Where I’m At Presently

The past two months have been like a black hole where the gravitational force has sucked out all my creative time. It seems like lately I simply blink, and all my free time vanishes like a magic act. Consequently, my production for this Substack has been lagging and while I have been working on several articles, I haven’t been able to complete any, and for that, I sincerely apologize to my subscribers.

One thing that worries me is that I have a history of two short-lived professional writing gigs, both lasting about nine months and ending only because I ran out of steam. I very much don’t want this to be another of those brief forays into writing, but I bring this up, more or less, to convey a specter that hangs over me while I now struggle with regularly posting. I might have mentioned this before but in case I haven’t, and it’s not self-evident, I am not a writer, neither by trade nor instinct. I manage to write by sheer determination, blundering through to arrange words on the page and taking hours to make it coherent. All this with the added hurdle of writing about my art and philosophy, and I want to take special care to get it absolutely right.

In recent months, I’ve been trying to focus on a few posts that will be key to this account, and the genesis of the title of this Substack, namely, What is it to call oneself an Artist and American? You can likely appreciate what a daunting task it is to write about subject matter that is core to your identity and to write about them with considered thought. This is a more significant task than I have the time and or skill to pull off, but because this is the core reason for the existence of this account, and I feel obligated to struggle with this beast. So, in essence, the main reason I haven’t posted in a while—apart from struggling to find precious time—is that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, with a topic too large for a simple post (it continues to morph into multi-part posts).

On the positive side, is that I’m an artist who works on several artworks at a time, and I've carried this production value to my writing projects, which led me to have a handful of ideas that I hope to bang into articles over the next month. I hope that you, my subscriber, will hang in there and I promise a payday, but because of additional factors that I won’t get into, you may not see these until May. But, let me at least leave you with a few teasers of articles that will be forthcoming.

Lost Art

I want to talk about lost art. In my estimation, the majority of contemporary art ends up in the dump or moldering in a storage space. And of the art that meets this fate, only a few folks, if any, get to view it. I don’t have any survey data on this, but I have a strong sense from my own experience and stories from other artists. When you think of the amount of work you may see at a gallery or museum compared to the quantity of work that artists are currently working on, it simply doesn’t add up. Where do all those excess artworks go? This will be a series of articles where I tell my own horror stories of works of mine that have disappeared. I’ll start it off with one that I traced back to find that, yes, it was tossed in the dump.

Writing Determines What You See

The other essential piece I need to write is, ironically, about how writing determines the art you see. This is another one of those art world things that no one talks about. Interestingly the lost art I mentioned above is directly related in that the art less written about is more likely to be of the lost art. This topic is near and dear to me and one of the basicmotivating factors of why I spill these words into my own writing about my art. My words about my art are mediating my art to you—that’s what I want to explore here.

Scoptophilia Triptych

Another work of mine that no one has ever seen and happens to be my largest work. My main obstacle to getting this written is that I’ve yet to photo-document this piece and it will be a task to get that done. But it’s a pivotal work that I need to get out there.

So, a lot of work for me this month but I feel like I owe you all and I will do my damnedest.

-cheers,

Frank.