I was recently talking with Barbara about a local artist [acrylic painter] I have met and conversed with a few times... and how I always find it flattering but odd when I realize that said artist talks with me [and about me] as if I am a peer. Barbara says that I am one and should certainly see myself that way, but I have trouble with this. Then she got talking about whether I realize that I am a good artist, and that my art is good.

Afterward I thought about it for a while, and realized that I do think that my work is generally Good Enough®, but I don't think of it as Good®. Since then, I've been struggling to define for myself just what the difference is, between good enough and good.

Finally I settled on something like this: if I look at a piece of mine, and I don't see things that I wish I had done differently, or parts that aren't quite what I would like.... if the flaws are not glaring, but are acceptable instead, then I can say the work is good.** Then I got thinking about which pieces of mine I can say that about.

I came up with four. Out of sixty years of arting.

Not sure where I'm going with this, I still need to mull over and hash out. Wondering if other people make a similar distinction between good-enough work and good work. I just wanted to get this down while I thought of it.



** and is this how I judge whether other people's work is good? Not sure that I do. Yet more sutff to mull over....

I've found myself thinking about this, off and on, over the past year or so, and today my shower thoughts put it to me this way:

The political divide of our current culture can be boiled down to two opposing beliefs:

1. If people need help to get by, then they ought to get that help.
2. If people can't get by on their own, then they don't deserve to get by, and they should fail [and possibly die].

Pretty much every other political position seems [to me] to grow out of one or the other of these.

To no one's surprise, I lean toward 1. Setting aside the fact that I find 2. morally repugnant, here's why I also find it untenable:

No one gets by on their own. No newborn human can survive without outside intervention.

To which I expect some Two-Believers to say Well Yes Of Course But®. It can be argued that there are other creatures that need to be nurtured at first, but once they are able to leave the nest, then they get by on their own. Only natural.

But humans are social creatures, which by their very nature continue to function within their society for their entire lives. And the fact that human society is so exceedingly complex compared to other creatures, seems to suggest that humans the most inherently and deeply social of all creatures on earth. We aren't really built to leave the nest. So, to argue that at some point in our lives, we are suddenly able to function completely independently... well, that strikes me as not just completely arbitrary, but also naive.


[At which point we could go on to argue about what kinds of social help, and how much, are Right® and which are Wrong®.... which is also arbitrary. And hair-splitty.]

This time, I am ranking topness as a measure of "how long can I listen to them before I burn out on them and need a break":

1. Sulk
2. The Charlatans
3. The Ocean Blue
4. Shed Seven
5. TBA [too many tied for this spot]

For a few years now, I've been saying that [the recently late] Alice Munro is my favourite writer. Now, news is coming out that calls her personal character into question. [It also suggests that efforts were made to suppress this news while she was alive?] This brings us once again to the issue of, "What do we do when good art, art that we love, has been made by a person who is not good, who we find it hard to love?"

There are various levels of separating the art from the artist (or not), and we all vary in how much we are able or willing to do this. Ultimately, it's a subjective and personal decision. I've come to realize that, for me, it's better and more accurate for me to say that I am a fan of a creator's work rather than a fan of a creator. I'm now trying harder to express myself in that way.

And now I'm seeing people going back to Munro's work, re-reading it in a new light, and wondering if they were inadvertently approving of messages counter to their own values. In this case, I don't have so much of an issue, I guess. For me, it isn't so much what she wrote about, or what her message was, as how she wrote it. Her writing has an elegant and insightful economy to it: she never sounds like she's straining to sound Writery®. That's what I like about her sutff. Those times when she wrote about dubious people doing dubious things, I never took it as approval of those things — more an awareness that there are people like that out there.

And now it turns out that she was one of them, so maybe we shouldn't be so surprised.


P.S.: I can understand boycotting an artist when we learn things like this about them, not wanting to contribute to them financially, etc. But, once they're gone, that whole aspect sorta becomes moot, I think?

Long ago I read that the only truly American artforms are jazz, comic books, and rock-and-roll. [The accuracy of all of those claims is easily disputed, but let's leave that aside for the time being so I can make my wanky statement about them]:

I got thinking about this and realized that all these artforms share a common element. Even if we break down jazz into its three major waves [Dixieland, swing, and bebop], the same process always took place.

When these artforms first emerged, all of them were originally dismissed as garbage for kids, the poor, and the ignorant. It took years for each of them to achieve some measure of artistic credibility, i.e., acceptance by well-to-do whites. I just find the consistency of this sort of reaction to creativity to be kinda intriguing.

Yesterday, I was out driving, and the traffic ahead of me was a bit hectic, and I suddenly found myself thinking: You take your life in your hands every time you get behind the wheel.

But then I thought: You take your life in your hands every time you go outside.

You take your life in your hands every time you open your eyes and sit up in bed every morning.

You take your life in your hands every time you draw a breath.

Basically, your life is always in your hands — that's where it belongs.

My 41^st acrylic painting is... well I was going to say my first acrylic abstract, but it's actually my first successful one. [I tried once before, very early on, but was so dissatisfied with it that I painted over it... with something that was only marginally better, frankly.] At least, to me this one is a success: it turned out pretty much how I had in mind, from a visual idea that came to me back in the spring. But it took some reading about Abstract Expressionism over the past few days to give me the impetus to give this one a shot.

It's also my first painting to be given a formal title. I believe that a title can potentially contribute a lot to an abstract. And it's the first time I managed to get a bit of impasto work into one of my paintings — not sure how well that shows here, but IRL you can see it.