Soul Searching

“A great nation deserves great art” is the slogan of the National Endowment for the Arts. It is catchy but what does it mean?

A nation inches towards greatness, in part, by assuming it doesn’t deserve much, and it maintains its greatness, in part, by understanding “greatness” is not a coronation or a title but a reflection of the quality of becoming.

Moreover, the relationship between great art and great nations is by no means tidy. Spain in the Seventeenth Century, for instance, was losing its hold on the empire and was burdened by disease. It was also entrenched in the Inquisition and abusing the American provinces. So did it deserve Velazquez, Zurbaran, Lope de Vega, Luis de Gongora, etc?

Perhaps it is more accurate to say—in the case of Spain as well as in many others—that nations get the soul searching they deserve in the work of their artists. Art is the mirror in which nations who think of themselves as great must see themselves, often, as otherwise. But that is a less catchy slogan.

Santa Monica Studio

We have finished the construction on the Santa Monica studio, and seeing the effort, some people have asked me if the project takes away from my work.

The question seems to point at a more definite understanding of my work than the one I have. To me, “the work” is always shifting and always feeding on that shift. The question also underestimates the value of this particular “detour.” It would be hard for me to make a categorical distinction between the process that generates a painting and the process that decides I should hang the deer head in the studio’s library. In each gesture I am trying to sort myself in relation to it and to find something refuge-like in the final assembly. Space and furniture, for instance, are something quite distinct from the position one takes towards painting only if the purpose itself is quite distinct. For me, the studio is an embodiment of the same point of view that generates the artwork.

The artwork and the studio have many (though not all) of the same aims and provide me with similar comfort and discomfort, so what is the meaning of lost time or interruption of the work? I gain energy by using it.