Gear 1

My nagging drive is in 1^st gear

The answer to the question of whether I want you to invest in my art is simple: yes and no.

I don’t want to have sleepless nights worrying whether you will buy my paintings on Monday and get rich on Wednesday. But, once you’ve bought my art I do want you to show it to the most influential person you know.

The art world is made up of so many wonderful people who understand the process of art, that it doesn’t take a long journey to find someone who will explain how artists work. Apparently, there are those of us who make the same work over and over in order to satisfy some nagging drive deep within us, and to refine our feelings about that one particular thing.

It was the visionary filmmaker Spike Jonze who labeled Woody Allen one of these. He reduced all of Woody Allen’s movies to a single plot: “Neurotic older gentleman can’t find satisfaction in his life until he meets a beautiful, way younger female who takes him through a journey of love, excitement, introspective pondering etc. etc.”

Okay, love him or hate him, Woody Allen has made a huge career out of dissatisfaction. His kvetching alter egos will live on in the minds of people long after his detractors have been buried. But that’s not entirely the point. The point is that movie-lovers will invest time and energy in his works even if just to find proof of what how he moved from naivete, to complexity, to dangerous eccentricity through his obsession with a particular narrative.

Perhaps Woody even forgot, somewhere along the way, that the plot is fictional. But that just adds to his allure.

Even if I am daunted by the idea of an artist locked in an ivory tower, unable to commune with everyday people, I still understand that what drives me is the need to let some secret of mine out … while everybody is watching. The paintings are my outstretched arm, and they are my human investment. In this way I guess I am an exhibitionist.