personal

<rant>

In Ari­zona, a 13 year old boy was recently sus­pended from school for mak­ing a draw­ing that resem­bles a gun. There is no indi­ca­tion that he has a his­tory of pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with vio­lent visual imagery, has made explicit or implied threats, engaged in vio­lent behav­ior, tor­tures ani­mals, or any other issues that would make a draw­ing of a gun part of a pat­tern that respon­si­ble adults might rea­son­ably be con­cerned about. A 13 year old kid makes a doo­dle of a gun and gets kicked out of school.

I con­sult in schools and have worked with extremely dan­ger­ous ado­les­cents. I spent the last three days teach­ing a course for spe­cial edu­ca­tors and school psy­chol­o­gists on how to pre­vent and man­age vio­lence. So I’ve seen lots of kids who need inter­ven­tion and dis­ci­pline. I think that sus­pend­ing a kid for mak­ing a draw­ing is an incred­i­ble act of bureau­cratic cowardice.

This may have only a periph­eral asso­ci­a­tion with art, but it still con­cerns me. If teenagers are afraid to make art because an adult might find their work to be polit­i­cally incor­rect, then we all, in the long run, will live in a world with less good art.

Ulti­mately, I think this trend is related to the increas­ing median age in core West­ern soci­eties. As more peo­ple find the young to be alien and fright­en­ing, there is more and more push for “zero tol­er­ance” of behav­iors would in their own youth have been con­sid­ered innocuous.

</rant>

Vaca­tion was lots of fun.

Work­ing on ideas for new posts. Any requests or suggestions?

I’ll be gone next week at the SCA’s Pennsic War. Back week after next.

If’ you’d like to sub­mit a paint­ing or draw­ing for pub­lic cri­tique, send me an image of it. I will either respond with an email telling you why I don’t feel com­fort­able doing a cri­tique of it, or I will post it on this site with my feed­back (with, poten­tially, thoughts from com­menters as well). I won’t be mean, but I will give my hon­est opin­ion, which some peo­ple might find painful.

A few caveats: Files should be less than 100k in size.* Make sure it’s a decent photo or scan, not one full of glare or other prob­lems. I’m not qual­i­fied to judge most abstract or polit­i­cal work. Don’t send your first ever paint­ing; do 10 or 20 or 100 more and send the best one of those. Don’t’ send joke images; I’ll only add you to my spam fil­ter. Send only one image. Send your own work. (Yes, you can prob­a­bly fool me by send­ing an image of some clas­sic but not well-known paint­ing. Big deal.) If you’re a bet­ter artist than me (and lots of peo­ple are) then I would not be the one to judge your work.

*You can find out the size by select­ing the file (click on it once) and choos­ing “Prop­er­ties” (Win­dows) or “Get info” (Mac) from the File menu. If it gives a size in megabytes (MB) the file is way too big. If you’re not sure how to make the file small enough to send con­ve­niently by email, you will need to change either the pixel dimen­sions of the image, the amount of com­pres­sion, or both. Chang­ing the num­ber of dots per inch only affects how it will print, not the file size. Try sav­ing the file in JPG for­mat if it’s not already that kind of file. If this para­graph seems like gib­ber­ish to you, find a teenager who knows about com­put­ers and ask them to make the file 100 k (kilo­bytes) or less in size.

It seems like a nat­ural cycle for artists to go through peri­ods in which cre­ative pro­duc­tion is lim­ited. That seems to be hap­pen­ing to me right now. Over the last few weeks, I’ve allowed the pres­sures of job, father­hood, mar­riage, friends, and other aspects of life to push art from daily prac­tice to some­thing that per­co­lates in the back of my head. I’ve been stay­ing away from inter­net art forums, stay­ing out of art stores, and gen­er­ally act­ing like some­one who doesn’t paint any­more. As a result, my most­ing rate here has decreased. I have not picked up a paint brush in four weeks. It’s not that I don’t think about art, but it never seems like the right time to start again.

At one level, I’m com­fort­able with this. I know I’ll get back to paint­ing, and I know it will be sooner rather than later. Paint­ing is too impor­tant to me to allow it to become some­thing I used to do. Right now, it seems OK to take a break, take stock, think about what I want to be pro­duc­ing, and let the back of my cre­ative mind work out what­ever it is it’s doing right now. That doesn’t seem pro­fes­sional, but for­tu­nately I don’t depend on art to pay the mort­gage. That gives me the lux­ury to be able to take an extended break from time to time.

On the other hand, I’m kind of anx­ious to get started again. Any reg­u­lar activ­ity con­tains its own momen­tum. The more you exer­cise, the eas­ier it is to exer­cise more. The more you paint, the eas­ier it is to bring your­self to paint again. Right now, there’s an iner­tia that makes it eas­ier to hang out with my wife and play with my baby son than it is to make din­ner, take out the trash, arrange with Kirsten to watch Bren­dan for a cou­ple of hours, and go paint. Once I do that again for the first time, even if the paint­ing part is clumsy and frus­trat­ing (as it prob­a­bly will be as I get back into prac­tice), it will be eas­ier to get back into the habit. And that’s what I need to do, and soon.

First, my six month old son Bren­dan spent a day in the emer­gency room and a night in the hos­pi­tal, after the cold he had been fight­ing for the past three weeks evolved into what the doc­tors first thought was pneu­mo­nia, but later diag­nosed as acute viral bronchiali­tis. He’s home now and doing much bet­ter. Over the week­end, how­ever, my wife and I expe­ri­enced how gut-wrenchingly dif­fi­cult it is to be the par­ent of a very sick baby who is suf­fer­ing when you can’t do any­thing to make it better.

Of much lesser impor­tance, I was chal­lenged on two posts I had made here regard­ing a lec­ture on color by Gray­don Par­rish that I attended. In an excess of enthu­si­asm, I had shared my lec­ture notes on this blog, even though atten­dees were asked to be dis­creet. I was asked in no uncer­tain terms to take the posts down, which I did imme­di­ately because it was Graydon’s stuff and he did not want it out there. I received con­sid­er­able crit­i­cism on the Cen­nini Forum for hav­ing posted in the first place, which I accepted because I was wrong to have done so with­out ask­ing per­mis­sion first. I would describe the expe­ri­ence as an excel­lent character-building exer­cise, but no fun at all.

I’m sorry I have not posted any­thing about art here in the last week or so. I’ll get back to that soon.

p.s. In the midst of the post­ing fiasco I was also accused of pre­sent­ing myself as hav­ing some kind of direct con­nec­tion to Gray­don Par­rish. I don’t think I have done so, but I’d like to state here unequiv­o­cally that I have absolutely no rela­tion­ship with Mr. Par­rish other than hav­ing attended a lec­ture by him and par­tic­i­pat­ing on an inter­net forum where he posts from time to time.

p.p.s. I am very thank­ful to the peo­ple who have writ­ten to me to offer their support.