Artistic NOW

There was this thing I read a few years ago about the beginning of agriculture and trade routes and the founding of ancient culture in a book about the history of beer. It described the selling of beer as this way of transporting the water and sunshine from one place to another that perhaps did not have the same resources. Transporting goods was a way of capturing and moving sunshine.

Of course this made me think about art.

Because art is attention.

It’s an attention equation.

The time the artist has learned their art is part of the value portion.

And that time is put on the paper, or into scraping the stone, or shaping the clay, or composing the music or the play or learning the part…

And then there is the time of the viewer who witnesses the object or performance.

Each piece of time is compressed. An object that took days or weeks or years to compose may be consumed in less than a minute.

That’s the equation, a kind of Golden Ratio, tightening ever smaller, a spiral wrapping inward.

My original training, since the time I was six years old and put in an art class with teenagers, was as a visual artist. My first jobs before becoming a professional theater-maker were in art departments.

What unifies my artistic pursuits is this question about attention; discovering who the work is for and developing my skill to keep the observer engaged.

I love learning new things. At the moment, I am remembering what rendering a finished drawing in ink is like. My hands used to know how to do it, but my eyes aren’t as sharp and sometimes my hands feel like they are full of mud and not muscle. But inside my fingers and bones there is memory, waking up, unwinding.

I’m reviewing the work of illustrators I love, like Pyle and Wyeth, and looking into current dynamos like Tracie Ching, Lucy Bellwood, and Jeff Smith. This time I’m spending separated from my theater collaborators has me returning to my first love, the pencil in my hand and afternoons to draw.

At the moment

There is time

How will we mark its passing?

Will I collect these days like sunshine growing barley so that some months from now we can share the contents of the barrel?

What do you think?