main psychological and emotional healing work of the past, for both our benefit. This new work leading my awareness, will impact what is historically internal, yet in the near future will predictably gain in greater inner cognizance. Clearer integration about being available to, as well as deserving of, supportive relationships that can be trusted. Growing more independent of the past chaos that once, were only strong but confused instincts about self-worth. The cumulative consequences long-term? Healthier internalized references about exchanging energy with others through my art_ the facilitating means from childhood for understanding healthier self-possibilities. It has been, and continues to be, a lot of good hard work_ and that real family imagined as a young child, then sought out in the world, is made up of two at this point.

visiting summer rose, acrylic on board

***(Remember all images that are available are listed in detail under the heading: "Details of Available Posted Artwork" on right of blog page.)***

slumbering friends, acrylic on board

How the steps of returning to my artwork are evolving...

Working to participate in the marketplace as the artist, from intense material poverty, means that manifest objective reality just gonna take time to build. Especially when one is working twenty hours a day, on a variety of levels, to also come out of social isolation. 'Course working largely in front of a computer is hardly going to help the social evolution happen with anymore speed than work in the studio really. There's a sad oxymoron_ yet current reality requires that I set the elements of a work presence up online at the outset of changes in my life, as a full-time single mom, that at last are moving closer to actual, productive studio time again!
Call me the artist, where my interpretations about how to go about fitting together the big pieces of life have been interpreted literally for two decades now. Magical and literal thinking are not all only for childhood. At least, not the part of childhood that socialized conditioning/messages assume to project as not defining a responsible adulthood! Adulthood as we now experience reality, comes in all flavors and colors, as it has always sought to be, express, participate (now lets coordinate this parade of possibilities, adulthood, with adequate access for all)!
Without sounding idly critical, or negatively judgmental, while at the same time being able to look back at how historical human psychology has evolved_ isn't it nice to live in a human era, where we can see more clearly that historical ideas about traditional-society defined adulthood, have roots more in self-aggrandizement, and in smaller ego-centered references that have only continuously left its followers unconscious to experiencing their own life while living in it?!
The counter-revolution has served well the aspects of cultural development that today operate more in the light of day, where once these same kinds of ideas were persecuted_ killing really, good and talented people over eons of human history. Wake-up! Wake-up!
The counter-revolution has also served well, those who have lived it open-minded_ prioritizing one's health longterm, in the organic process of experimentation_ those long buried ideas on how to more consciously notice that we are alive, while alive! What's that Jefferson Starship song? "...living in books, or we can live! Live for today!"
Alert! Alert! Contrary to popular assumption, this is not an just intellectual description about living the life experience.

What has been said here then, under the title of 'my artwork evolving?'
Think of my posts as a tapestry, written in a female perspective that are without a formal beginning, middle, or end_ the work of a lifetime that on occasion reaches for long strands that alternate expression in up-close detail. For now, just as will the dates of my posts not chronologically match up with the recent images posted, yet, when one steps back over time, in those places where the mind gets quiet because the mind is thinking of everything and nothing, you will see more clearly the whole coming into focus. Remember what that is like? To watch an artist's drawing come into shape of the whole? Magic, right? It is a plastic kind of thing_ observing, creating, living. One makes a stroke on the canvas. Living, creating, observing...

What is she trying to say? Stay tuned.

Anybody care to matron/patron this artist's endeavors?

my funny valentine, oil

Est-ce que les temps présent comme la fin du siècle?

The question in the title of this entry asks, whether or not the time we are currently living can be considered as like the period of the original...?
As an artist who is logging in more hours on the internet, my observations of what other artists are doing with the technology have begun to pick up on an impressionistic similarity, correlating with that period of history that is referred to as "la fin du siècle... My comparison here, principally focused on the artists of that time_ chiefly Picasso for example's sake, whose artistic developments in a new art form called cubism were coalescing in the studio, and simultaneously in the café life of the era. Imagine what it must have been like as any artist of the day would have regularly interacted with artist-colleagues, as well as others from a variety of disciplines well into the night over cheap glasses of wine, indeed sharing in the 'ferment' of their discoveries_ remembering also that electricity was the brand new technology! Fast forward those impressions to what we might call blogging today as perhaps one very small, yet plainly mighty example in the cultural synthesis of technology emerging, and now paralleled with your understanding of the fin du siècle! Can you see?
In recognition that a twenty-first century 'feeling' for possibility is emerging rapidly, it is important then to shift one's assumptions about any frame of reference that might co-opt current orientation of a new reality, by very simply acknowledging out loud first that we are NOT, I repeat NOT then only in a fearful, overly stressed, or uncertain end-of-the world battle for good or evil_ as that sort of thinking is just antiquated! Rather we are collectively on the verge of what is new and possible on a worldwide scale that has never been experienced before, and that through the inventions, and developments of the technology, this is a new field of possibilities that humans have really been building creatively and intelligently toward, for a very long time! Thank-you, Mr. Buckley!
Even though my attempts to describe the parallel, may be awkward in the attempt to link really big ideas together from the artist's perspective, when you consider none-the-less the reference to a new 'La Fin du Siècle,' does describe these emerging times of creative-techno synthesis very accurately. To this end I say, take heart, hands, head, and DO NOT leave your body or soul behind!!!! These are new human times in the best of ways. So, inspire! Be! Contradictions abound, as one can now recognize that one truly has the time to create! Discover this! Reinvent! Learn! Grow! Produce! Define anew! As everyone's voice, views, abilities_ are truly needed now.

study after Vermeer, oil
_chosen to accompany this journal entry,
for all of its 'simplicity'